Climate recorder.
Chemical changes over time in the fossils of microscopic sea creatures called planktonic foraminifera can help scientists track ancient sea levels.
Credit: Howard Spero, UC Davis/NSF
Posted on 12/19/2007 12:01:09 AM PST by neverdem
Climate recorder.
Chemical changes over time in the fossils of microscopic sea creatures called planktonic foraminifera can help scientists track ancient sea levels.
Credit: Howard Spero, UC Davis/NSF
When the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report on global warming last summer, one of its most dramatic predictions was that sea levels would rise as much as 0.58 meters during the next century--enough to threaten coastal cities in Southeast Asia and North America. That's nothing, however, compared to what happened about 124,000 years ago. At a certain point during the warm "interglacial" between the last two ice ages, scientist have calculated, sea levels rose almost three times as fast. Given that the IPCC report predicts surface temperatures will reach similar levels during the next 100 years, the panel's dire forecast may not be dire enough.
Locked in ice or flowing freely, the world's amount of water remains relatively constant. But sea levels can undulate 100 meters up or down over several millennia, depending on the ratio of water to ice. That's about how much seas dropped, for example, during the last ice age, which ended about 15,000 years ago--enough to allow the ancestors of Native Americans to walk from Siberia to Alaska courtesy of a land bridge that surfaced across the Bering Strait.
Now an international research team has discovered that during the warm period following the next-to-last ice age, when global temperatures reached at least 2°C above the current average, the seas rose by as much as 6 meters over just a few hundred years. The team reached this conclusion by analyzing microfossil-containing sediments from the floor of the Red Sea. Those sediments preserve the ratio of certain oxygen isotopes that provide strong signals about the strength of currents and other factors. By tracking the ratio over the time the sediments span, the researchers have been able to compute the rate of flow into the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean, which indicates the level of the water. Their analysis, reported online this week in Nature Geoscience, shows that as global warming was in the process of melting the continental glaciers about 124,000 years ago, sea levels began rising at the relatively blistering rate of about 1.6 meters per century. Some of the evidence also shows downswings and upswings in sea level, presumably related to swings in global temperature during the interglacial period.
The rapid rate in ancient times remains relevant, says geoscientist and lead author Eelco Rohling of the University of Southampton's National Oceanography Centre in the U.K. It "offers a warning" to climatologists that sea-level changes can depend strongly on factors that influence ice formation and melting--factors that he says current IPCC climate models understate. The per-century rate of 0.6 meters that the models are predicting for the near future is 1.0 meter less than the findings of Rohling's team. That difference, he says, "clearly identifies" the need to improve the climate models to reflect the impact of glaciation and melting.
Other experts aren't so sure. Geologist William Thompson of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts says that although the IPCC estimates indeed "may be too conservative" and the Red Sea research provides an "important contribution to our understanding of past sea-level changes," there are "significant uncertainties" in the method used by the team, and other studies haven't shown "such high rates of sea-level change."
Related site
100 meters — without human intervention.
Humanity wiped out!
What? that didn't happen???? OK, well...it put them back in the stone age!
Indeed, up and down, over and over, if you believe the fossil records and modern science.
That’s it, I am building an Ark!!!
Noah’s Ark ready for floods in Holland
Last updated at 16:10pm on 30th April 2007
Following in Noah’s footsteps, Dutchman Johan Huibers is ready for any floods Holland may experience - thanks to his own special ark.
Huibers built the replica of Noah’s Ark with cedar and pine using modern tools after a premonition of his homeland flooding.
It stands at 150 cubits (68 metres) - three-quarters of the length of a football pitch.
Scroll down for more...
Noah’s Ark in the Netherlands
Huibers’ ark stands at 150 cubits (68 metres) - three-quarters of the length of a football pitch
Life-size models of giraffes, elephants, lions, crocodiles, zebras, bison and other animals greet visitors to the Dutch treat.
“In 1992, I had a dream that Holland will become flooded.
“The next day, I found a book about Noah’s Ark in the local bookshop, and since then, my dream has been to build the Ark,” says Huibers.
After two years in the making the Ark has thrown open its doors in the town of Schagen, north Holland.
Visitors were stunned. Mary Starosciak said: “It’s past comprehension, I knew the story of Noah, but I had no idea the boat would have been so big.”
Huiber’s Ark may prove more than just a tourist attraction.
Environmental campaigner Al Gore predicts low-lying Holland will flood in future due to global warming.
The ark will sail to cities in Netherlands, Germany and Belgium in the next couple of months carrying live and stuffed animals, as well as religious information
Oh yeah? Well, what about them cave men and their pollution-spewing campfires?
"And don't forget dinosaur farts... you think cows are bad? You haven't smelled anything!"
That still leaves plenty of time for the "Dutch solution" (i.e. dikes and levees). If global warming turns out NOT to be CO2 mediated, but due to solar and astronomical variances, then it's gonna happen no matter what we do---so----the answer is to adapt.
Another Global Warming story that buries the lead, because it is inconvenient to the tall tale that they want to tell. The real story here is yet more evidence that the Global Climate Models (GCM) are crap. Anyone who knows anything about these GCMs understands this, but the purveyors of them have hit upon a cash cow and they will continue to phony up data, tweak their algorithms, and do whatever else that the Climate Cultists want.
The inconvenient truth for the global warming fanatics is that the northern hemisphere has been covered with glaciers not once but several times, most recently about 10,000 years ago. If man produced CO2 is mostly to blame for global warming why am I not now sitting on a glacier? Obviously the earth has undergone cycles of both extreme global cooling and global warming without any possible human intervention. Their climate models fail to explain what we know geologically to be true.
But human activities are helping the process along right now.
1.6 meters per century
That works out to about 6 inches per year, or half an inch per month.
If critters and people can’t move their crap out of the way faster than that, they deserve to drown!
I have to wonder. The average tempurature isn't supposed to have become warmer since 1998.
Global ocean temperatures "plunge" The source link doesn't work. How convenient?
The UN Climate Change Numbers Hoax (Devastating)
Determining the level of support expressed by reviewers’ comments is subjective but a slightly generous evaluation indicates that just five reviewers endorsed the crucial ninth chapter. Four had vested interests and the other made only a single comment for the entire 11-chapter report. The claim that 2,500 independent scientist reviewers agreed with this, the most important statement of the UN climate reports released this year, or any other statement in the UN climate reports, is nonsense.
That excerpt is from the original source, Canada Free Press.
I know the link wouldn’t work. It’s a text .dat file, but it’s ftp protocol, not http, so FR wouldn’t link it. I posted the working link in comment #1
I know the link wouldn’t work. It’s a text .dat file, but it’s ftp protocol, not http, so FR wouldn’t link it. I posted the working link in comment #1
Not exactly. See my profile, point #4, particularly the paragraph beginning "Quote from the above".
Quick summary: 1998 was a warmer-than-average year (by a lot) even while global temperatures are rising. So the average global temperature is still rising, even though 1998 was (and still is) warmer than the current average.
~~Anthropogenic Global Warming ™ ping~~
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I'm noting that they used the much more recent interglacial than the more recent article I pinged you to.
I'm also noting a bit of squishiness in this, too.
Now an international research team has discovered that during the warm period following the next-to-last ice age, when global temperatures reached at least 2°C above the current average, the seas rose by as much as 6 meters over just a few hundred years.
They're not saying anything about when this occured within the warming cycle; nor for how long that rise rate continued. They are also not mentioning what final level they ultimately rose to, compared to current sea levels.
IIRC, the maximum sea levels, when the temps were 2C above our current "global average temperature", were only 8" (<20cm) higher than current sea levels.
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