Guest contribution by Rud Istvan
Willis Eschenbach’s most recent post on clouds and cloud feedback and my comments on it made me think again about other possible examples of climatic errors. Or to paraphrase Mamet: “To pretend to believe some things, you have to pretend to not know some other things.”
As luck would have it, today (03/15/2021) Google News Science included an example of a CNET article. The headline on Google News reads: “Scientists are stunned by fossils found deep beneath Greenland’s ice sheet.” Google editor’s comment: “Discovery could have HUGE implications for climate change studies”. Google supports Gizmodo’s Sublead story: “Millions of years old plants show that Greenland was once free of ice!” Google News reported, paraphrased by Gizmodo: “We will all die from a sea-level rise of 8 meters when Greenland melts again.”
The backstory shows the worst reporting in science. The CNET leader and the Gizmodo sub are both discussing a new PNAS paper on a new analysis of the “dirt” found in the mid-1960s at the bottom of an old ice core that was drilled to the ground of the Greenland ice (the camp Century core). . The ‘dirt’ was only rediscovered because its ice core repository for new items was being ‘cleaned’, so they checked the inventory of the old items before throwing it away. What was found in the newly rediscovered, nearly 70-year-old Greenland “filth” was evident plant material that was newly radiocarbonated (mya) about 1 million years ago.
Greenland has already melted! So we will all die from a sea level rise of about 8 meters! At least the media mentioned above reported on the new PNAS.
The plant material reported in PNAS is obviously true. So Greenland mostly melted by 1 mya; otherwise these plants would not have been able to exist there for a short time. But this “climate thing” ignores two big “other things”.
First, Greenland sat over a very active tectonic zone and was still forming Iceland. 1 mya Greenland was further south, not facing north, and was considered a separate tectonic plate. (It’s now mostly snuggled up against the North American plate, with lots of tectonic earthquakes along the border.) It has increased over the past million years as it approached North America, drifting further north, and tilting more north / south. So the current climatology is not the climatology 1 mya. It remains a separate tectonic plate (perhaps until recently) as Greenland also contains some of the oldest known exposed crustal rocks, dated to 3.7-3.8 mya. (Only even isolated Australia competes in the age of the oldest rocks, dated with zircon.)
Second, around 1 mya in the mid-Pleistocene (which itself began around 2.7 mya, arguably with the tectonic occlusion of the Panama Isthmus), the system of icing / de-icing (two chaotic weird attractors?) Demonstrably shifted from roughly a symmetrical 40- kya ice age / 40 kya non-ice interval up to an asymmetrical approximately 100 kya ice age / approximately 20 kya non-ice interval. Nobody knows why, but it was geologically detectable. A 40/40 cycle 1 mya would have meant much less ice cap on Greenland, much more melting and therefore plants during at least part of the non-ice intervals. NOT NOW with the new asymmetrical 100/20 ice cap cycle.
So the MSM reached for a new “true” PNAS result, ignored its context and proclaimed the climate fate. This is just a more warmunistic reinforcement of belief, not the contextual scientific reporting that is now being conducted here.
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