Lewis Page @ The Register:
New ice core data from the Antarctic Peninsula has revealed that temperatures in the region during the past 10,000 years have often been higher than they are today, and that warming of the sort seen there recently has also occurred in the pre-industrial past.
The new data are derived from a massive new 364m-long core extracted from the ice sheet lying on top of James Ross Island towards the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula in the freezing Weddell Sea. The core was extracted by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey, assisted by French boffins, who reached the area courtesy of the Royal Navy ice-patrol ship HMS Endurance and her helicopters.
The mighty core has allowed analysing boffins to reconstruct local temperatures and snowfall way back to the end of the last ice age. The info is of particular interest as the Peninsula has warmed up rather quickly over the last 50 years or so, and is bucking the overall Antarctic trend which has seen vast new expanses of sea ice appear around the coasts of the austral continent. Thus it is that the Ross Island ice core results have made it into this week’s edition of agenda-setting boffinry mag Nature.
So what have we got?
Move along, nothing to see hereAs is plain from the graphs, it has often been hotter than it is now at Ross Island during the past 10,000 years – today’s temperatures are nothing exceptional. The idea that they must result from man-made carbon emissions doesn’t, on the face of it, seem that credible.
But perhaps the recent warming has been exceptionally, unprecedentedly fast? The Esperanza station not far from James Ross has recorded a climb of 2°C since it was established in 1958. Maybe something is happening along the Peninsula which has never happened before in the Holocene (post Ice Age) era?
It would certainly seem so. A press release issued ahead of the Nature paper by the British Antarctic Survey states uncompromisingly:
The scientists reveal that the rapid warming of this region over the last 100 years has been unprecedented.
[Since the publication of this article the press release webpage has been amended to say “very unusual” – Ed.]
Panic Stations!
Hold on though. The actual Nature paper has this to say:
Beings that live for a single century can only refine the current best guess when dealing with deep time.
We are an anolmy if we know our grandmothers maiden name two generations out.
The vast majority of people on this planet never travael more than seven miles from their point of birth… Most will die within two miles of that point.
Anomaly..
I can spell. I can not type.
I have an glacial erratic… or a dozen. One found in Massachusetts that originated somewhere no genius geologists can identify. One said maybe Greenland. Thing is too big to hump about for a headscratching.
This unit has the deepest stria i have ever seen. It should have crushed to sand, rather than holding three inch round striation patterns in a hundred pound rock.
I love it here.
I have another rock dated @165 million years or so. It weighed over a thousand pounds according to the lull that pulled it. It was a most beautiful thing… granite mixed with some limestone … and voids with crystalline quartz …
My wife painted it brown with an oil paint, for sone reason inexplicable to other than female types.
It is hard to hide my other hundred million year old rocks fron beings who hate them.
There was a man who write a book… “choke”…
One of his characters… Dennis I think… perfectly exemplifies the nature of those obsessed with the collection of stones.
My most beautiful and valued posessions were left by something that scattered them about like discarded pebblles.
He/she left other things too.
That
One of these other things was the ability to self edit.
The closer the observer is to the observed, the less likely the observer is to have recognition of the variance he/she intends to observe.
We also now know that the quality of observing an unknowing particle in fact modifies its interaction with physical reality.
This manifests to the molecular. And smaller.
Some one has already linked the quantum to the physics with provable, repeatable, predictible…. methodology.
The question holding things up now is how to break the news to the others who can not find their a$$ with two hands and a flashlight.