Another factoid hurled about nowadays is that the pace of current temperature and other changes is unprecedented. It is false. If you look at a chart of temperature reconstructions since the Holocene began, you see almost vertical lines both up and down before and after the “Younger Dryas”, an incredibly abrupt and severe cooling in the middle of the last retreat of the glaciers. And now we hear from the University of Norway, where they know a thing or two about ice, that around 11,000 years ago the ice in the Storfjorden Trough near the Svalbard formerly known as Spitzbergen, currently famous for polar bears and ice, melted incredibly fast. Which the authors say is proof that current melting is ominous and unprecedented.
According to the press release, “10,000 km2 of ice disappeared in a blink of an eye from an ice sheet in the Storfjorden Through [sic] offshore Svalbard, a new study shows. This dramatic break off was preceded by quite a rapid melt of 2.5 kilometres of ice a year. This parallels the current melt rates in Antarctica and Greenland and worries the scientists behind the study.” And why does it worry them?
Well, it might be evidence that climate is unstable and unpredictable. Which is genuinely worrying. We would not have readers believe that our skepticism about CO2 as the “Thermostat that Controls Earth’s Temperature” means we do not think climate is changing, can change suddenly, and can change suddenly in undesirable ways. On the contrary, we are convinced that it has done so consistently in the past.
Indeed a new study suggests the current warming began in 1825 and you’re going to have a hard time blaming that one on human CO2 emissions or anyone else’s even if Watt did invent his steam engine in 1776 and Newcomen his “fire engine” 64 years earlier. But we say “consistently” rather than “steadily” because a key point is that while climate generally seems to settle for long periods into fairly stable patterns of fluctuation, including 100k year cycles of brief interglacials and long glacials for the past 1.5 million years (and a 41k cycle for a million beforehand), the fluctuations within those patterns, as well as between them, are both irregular and often sudden.
The paleo climate record does not allow us to spot brief changes, and the further back you go the longer “brief” becomes. We do not know whether the Cretaceous saw fluctuations as severe as the Younger Dryas, when temperatures apparently changed by as much as 10°C in mere decades. But it might have, based on what we see in the record where our proxies are, we think and hope, more reliable.
It’s odd what the alarmists say in response. Once upon a time they claimed climate was stable until awful humans came along. Now they say climate is inherently unstable but it stabilized anyway until awful humans came along and, as that Atlantic piece quotes the late Wally Broecker, “‘we are poking it with sticks’” and it is “‘an angry beast’”, before saying with anthropomorphic intensity that this “ill-tempered planet” will turn on us with a snarl, recreating the dreadful conditions in which for aeons spectacular life forms flourished even in what later became a “desolate wasteland” due to cooling.
On which point that Atlantic piece at one point conceded that “A common projection for our own warming world is that, while the wet places will get wetter, the dry places will get drier. But the Pliocene seems to defy this saw for reasons not yet fully understood. It’s a strangely wet world, especially the subtropics, where—in the Sahara, the Outback, the Atacama, the American Southwest, and Namibia—lakes, savannas, and woodlands replace deserts.” None of which diminishes their conviction that all change is catastrophic, the models work and unless we repent the wrath of Goddess will strike us all down and rightly so.
It makes for a great scare story. But speaking of Svalbard, where the retreating ice was meant to sound the death knell for polar bears and much else besides, it turns out that it was much less icy in the 1940s than it was by 1979 and, even more important, that the water around Svalbard was warmer in Roman times than it is now, by about 4°C, and it was water not ice. Indeed, the extent of the ice there is now as great as it has been since that scary melt-off 11,000 years ago.
As for those intrepid Norwegian scholars, they conclude that “‘This is strengthening our hypothesis that an increase in ocean temperature and global warming is the direct cause of the chain of the events leading up to the dramatically rapid ice sheet disintegration.’ Says Rasmussen.” (Elsewhere identified as “CAGE-professor and first author Tine Lander Rasmussen” with CAGE apparently the Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate in the Department of Geology at The Arctic University of Norway.) Wow. Warmer water caused the sea ice to melt. No sum too high for that kind of startling finding. Now if we just knew why the water got warmer.
Instead, the press release drones, “This gives some alarming perspectives on present-day outlook. The great melt of the glacial maximum to the Holocene was 10,000 years in the making. The present climate change is much more rapid.” Which is one way of saying not much happened for a long time then something suddenly did without any connection to CO2. Instead the press release went on to quote without naming the person that “‘The final retreat of the Storfjorden Through ice sheet happened as rapidly in the outer parts as it did further up the through. This means that as soon as warmer oceanic water got access to the ice sheet, it surged pretty rapidly inward from the edge of the ice shelf. To the interior of the sheet itself. We see this happening in Antarctica today. The Larsen A (1995), B (2003) and C (2017) break-offs are examples of this process.’” Uh except Antarctica isn’t warming.
Still, we’re all going to die, which is what really matters.
You are right to highlight that current climate change is not unprecedented and that rapid climate change occurred in the not too distant past. For example, approximately 11,500 years ago temperatures increased by 5-10°C in a few decades.
The source is Alley (2002) who states:
”…the end of the Younger Dryas interval involved: 5-10°C warming…Most of these changes occurred in less than a few decades, and possibly in less than a few years…
Large, rapid, widespread changes were common in the pre-agricultural past, especially in regions near the North Atlantic, but apparently also in monsoonal regions affected by the North Atlantic, and likely elsewhere or even globally.”
It is worth noting that Alley is certainly not a climate change sceptic.