In a recent Substack post, geochemist Dr. Matthew Wielicki goes over a series of studies published since 1992 exploring natural climate variability on very long time sales. Wielicki begins by noting how much the climate movement insists that up until recently the climate was very stable: “the modern climate narrative does not merely argue that warming is occurring. It frequently asserts that recent warming is unprecedented in the historical context. The IPCC AR6 Summary for Policymakers, for example, states that global temperature increases are ‘unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years.’” But does that picture line up with the evidence? Wielicki has undertaken a review of more than 400 studies based on long term proxy records and concludes that it does not.
Specifically he finds instead that:
“the claim of a historically stable climate followed by unprecedented modern disruption is not strongly supported when examined through high-resolution proxy records. Rather than a smooth climatic baseline, the paleoclimate archive reveals a system characterized by abrupt transitions, large regional swings, and nonlinear responses operating across oceanic, atmospheric, and hydrological systems.”
In the Substack post to which we linked at the outset Wielicki goes through seven studies that provide particularly clear evidence of an unstable climate. One of them uses ice core records from both the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps and shows that over 50,000 years during the last glaciation, large swings in temperatures occurred leaving synchronous traces at both poles, proving that they had to have been global in scale, not just regional. As he notes:
“This confirms that abrupt climate variability is not a localized anomaly but a globally coordinated climate response embedded within the Earth system itself”.
Another piece of evidence he cites, a speleothem record from Hulu cave (in China), shows a record of monsoon-influenced rainfall variations over the period 10,000 to 20,000 years ago that lines up with evidence from proxies taken from the Greenland ice cap. Again, significant variability at the global scale long before human-induced climate change was a thing.
It gets worse… for the orthodox view. Within the Greenland ice core record itself the proxy record can be analysed down to high time resolution showing that large climate changes happened, and were abrupt. Wielicki notes:
“Many abrupt warmings unfolded over decades to a century, with some transitions occurring extremely rapidly. Yet there was no single, repeatable ‘script’ governing these events.... The authors conclude that this diversity reflects variability inherent to the climate system itself, not noise in the archive.”
If you’re not a subscriber to Matthew’s Substack we encourage you to become one. And we will continue to follow his progress through the vast paleoclimate proxy archives.
