The Holocene Climatic Optimum

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HOLOCENE EPOCH

The Holocene Epoch covers approximately the preceding 11,550 years of the Quaternary Period. The beginning of the Holocene (around 9,543 BC) was marked by the demise of the Pleistocene glaciations and by the onset of multiple climate changes affecting the distribution of vegetation which led to the extinction of many mammal species that had once flourished during the Pleistocene; for example, mammoth, deinotherium, fleecy rhino, saber-toothed tiger, etc. Some human subspecies also disappeared during and prior to the Pleistocene, such as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (man of Neanderthal).

Thanks principally to consecutive warming periods, modern human beings (Homo sapiens) were able to prosper from the domestication of vegetal and animal species. The temperature fluctuations shown in the Graph taken from the number of iron stains are represented by the yellow line. The background of the graph is red in the upper two thirds, representing the warm atmosphere, and blue in the lower one third, representing the cold environment. It is possible to observe that the warm environment (wide of the attenuated red horizontal band) prevails over the cooling fluctuations (attenuated blue horizontal band), since the latter is narrower than the warm band.

In general, with fluctuations measuring up to 6 °C (based on the average standard of the last 150 years), the temperature has been warm, punctuated by periods of extreme cooling, such as a glacial period that occurred 8,000 years ago and, most recently, the period known as the Little Ice Age between 1570 and 1830 AD.

The period prior to the Little Ice Age was marked by warming on a global scale, which was similar to previous warm periods that also extended over the whole planet. At a global level, the Medieval Warm Period fluctuation was more than 0.62 °C.

In the bottom left-hand corner of the graph, the Medieval Warm Period is represented by the red bar marked A. Next to it, the period known as the Little Ice Age is represented by the blue bar marked B. The period of recuperation from the Little Ice Age, which corresponds with the period covering the last 156 years, is represented by the blue-red bar marked C.

The highest anomaly of the present period of recovery was 0.786 °C, and happened in 1998 for one minute. Since then, no anomalies have been registered that would indicate a continuous warming, given that the anomalies from 1999 to 2007 have all been much smaller than the anomaly registered in 1998. For example, in both 2000 and 2001 the anomaly was 0.34 °C ; in 2002 it was 0.27 °C, in 2003 it was 0.27 °C, in 2004 it was almost 0.19 °C, in 2005 the anomaly was no more than 0.48 °C, and in 2006 it did not exceed 0.38 °C.

By comparison, during the period of warming at the beginning of the Holocene known as the Holocene Climatic Optimum, the temperature anomalies were 12 times greater than the highest deviation registered in the last 156 year (the anomaly during the Holocene Climatic Optimum was 6 °C higher, while the anomaly in the current period has been no higher than 0.52 °C). (Koshkarova & Koshkarov. 2004).

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"In the postmodern view, whether in its Green or its deconstructive versions, science is not dispensed with so much as domesticated. Modern science is to lose its place of privilege, with “non-Western”- and nonrational- “ways of knowing” elevated to an equal position." (Lewis; 1996)

To quote this article copy and past the next two lines. Please fill in the blank spaces with the day, month and year when you read this article the last time:

Nahle, Nasif. (2007) Warming Periods in the Holocene Epoch. ©Biology Cabinet Organization. 22 March 2007. http://www.biocab.org/Holocene.html. Last visit on (day) (month) (year).

INTRODUCTION

The Media and some organizations have told us that the current global warming has been unprecedented and that it is a threat for humankind and all life on Earth. However, when I assessed the issue on past and present temperatures I found that actually other changes of temperature and warming periods in the past have been extremely higher than the current one. In addition, I found that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has never been an important driver of the climate on Earth as we have been made to believe. I have plotted the data provided by NOAA, IPCC and independent researchers to give you the real panorama about past and current situations so you can notice what is behind the veil. Changes of temperature, global warming, climate changes and oscillations of the concentration of the atmospheric carbon dioxide are quite frequent on our planet.

On the other hand, I want to make clear that I support the fight against contamination and destruction of biomes, but without distorting and flawing the science. We have not caused the present cyclical natural phenomena. We have survived to those changes of climate and global warming and cooling periods before and we will survive this one.

I want to let you know that we at Biology Cabinet are preparing another article where we will demonstrate scientifically that the sinks for carbon dioxide are not working at their top capacity and that the failure has been promoted by solar and planetary events.

Nasif Nahle

Owner

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I have introduced the change of the concentration of the carbon dioxide during the same period to clarify that its concentration in the atmosphere has not an important influence on the change of tropospheric temperature. The solid blue line is the change of temperature figured out from the iron stained grains, while the solid green line represents the change of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is evident that there is no correlation between CO2 and climate. We know that the CO2 is a gas that can absorb and emit heat, but it cannot store heat as to cause a warming of the planet.

I have included the graph (dotted red line) from other proxies, i. e. pollen, tree rings, diatoms, etc., so you can compare both versions on the change of temperature during the Holocene Epoch. It is quite clear that the CO2 has not a significant role in climatic variability on Earth. See a full comparison in the next graph.

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There are many important issues to consider from the graph above these paragraphs.

The sky-blue line, which corresponds to the boreholes obtained from Greenland, shows that the amplitude of change of temperature at those latitudes was wider than the other proxies; for example, it is wider than the change of temperature at the Sargasso Sea surface, where the amplitude of change of temperature could be the narrowest change compared with the other proxies.

The green line corresponds to the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere obtained from the study of bubbles of air trapped in the ice at the Vostok ice core. The line is almost smooth from 11000 to 5000 years ago, and it starts to ascend when the amplitude of the change of temperature decreases (red line), that is, becomes narrower. That time corresponds precisely to 5000 years ago, not 250 years ago, related to the industrial revolution. Actually, the increase of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began 5000 years before present.

The red line is the average of the change of temperature deduced from all the proxies represented here. It is evident that the sharp increase of the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is closely related to the very narrow amplitude of the change of temperature given in the last 250 years. Consequently, it suggests that the increase of the concentration of the atmospheric CO2 cannot be attributed to human activities, but to natural phenomena.

The global change of temperature during the Holocene Epoch has been from 2.25 K to 7 K. In the last two centuries the change has been only 0.52 K. Thus, the global warming throughout the last decades has not been unique or higher than in the past.

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The graph above these lines is a comparison between the change of atmospheric temperature in China through the last two millennia reconstructed by Yang et al (that a kind colleague, Dr. Craig Loehle, sent to me for its analysis) and the Antarctica temperature obtained from boreholes by Bond et al.

The blue line shows the reconstruction of the atmospheric temperature from boreholes at the Antarctica. The dark blue line shows the change of temperature reconstructed by Yang et al. Both plots coincides in warm and cold periods; however, we can observe that the temperature in the Antarctica raised many years before a change of atmospheric temperature was perceptible from the proxies used by Yang et al.

The reconstruction of the Antarctic temperature shows a period from ~110 AD to ~1020 AD when the atmosphere was warmer than at present. Perhaps during this period of extreme warming during the Medieval Age the Antarctic glaciers melted at a faster and superior rate than at present.

Nasif Nahle

8 December 2007

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Broecker, Wallace S. Was the Medieval Warm Period Global? Science. 23 February 2001. Vol. 291. No. 5508, pp. 1497 – 1499.

Bond, Gerard et al. Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene. Science 7 December 2001: Vol. 294. no. 5549, pp. 2130 – 2136.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Lewis, M. W. The Flight from Science and Reason-Radical Environmental Philosophy and the Assault on Reason. Editors: Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt and Martin W. Lewis. 1996. New York, NY.

David Jablonski, Douglas H. Erwin and Jere H. Lipps. Evolutionary Paleobiology. 1996. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, Ill.

Loehle, C. 2007. A 2000-year Global Temperature Reconstruction Based on Non-treering Proxies. Energy & Environment 18(7-8): 1049-1058.

Parrenin, F., L. Loulergue, and E. Wolff. 2007. EPICA Dome C Ice Core Timescales EDC3. IGBP. PAGES / World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series # 2007-083.NOAA/NCDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.

Petit, J.R., Jouzel, J., Raynaud, D., Barkov, N.I., Barnola, J.-M., Basile, I., Bender, M., Chappellaz, J., Davis, M., Delaygue, G., Delmotte, M., Kotlyakov, V.M., Legrand, M., Lipenkov, V.Y., Lorius, C., Pepin, L., Ritz, C., Saltzman, E., and Stievenard, M. 1999. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature 399: 429-436.

Sykes, Bryan. 2001. The Seven Daughters of Eve. W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. London, UK.

V.L. Koshkarova and A.D. Koshkarov (2004). "Regional signatures of changing landscape and climate of northern central Siberia in the Holocene". Russian Geology and Geophysics 45 (6): 672-685.

Yang, B., A. Braeuning, K. R. Johnson, and S. Yafeng (2002). General characteristics of temperature variation in China during the last two millennia. Geophys. Res. Lett., 29(9), 1324.

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