Warming Caused Little Ice Age

Here are more indications that long-term climate
forecasting is beyond human prognostication ability.

What if a warming trend in one geophysical regime led to global cooling? Do climate scientists know that is impossible? With today’s announcement that a warming trend led to the infamous Little Ice Age of medieval times, there is new cause for skepticism.

Winter Is Coming: Researchers Uncover the Surprising Cause of the Little Ice Age (University of Massachusetts at Amherst). Latch onto that word “surprising.” This press release, based on a paper in Science Advances, violates the expectation that measured warming always leads to global warming. To call this a paradox is an understatement.

New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age? The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming.

The Little Ice Age was one of the coldest periods of the past 10,000 years, a period of cooling that was particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region. This cold spell, whose precise timeline scholars debate, but which seems to have set in around 600 years ago, was responsible for crop failures, famines and pandemics throughout Europe, resulting in misery and death for millions. To date, the mechanisms that led to this harsh climate state have remained inconclusive. However, a new paper published recently in Science Advances gives an up-to-date picture of the events that brought about the Little Ice Age. Surprisingly, the cooling appears to have been triggered by an unusually warm episode.

Readers can follow the reasoning about the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC),” how it works and what effects it brings; the details are in the press release and in the AAAS open-access journal Science Advances by Lapointe and Bradley, “Little Ice Age abruptly triggered by intrusion of Atlantic waters into the Nordic Seas,” 15 Dec 2021, 7:51, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi8230. It’s complicated. Ocean currents, dust in the air from volcanoes, and sea ice levels get into the mix. But there is no question that up till 1380 A.D., Europe enjoyed a warm climate before abruptly (in 20 years) plunging into a Little Ice Age (LIA) for two centuries. As the quotation above shows, it was not a fun time for Europeans.

The authors and their university cannot, of course, risk upsetting an applecart as big as the Global Warming Hysteria constantly pushed by Big Media and Big Science. The press release therefore offers some points on which the LIA and today’s comparable AMOC trend are different. As the ending of the press release shows, however there remains considerable uncertainty about what is going to happen in our time.

Lapointe and Bradley have been wondering whether such an abrupt cooling event could happen again in our age of global climate change. They note that there is now much less arctic sea ice due to global warming, so an event like that in the early 1400s, involving sea ice transport, is unlikely. “However, we do have to keep an eye on the build-up of freshwater in the Beaufort Sea (north of Alaska) which has increased by 40% in the past two decades. Its export to the subpolar North Atlantic could have a strong impact on oceanic circulation”, said Lapointe. “Also, persistent periods of high pressure over Greenland in summer have been much more frequent over the past decade and are linked with record-breaking ice melt. Climate models do not capture these events reliably and so we may be underestimating future ice loss from the ice sheet, with more freshwater entering the North Atlantic, potentially leading to a weakening or collapse of the AMOC.” The authors conclude that there is an urgent need to address these uncertainties.

After so many years of Global Warming Hysteria (GWH)* can they assure us that they know what they are predicting? If this surprise finding about the LIA is coming out now, what else is likely to surprise the experts?

*Proof that anybody can come up with quasi-authoritative acronyms.

Climate prognostications cannot possibly take into account all the factors involved, and they don’t, as shown by new surprises that keep cropping up in the research.

That’s Not All, Folks

Here are more surprise announcements from sources within academia the climate change community that cast doubt on the consensus that man-caused global warming requires immediate draconian measures to remedy.

Gas-passing plankton illumine another piece of the carbon cycle puzzle (Oregon State University). Climate scientists didn’t know that some ocean microbes can digest acetone and isoprene – usually considered products of human industrialization. But they can. This affects models about the global carbon cycle.

The ocean’s most abundant life form, a type of bacteria discovered by Oregon State University, consumes an organic compound commonly found in solvents like paint remover, a new study by OSU shows.

Finding that SAR11 bacteria use acetone adds to evidence suggesting that aspects of the marine carbon cycle, which pulls atmospheric carbon into the sea, are not being considered in the study of the cycle and its ability to buffer climate change, scientists say.

Here are important aspects of the carbon cycle that were not being considered in climate models. It’s possible that SAR11 bacteria can buffer against human pollutant emissions. One of the authors commented, “there are hidden aspects of the carbon cycle that need further study before we can fully understand the movement of carbon through biological systems in the ocean.”

Improving the Estimation of Human Climate Influence by Selecting Appropriate Forcing Simulations (Geophysical Research Letters, journal of the American Geophysical Union [AGU], 24 Nov 2021). These guys are supposed to know climate change in and out. What do they mean, “improving” the estimation of human influence on climate? Aren’t the models perfect enough to make Greta cry and governments jump?

How dare you!

Simply applying different possibilities to the same set of observations to search for the “best” approach could lead to overfitting observations and thus unreliable estimates of human climate influence. We therefore suggest an approach in which the different regression approaches are first applied only to climate model output to determine how to best perform the regression analysis before applying it to observations.

And we have been told that global warming is a certainty based on the science. What’s this about “suggesting” another approach?

Can diamonds originate methane? (University of Bologna via ChemEurope). Methane is usually a marker of biological activity. There have been long debates about whether abiotic geological processes can make methane. Now, researchers at the University of Bologna in Spain have evidence that the diamonds can emit methane. This would be a reverse of the process believed to form diamonds by the decomposition of methane. Does this matter to climate change theory?

The deep earth’s carbon cycle accounts for about 90% of the whole carbon cycle. Despite this, to date the cycle happening beneath the earth’s surface is little known. This phenomenon is crucial to life on our planet as it allows carbon in the deep Earth to get back to the atmosphere.

Experiments under high-pressure conditions showed methane being rapidly produced from diamond under certain conditions. “These results suggest that carbon-based graphitic materials may be very efficient reagents and can therefore act as sources of energy feeding methane reserves in the the earth’s upper mantle.”

Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than the media’s favorite bogey-gas, carbon dioxide. The IPCC can’t blame this natural, abiotic methane production on SUVs and coal plants.

Climate change is not directly tied to origins—our focus at CEH—except through the common denominator of a die-hard, closed-minded consensus. We think people should know what goes on in the sausage factory where climate consensus is made, so that the non-gullible have a basis for believing that the Darwin consensus is also a house of cards.

Please notice that we quote the insider, climate-consensus sources for these reports. But to end this article, here again is one skeptic’s list of previous predictions made by the climate consensus that did not come true.