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Ancient global warming shows the limits of our knowledge

arstechnica.com — A new analysis of a past period of climate change suggests that there might be feedbacks in the climate system that we aren't aware of yet.

Who dugg this? Made popular Jul 16, 2009

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  • BitpopBoogie, on 07/15/2009, -19/+43Climate change is what brought the american natives across the land bridge into our continent. It has been happening since the dawn of time. This notion of permanence is something relatively new. People used to migrate, and while we may not have to migrate like the ancients, we may have to move when water levels rise or areas dry out. We don't know why climate change happens...and we can't stop it now. I'm all for cleaner air just as the next guy, and I'm all for conservation and keeping big companies in check - however i'm not going to participate in a carbon off set program or spend my free weekends driving around the suburbs encouraging people to plant trees. The "green" business revolution is a scam - you won't see me adding solar panels to my roof any time soon. I just bought some household cleaning solution that's made with "green" ingredients, and it's total and complete bull crap. They squirted some lime in w/ the ammonia D and call it green. It's retarded. What is happening is going to happen, and no amount of fuss is going to pull it around. So if we are to be destroyed by our own hand, so be it.
  • bewareofmoose, on 07/16/2009, -2/+21Hell, I'd add solar panels to my roof. My area of the the country gets a lot of sun - and the idea of powering my house and selling excess wattage appeals to me.
  • DavidCEisen, on 07/15/2009, -9/+24Don't be so willfully ignorant. There are a wide variety of methods to measure atmospheric conditions in the past. A few of the most common are tree rings, ice cores, and fossilized coral. Read a book and educate yourself before making an ass out of yourself.
  • Ninh, on 07/15/2009, -15/+28Humbug! The science is in, consensus has been reached, now fork over your money already and quit stalling!
  • LouisCipher777, on 07/15/2009, -8/+21wow... just.... wow.

    let's stick to science
  • Akairenn, on 07/16/2009, -3/+13"Climate change is what brought the american natives across the land bridge into our continent."

    And we see what happened there; while advantageous to us, the dinosaurs quickly died out because of their reliance on large SUVs!
  • steelersfan7roe, on 07/16/2009, -10/+19Wow. So the earth will survive global warming?

    Thanks Sherlock Holmes.

    It's not about the earth's survival, it's about more than half the human population and their infrastructure being located 50 km or closer from the coast.
  • DavidCEisen, on 07/15/2009, -5/+14You're not serious, right?
  • Gravedigger3, on 07/16/2009, -5/+13Where the ***** do you people come from? Please tell me you are trying to be funny.
  • whytheam, on 07/16/2009, -1/+855 million years ago
  • ElkorAlish, on 07/15/2009, -6/+13Eisen is right, methods of studying past climate change are well documented.
  • bicyclethief, on 07/16/2009, -6/+13Business men taking advantage of a trend, leveraging buzz words, and putting out ***** products. Stop the presses!

    Just because some "green" products are scams doesn't mean they're all scams. What kind of logic is that?

    Going green is a lot about changing our habits to be sustainable. It's just sensible given earth's finite resources and a growing population.

  • Rudegar, on 07/16/2009, -3/+9breaking: science is not an exact science that we can just go "hey now we know everything there is to know!" :P
  • inactive, on 07/16/2009, -2/+8What? You mean there are more variables in climate change than mere carbon output? Madness!
  • lostlyrics, on 07/16/2009, -0/+6certified burier here ! *click*
  • Barackalypse, on 07/16/2009, -12/+18You mean looking at 100ish years of temperature data on an object that is billions of years old might just cause us to come to incorrect conclusions?!
  • bombula, on 07/16/2009, -4/+9The globe is warming. Individual places on the globe experience ... wait for it ... "climate change".


  • wrathchilde, on 07/16/2009, -0/+5Sorry, gotta call BS on you, dude.
    If you have the capacity to read and understand the litterature on Global Climate Models, and are under the impression that they do not account for cloud cover then you have not been reading the current literature. Similar to the "it's the sun" crowd, or "volcanoes produce more CO2", this is just an completely innacurate statement.
    Oceanographer here, I read the literature and interact with the community and I disagree with your assertion.

  • malex, on 07/16/2009, -3/+8Ice cores and fossilized coral provide significantly more data than just a few centuries.

    It's perfectly valid to state that there might be variables we have yet to understand, but you guys really have to get off this OMG ALGORE SOCIALISM conspiracy kick.

    Would it kill you to pick up a book?
  • 10lbhammer, on 07/15/2009, -4/+9oh ***** guys, the rapture index is up to 167! the hand of god is coming!

    http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html
  • DavidCEisen, on 07/16/2009, -1/+6Actually these scientists should be commended, for they have furthered our understanding of climate change and the reality that we must decrease our carbon output.

    Please read scientific literature before commenting on it, else-wise you look foolish.
  • Bagos1, on 07/16/2009, -2/+7Any time one species becomes too dominant it strains the entire eco system in an area, a region , a continent and eventually on a global scale. Trilobites would be a good example of a species being so successfull in dominating the globe that they eventually collapsed and became extinct, much the same as yeast fermenting in wine. At 14% alchohol they kill themselves with their own wastes.

    It is insane the way that we waste and destroy our rescources. We do contribute to habitat destruction, but this is a conservation argument and one that needs to be addressed. We can not keep polluting and consuming without consequence. Easly available drinking water is fast approaching the danger zone.

    But monetizing and capitalizing on this and creating a new market for trading carbon is a scam. Do you have a choice as to what energy provider you can use? If it comes from coal and the carbon credit makes your prices go through the roof....and you can't chage your supplier....exactly what have you accomplished? It is a trap and a scam. This nonsense that it goes to energy suppliers that don't pollute....who cares, how does that affect the ones who do if you can't change them.
  • matt77, on 07/16/2009, -2/+7Yah, and if Niven had actually read the article he would have seen that they explained exactly how it was done in this case.

    "The authors relied on the fact that deep ocean waters, being colder, can dissolve more CO2 and get more acidic. As a result, below a certain depth, calcium carbonate from the shells of dead organisms dissolves back out of sediments. By using sediment cores from several sites, they were able track how that depth changed in response to the ocean acidification that occurred during the PETM. Since the additional carbon induced this acidification, the results put some constraints on how much carbon was involved."
  • ApokalypseNow, on 07/22/2009, -0/+5@these3remain
    Observation is a step in the scientific process, yes, but it refers to the observation of a phenomena that needs explanation - it does not mean literally watching something with your own eyes. Do we need to watch Jupiter for 12 years unblinking to ascertain that it orbits the sun?
    First-person observation is simply not the only or even always the best sort of evidence relevant in science. Overwhelming physical evidence can often be more convincing and reliable than eye-witnesses in history: the same is true in science, only to a far greater degree because of the sheer amount of converging lines of evidence available to cross-check each other. All this evidence can be used to form a pattern for the purposes of generating predictions. Is it possible that Jupiter zips around the solar system when we aren't looking? Sure, but we have no reason to think it does.
  • bewareofmoose, on 07/16/2009, -4/+8Typical cognitive dissonance.
  • DavidCEisen, on 07/16/2009, -1/+5Of course the Earth will survive. Preventing climate change has nothing, absolutely nothing, with saving the Earth. It is widely held that the Earth would eventually recover from climate change. The question is how will human life cope with climate change. The risk is that millions, if not more, people will die.
  • Foodeater133, on 07/16/2009, -10/+14Earth survives

    lots of humans die. A very simple concept.

    Global Warming sucks.
  • WhiteHatTrick, on 07/16/2009, -0/+4Come on green fyre, I know you graduated from copy paste spam university, but that is not a rebuttal. Ill be waiting for a legitimate argument.
  • WhiteHatTrick, on 07/16/2009, -4/+8Gravedigger, that is as true as all the other gases in the atmosphere attribute to insignificant climate change, many of them in much higher levels than co2, and not components of all living beings and processes. Does that help you see how ridiculous the idea of taxing it is? Tell you what Ill start forcing you to pay me for all oxygen inhaled by your body thus saving enough oxygen for the earth and leprechauns to survive. Now pay up! Largest tax increase on Americans ever, and thats no myth or scam!
  • JimintheOC, on 07/19/2009, -0/+4The earth has been COOLING for the last decade!!!! Global warming is a SCAM!!!!!!

  • DavidCEisen, on 07/16/2009, -3/+7Its difficult to get a clear understanding of what exactly the article's argument is, as it hasn't been published yet. But a few statements suggest that it is not going to say what you deniers think it is going to say. It is a shame that this paper is being misconstrued by ignorant people to meet their personal, political viewpoint. We must move beyond that and have discussions on the actual science in question.

    First there is this statement: "At accepted values for the climate sensitivity to a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration, this rise in CO2 can explain only between 1 and 3.5 °C of the warming inferred from proxy records. We conclude that in addition to direct CO2 forcing, other processes and/or feedbacks that are hitherto unknown must have caused a substantial portion of the warming during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum."

    This statement does not reject, but rather accepts the fact of, CO2 forcings. What it does imply is that at one point in time, there was another significant source(s) of climate forcings. This is not a surprise, as it is widely known that many other climate forcings exist.

    The letter ends with this statement:

    "Once these processes have been identified, their potential effect on future climate change needs to be taken into account."

    Also from the paper:
    "Undoubtedly, the climatic boundary conditions before the PETM were different from today’s - including different continental configuration, absence of continental ice and a different base climate, which limits the PETM’s suitability as the perfect future analogue.”

    This study raises questions about whether current models would be accurate 55 million years ago--climate models could be accurate in the present, yet not be in the past.

    I bring your attention to the phrase "potential effect on future climate change", which does not imply that they don't believe in anthropogenic climate change. There are large questions remaining on what will happen when we move past certain tipping points. For example what will happen when the deep ocean currents slow? What will happen when the ice caps melt? What will happen when the permafrost melts? These all have the potential to worsen the effects of climate change, but we don't understand by how much. We very broadly understand how these activities can occur (for example melting ice in the arctic warms the deep ocean currents while decreasing the salt level of the water, which lowers the density, this in turn slows the current, which in turn slows the rate in which CO2 is absorbed by the ocean), but we do not know the precise effects. This research could help us understand these questions, yet it is being abused by ignorant people who either have no understanding of the issues or are willfully misconstruing research.
  • DavidCEisen, on 07/16/2009, -1/+5I get it. I read scientific literature and like to understand the important issues of our time, therefore I'm a communist.
  • CosmicSurfer, on 07/16/2009, -3/+7@Brotoi - I have studied geology and biology and anthropology and have taken a raft down what is LEFT of the CO river, played with lots of fossils pulled from the rock or sitting in the middle of a dry river bed or the edge of new improved reservoirs capturing water to feed the blue grass lawns in the desert; watched that once great river sucked dry to create massive fountains in front of large hotels in the desert and cool an explosive population of grey haired men and women hiding from the noon day sun. I lived to see the humidity levels rise over Phoenix and the brown cloud over Denver grow to the point of choking.

    It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that we are running for sure and certain suicide as a species and mass murderer of a planet...We are one of the VERY few species that ***** where we eat and eats it again...
    The day IS coming very soon that those of us who are now contracting asthma, COPD, allergies to 20th and 21st century corporate creations and reacting to the toxins we are spewing into the environment will start dropping like canaries in a gassy coal mine but will we stop?
    The answer to that? Probably not - there will always be some flat world idiot with lots of money to convince too many of us that we are playing Chicken Little; Even those with degrees won't be able to agree or will taint and skew research to justify anything for a buck or for just...peace of mind..."it can't happen here" IS STILL the premise on which we as a species act
  • LouisCipher777, on 07/15/2009, -12/+16most of what you said is right, but for the most part we do know various causes of climate change, and none of them involve CO2 and all of them are beyond the power of anything short of TV super-science to stop it.
  • emailowndme, on 07/16/2009, -3/+7Genuine means it agrees with your preconceived opinion?

    Must be nice to have such a iron-clad definition of genuine.
  • DavidCEisen, on 07/16/2009, -2/+6Their research uses the current scientific consensus on the potential warming of CO2 to find that, while CO2 did in fact play a critical and significant role in PEMC warming period, there must have been another forcing at the time as well. This does nothing to discredit current models, only suggests that the risk of a warming climate could be much greater than we currently suspect.
  • CrazyDave303, on 07/16/2009, -2/+6You know if you forget about CO2 there is a lot of other reason to lay off the current system of powering our world with coal and oil. These are two good reasons that come to mind at 12:30am at night:

    http://www.celsias.com/article/clean-coal-disaster ...
    http://stoptarsands.wordpress.com/2008/06/19/tar-s ...

    Sorry not to get all hippy on you.
  • Prodigy1990, on 07/16/2009, -8/+12all i know is that this is the coldest summer i have ever experienced in the north east. where the hell is global warming these days?
  • Barackalypse, on 07/16/2009, -5/+8But wait, aren't people like you always trying to pain the right as a bunch of Bible thumping evolution deniers that think the world if 6,000 years old? Now you're calling right wing propaganda something that mentions events millions of years in Earth's past ?
  • inactive, on 07/16/2009, -0/+3Cap and trade is not the answer.
    Redirecting of standing subsidies and policy is. (Like the 10 billion (or so) a year the oil barons get.)

    @ Cosmic Surfer I am watching America and EU to see what happens. EU imports from Brazil and good deal of grain but most fresh produce is greenhouse. America just washes a ***** ton of poisons and fertilizers every year onto anything that gets grown. Australian farmers have noticed and are responding. Another 30 years and the answers will be known, especially if the US gets blanket health care.
  • EddiePotato, on 07/16/2009, -3/+6Liar.
  • CosmicSurfer, on 07/16/2009, -0/+3The question remains - is it worth cutting down the last tree to build the last McMansion on the last lot of once wooded old forest while pumping out the last drop of oil to fuel that homeowner's Humvee while he gorges himself on the last prime rib roast throwing 1/2 of it "away:" wrapped in the plastic that will go into the last land fill, tipping the scale to the final point of no return....
    AND - Where IS away?
  • Gravedigger3, on 07/16/2009, -7/+10I love it when people post condescending comments about ***** they know nothing about. It makes me feel less stupid. Like watching contestants on American Idol or the Special Olympics.
  • rocknog, on 07/16/2009, -4/+7Here's the way I see it. Yes, we know natural climate change happens. However, at the moment, I think it's fairly clear that we're responsible for current climate change. It's very difficult to explain the temperature increase without greenhouse gases. The thing is, as long as we are dependent on fossil fuels, there's really not much we can do. Should we work toward finding alternatives? Absolutely, but with the recognition that, at the moment, there's really not a whole damn lot we can do to prevent global warming. As such, I think we need to focus on having resources to adapt to changes as they happen, rather than wasting our time with all of this green business, which, as you said, isn't accomplishing much other than wasting money.
  • greenfyre, on 07/16/2009, -3/+6Fable: "It's cold in my yard today, so there's no Climate Change"
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0JsdSDa_bM&fea ...
  • greenfyre, on 07/16/2009, -2/+5Alternatively you try actually knowing what you re talking about
    To detect climate trends requires a minimum 30 yr data sequence
    How to decide climate trends
    http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2008/12/ho ...
    Results on deciding trends
    http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2009/01/re ...
    otherwise all you are looking at is short term fluctuations in weather.
  • aladrin, on 07/16/2009, -4/+7You realize you come off as a complete whackjob, right? You talk about having to study 'biology and geology in one course' like that makes such a big difference. Then you talk about these 'papers' that have a language 'not in your dictionary'. Seriously? It's ENGLISH. Those words are in there.

    I've read the papers. The most they ever say is 'many scientists agree with me'. Well guess what? Many scientists disagree, too.
  • Dralha, on 07/16/2009, -3/+6"Durrrrr....it's kold out mah kichen window. Tharfur, thar hain't no sech thing as globul warmin."

    Get a ***** clue, denialists.
  • greenfyre, on 07/16/2009, -3/+6Interesting that people imagine that a single paper would somehow overturn all of the thousands upon thousands of studies that already exist. ... what about those studies that actually have been published?
    http://cce.890m.com/
  • elcalrissian, on 07/16/2009, -4/+6No, its about groundbreaking legislation inhibiting efficient production, slowing growth, and killing jobs, all in the name of cutting Carbon emmissions to stop a warming cycle that has nothing to do with Human generated carbon.
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