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When climatologists talk about the Quaternary Period, you probably
think they are referring to events that occurred thousand of years ago.
You would likely be right, but for the official record, the Quaternary
Period is the geologic and climatic time period that began roughly 1.8
million years ago and includes the present. The Quaternary includes two
major geologic epochs including the relatively cold Pleistocene when
glaciers ruled the Earth and the Holocene period that began
approximately 12,000 years ago when the glaciers retreated.
We see the
climate alarmists sometimes arguing that we have left the Holocene and
entered the Anthropocene – a time when the human impact has
significantly altered the Earth. So, we are currently living in the
Quaternary, Holocene, and Anthropocene, all at the same time.
One of the world’s leading journals focusing on the geology,
geomorphology, geography, archaeology, soil science, palaeobotany,
palaeontology, and palaeoclimatology of the Quaternary Period is
published by Elsevier and is titled Quaternary Science Reviews. Three articles have been published recently in the journal with what we are calling the “Lessons of the Quaternary.”
The first article of interest was generated by a team of scientists
from Norway, Canada, and Russia and deals with glaciers in the northern
Ural Mountains of Russia. Their shocking and revealing title is
“Glaciers in the Polar Urals, Russia, were not much larger during the
Last Global Glacial Maximum than today.”
Are they kidding — is this
some kind of spoof? Every presentation on global warming insists that
glaciers are retreating the world over, but these clowns are trying to
tell us that the glaciers of the Urals are no smaller today than during
the time when glaciers all over the world were at their maximum?
Well,
Mangerud et al. went to the northern Urals during the summer of 2000
and collected quartz samples from boulders left behind from glacial
advances. It is a long story, but ratios of various beryllium isotopes
can be used to date when the boulders were deposited. Consistent with
many other studies, they found that the Last Glacial Maximum was indeed
around 21,500 years ago.
This may not go over well with the climate
alarmists, but Mangerud et al. conclude “that the restricted growth of
the Chernov Glacier during the Last Global Glacial Maximum (LGM) is representative
for most of the other glaciers in the Polar Urals, i.e. they were not
much larger than at present.”
Next up is a piece produced by 13 scientists who focused on climate
change in Central America over the past 85,000 years. The Hodell et al.
team came from leading institutions in Florida, Switzerland,
California, and Germany and they headed to Guatemala to extract cores
from the bottom of Lake Petén. The layers in the core would alternate
from clay to gypsum reflecting wet and dry conditions.
Furthermore,
they analyzed the chemical and physical properties of the layers and
related them to climate (and sea surface) conditions. A portion of one
of their figures (see Figure 1) really caught our eye. The plot is
reconstructed sea surface temperatures from the Atlantic Ocean off the
coast of Guatemala for the past 32,000 years. If global warming is your
thing, you really missed it – notice the 12°C warm-up from 15,000 years
ago to 10,000 years ago. We see no warming at all during the
Anthropocene; we also notice how much more variable the climate was
during the cold periods, not the warm ones. Read rest...
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