An interesting take on climate change – century to century swings

20240511

Here's an article on climate change that makes the point that climate has historically changed from century to century by as much as 6° Fahrenheit, 3° Celsius.  The fact that it has gone up a bit in the last century is no anomaly.  Temperature does that.  It oscillates periodically, by about the same amount as your weight oscillates every time you step on the scale.  It is normal.

The article is based on data from the Vostok Ice Cores, the Antarctic ice sheet, which is undisputed and has been known to science for decades.  You can easily search on "Vostok Ice Core" yourself.  Here is a graph showing all of the pertinent measures as far back as they go, about 400,000 years.  Four thousand centuries.

You will notice that the temperature squiggles are denser in the last 100,000 years because the century-to-century demarcations are more distinct.  Also that the CO2 squiggles are not as dense – it's changes are smoother over time.

The bottom squiggle shows the amount of solar energy striking the earth at 65 degrees north latitude.  This is a function of the Milankovitch Cycles – changes in the earth's elliptical orbit, tilt, and the precession of the poles.  Next-to-the-bottom is the amount of the oxygen 18 isotope in the air samples, a proxy for the depth of the ice sheet.

So much for Vostok.  The graph below, the centerpiece of the argument made in the article, shows century-to-century change in temperature.  The size of the ups and downs of the squiggles in the red line in the graph above.  Though, as the author says, such changes cannot be random – they are caused by systematic changes, such as the Milankovitch cycle – they certainly do behave as if they were random.  They fit the bell curve.

The take-home point is that the fact that  it appears that earth's temperature is rising at the moment is a "so what?"  It has always risen and fallen.  The magnitude of its present rise is small in comparison with past temperature changes.  An observer could expect that what we observe today (purple square) would occur about 140 times in the 4000 observations, and that most of the time the century-to-century variation would be greater than what we see today.  

We have names for the squiggles of the recent past.  "Little Ice Age."  "Medieval Warm Period."  "Late Bronze Age Collapse."  Maybe we could invent a name for this time.  "NWO Climate Panic?"

I will add that, though not covered in this article because Vostok goes back less than a half million years, the level of carbon dioxide has been as much as twenty times greater than today.  Here is a graph of what has happened over a half-billion years.  Almost no correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature.  You can tell Biden to jump in his electric car and drive off into the sunset.  Or about two hundred miles in that direction, assuming it isn't freezing.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man will soon depart for Toastmasters as the kids stay home with unseasonable sniffles.  Our weather has been deceptively cool.  Mom warned them to dress warmly, but no…

Graham