Era of the Pharaohs: Climate was HOTTER THAN NOW, without CO2

The Register ^ | 11th March 2013 06:02 GMT | Lewis Page

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

And yet ... Alexandria was NOT a flooded island. Weird

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A new study has confirmed that at the time of the Pharaohs the world's climate was significantly hotter than it now is for thousands of years - and yet the seas don't appear to have risen, nor did the various other doomsday scenarios foretold by climate alarmists take place.

The new research, funded by the US government's National Science Foundation, seeks to pull together various different measures of what the temperature might have been in the distant past. Methods included analyses of ancient pollen, deep ice cores, shells from marine organisms etc. The project was led by Shaun Marcott of Oregon State uni.

Marcott and his colleagues, published today in leading boffinry mag Science, have this to say:

Our results indicate that global mean temperature for the decade 2000–2009 has not yet exceeded the warmest temperatures of the early Holocene (5000 to 10,000 years ago)

Forget the spike at the right in this context

The graph produced by the researchers, to layman's eyes, appears to contradict this: but that's because Marcott and his crew say they produced it by bolting on the latest version of the famous/infamous "hockey stick" graph, produced partly from thermometer readings in recent times by the famous climate zealot Michael Mann, at the end. The problem with doing that is that the rest of the graph cannot and does not display any variation on scales shorter than 120 years: had there been thermometers recording temperatures globally for the last 10,000 years there may have been many such up-and-down spikes to be seen. That's why Marcott et al freely acknowledge that the world was hotter than it now is for much of the period before 5,000 years ago.

Nonetheless the team consider that the recent rises in temperature are cause for concern against the background they have produced.

"In the last 100 years, the increase in carbon dioxide through increased emissions from human activities has been significant," comments Marcott.

Even so, other climate scientists point out that the methods used by Marcott and his team would not be able to detect previous sharp temperature spikes, which are very plausible (the temperature everywhere on Earth goes up and down wildly off the graph above during any short-term period). Robert Rohde, of the BEST project at Berkeley in California - an organisation well known to lean heavily toward the warmist position - pointed this out very clearly to the New York Times:

In essence, their reconstruction appears to tell us about past changes in climate with a resolution of about 400 years. That is more than adequate for gathering insights about millennial scale changes during the last 10,000 years, but it will completely obscure any rapid fluctuations having durations less than a few hundred years.

And indeed, less warmist-friendly scientists would quarrel with other aspects of the results. Many respectable studies and climatologists indicate that there was a "medieval warm period" around a thousand years ago - and probably also a "roman warm" two thousand years back - during which temperatures were higher than they are today, as we see in this graph from last year produced by scientists at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz:

Phew, what a scorcher, Marcus. Let's get in the frigidarium.

Many warmist scientists would agree with Marcott's picture. They would say that the Medieval and Roman warm times, though the evidence for them is strong, were local phenomena only. Europe may have been warmer then, goes the thinking, but the world as a whole was not (although doubt has lately been cast on this by research which indicates that the Medieval warming took place in Antarctica also).

Be all that as it may, today's study certainly seems to ram the point home that at the time of the first pharaoh - perhaps five thousand years ago - it was significantly warmer than it is now and had been so for much of the preceding couple of millennia.

This is interesting, because it is widely believed in some circles (specifically, dubious warmist thinktanks funded in large part by Google's Eric Schmidt) that global warming to be expected just in this century will mean sea level rises on a scale of a metre or more by the year 2100. More serious scientists agree that such sea level rises are on the cards, but suggest - more plausibly, given the immense mass of the ice sheets which would have to melt - that they will take much longer to appear: so much so that in all probability there will be little difference between the 20th and 21st centuries in terms of sea levels.

Nonetheless, according to those more realistic experts, even if we stop emitting carbon right now - so, perhaps, containing eventual warming to levels like those seen in the pre-Egyptian millennia - we could expect a metre of sea-level rise above present levels by the year 3000 AD.

And yet the ancient Egyptians, despite having lived through pretty much exactly that scenario, don't appear to have seen anything like those sort of sea levels. Respectable geologists project that sea levels just a metre above today's would see the port city of Alexandria become an isolated island or peninsula off the Egyptian coast: but that didn't happen. The Old Egyptian town of Rhakotis on the site which later became Alexandria was a major urban centre right back to 2600 BC and before. This would hardly have been the case had it been largely inaccessible from the fertile farmland of the Delta (much of whic would have been flooded and useless anyway in that scenario, as is expected in the imminent future by alarmists now).

It's interesting stuff, anyway - and doesn't really seem to support the agenda its authors might support. Marcott et al's paper can be read by subscribers to Science here. ®

[Puppage]

Era of the Pharaohs: Climate was HOTTER THAN NOW, without CO2

That's just crazy talk! They might not be able to tell us if it'll rain on Saturday, but they KNOW we'll all die from GW down the road.

[MaxMax]

I've noticed the anger in the faces and voices of those who worship climate change growing
to an unhealthy level. They must know their cult is failing and the desperation is becoming hysterical.
No facts will sway their belief of the false inevitable doom that America is causing.
Sad sad people.

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

Email soon to be leaked from East Anglia: “We have to make the Alexandrian warm period disappear.”
Follow up from the state-run media: “Email taken out of context.”

[Uncle Miltie]

Totally explicable:

[Vigilanteman]

The big surprise here is that the National Science Foundation actually funded honest research. I'd like to know how BO's hiring screen let these researchers get through.

It is no secret that Hannibal (218 BC) got his elephants locally from Northern Africa and not Central Africa, the nearest source of the giant beasts today. It is also no secret that productive lands extended into the northernmost regions of where the Sahara Desert is today even with the earth being warmer at that period than it is today.

All things considered, global warming is actually a good thing because it brings about a net increase in agricultural production worldwide, thereby making more of the globe inhabitable.

Only from a libtard point of view is this a bad thing because it means the globe can support more than the half-billion or so human beings which it traditionally has for most of human history and which libtards believe is natural or sustainable.

In all fairness, some libtards now admit that that number may be as high as four billion with technological advances. Doesn't that make you feel warm and fuzzy that some of them think our global population only needs to be reduced by 50% or so, rather than the 94% or so formerly believed?

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Ernest. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Ernest.

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[rktman]

Wait, what? You mean the bulldozers and cranes they used to build the pyramids were solar powered? Just another middle eastern contribution to mankind. Kind of like their space program.

[CottShop]

[[They must know their cult is failing and the desperation is becoming hysterical]]

It’s not failing- not by a long shot- they are poised to begin teaching/propogandizing school kids all across america- our ‘dear leader’ is set to pass more andm ore climate control measures, carbon taxes, fines for violators etc- and he’s already foisted many restrictive and unbearable measures on businesses in the name of climate change-

We are the ones losing- not them- We’re just not hearign so much these days how badly we’re losing hte battle- they on the left just figured otu that goign public meant opposition- so now they do everythign behind hte scenes and have practically ordered the main stream media NOT to report the issues so much any more in order to keep the public unaware of what’s happening

[Foolsgold]

WOW no co2 didn’t anybody breath? I guess no plants to feed (with CO2) either.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

This may also explain why Egypt, in the time of the Pharoahs, about a 3100+ year period, may not just have been hotter, but wetter as well as far more agriculturally productive.

To explain, Egypt is very unusual because it typically has only one farm season, that begins with the flooding of the Nile River. Importantly, global cooling or global warming, the Nile is pretty constant in its water level through history.

However, if it was much hotter, it could have also brought more rain, enough for a smaller second farming season. And thus, more abundance.

[Verginius Rufus]

If they didn't have carbon dioxide in the time of the Pharaohs, when was it invented, and by whom?

No doubt it will turn out that an ancestor of George W. Bush was to blame.

[driftless2]

It has been the contention of the warmists that any rise in temps will mean complete disaster. But it has been proven that there were many instances in the history of the world with temps appreciably warmer than today. For instance, the warming that allowed the Vikings to settle Greenland for 400 years. So if warmer temps means complete disaster, and we know there were many cases of warmer temps in the past, why are we and other life forms still around? It’s a question the warmists wish to squelch.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I am confused....I think this is the same paper discussed at WUWT....and the NY Times is reporting something verydifferent:

“Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years,”

Thread I just posted :

Validity of “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years”

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Well the commies have a record of reducing the population alright.

[Marine_Uncle]

RE: "I am confused....I think this is the same paper discussed at WUWT....and the NY Times is reporting something very different:"

Well someone has to keep the masses ignorant.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

See #10!

And the link at #15.

I don't think using Mann's hockey stick calculation method was a mistake.

[Dexter Morgan]

I do know that the 7 lean years were caused by Burning Bush.

[SaraJohnson]

It was hell on earth back then?

Liberals are trying to catch up. They pronounce themselves gods, enslave humanity and eat our hearts and souls.