A Tale Of Two Climatic Changes Part Two
Key to understanding the posts is Earth’s power balance as presented by Nobel-laureate Dr John Clauser in a video
Clauser concludes that Earth’s temperature should remain relatively constant thanks to a cloud thermostat that buffers power density changes of up to 18 W/m2, so humankind should not be worried about the relatively minor power density increases caused by atmospheric CO2 increases.
But he leaves open the question on what physical process can disrupt this power balance and cause ‘climate change’.
Earth’s temperature and climate have demonstrably changed in the past. The last glacial period ended around ~19,000 (19 kyr) years ago when the glacial steady-state energy balance was disrupted.
The Glacial vs Interglacial Power Balance
Earth’s ~6 ºC lower global mean surface temperature during our last glacial period was almost certainly due to the presence of large ice sheets that caused semi-permanent weather systems that caused cold & dry northerly katabatic winds over North America and Europe (Post 1).
Assuming a 1 ºC surface temperature change is caused by a ~5 W/m2 power forcing (Stefan-Boltzmann eqn) means that “Thermal Outgoing” during the glacial period was likely on the order of (239) – 5 *6 = (209).
In a zero-sum power balance, and under the assumption of a constant “Solar Incoming”, the “Solar Reflected” must have been around (130). Due to the ice sheets, Earth’s average albedo of 0.38 (130/340) was higher during the glacial period than its present average value of 0.29 (100/340).
An ice sheet’s albedo is typically on the order of 0.8-0.9, so the presence of large ice sheets can explain the difference in Earth’s global mean surface temperature and albedo during the last glacial period, even under a constant “Solar Incoming”.
The above is uncontentious. The numbers might be debated, but the overall picture is clear: Mother Nature caused the glacial to interglacial climatic change by melting the large ice sheets, thereby raising Earth’s global mean surface temperature by lowering Earth’s average albedo.
And she performs this Magic Trick like clockwork every 100 ka, to the great bafflement of mainstream science. Which highlights the chicken vs egg ‘climate change’ paradox: how can Mother Nature raise temperatures in order to melt the ice without first lowering the albedo?
How can Mother Nature lower Earth’s albedo without first melting the ice?
How not to melt ice sheets
Melting ice sheets with solar energy is very hard to do, as they reflect 80-90 percent of the incoming power, that is 80 percent of any “Solar Incoming” power increase is reflected.
How does Mother Nature do it? As with any good sleight-of-hand trick, Mother Nature has successfully diverted Science’s attention with an obvious yet false answer: “Solar Incoming” must have dramatically increased around 19 kyr.
But it didn’t. It actually decreased by ~10-15 W/m2 in the Northern Hemisphere during the summer melting season from its higher values during the Last Glacial Maximum (26.5 kyr), as per reconstructions using the (industry-standard) Laskar et al. (2004) insolation calculations.
This irrefutable evidence that a higher “Solar Incoming” did not cause the last glacial period to end has knocked mainstream science into a cognitive fugue. Any alternative ideas on how the trick actually works are dismissed out of hand in favor of vigorously beating this dead horse in the hope it might somehow prove viable after all.
The Clauser power balance strongly suggests that the solution lies in adding an extra term to the energy balance, that is adding a power source that regionally melted the ice and raised albedo.
How to end semi-permanent Katabatic Weather Systems
Post 1 demonstrated sometime during the glacial to interglacial transition the cold & dry semi-permanent katabatic weather systems that enforced the glacial steady-state in the Northern Atlantic transitioned into our current warmer and wetter semi-permanent weather systems that are dominated by the Azores/Bermuda high.
Geological evidence indicates the collapse of these large katabatic weather systems had occurred by 14.6 kyr, the start of the Bøling-Allerød (Andersen, B., Borns, H., 1994, The Ice Age World, Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-8200218104).
CSDMS (youtube.com) paleogeographic reconstructions demonstrate what happened in North America.
A low-albedo interglacial corridor established itself and partitioned the North American ice sheet into two. This corridor acted as a continually-expanding low albedo nucleus that basically caused the North American ice sheet to melt from the center outwards.
The cold, northerly katabatic winds shifted to warmer easterly and westerly katabatic winds over the corridor. As the corridor grew and the ice sheets shrank, the influence of the northerlies waned.
How to melt an internal corridor
There is only one plausible explanation of how this 2000 km long N-S oriented corridor could have been melted through the center of the ice sheet: it melted from below due to a regional increase in geothermal heat.
The corridor precisely overlies a geothermal anomaly (map below from Grasby, S. et al., 2012, Geothermal Energy Resource Potential of Canada, Geological Survey of Canada, Open File 6914 (revised), 322 p., doi:10.4095/291488), an area of high geothermal heat flux.
The melting of the corridor occurred during a period of regionally and globally elevated geothermal heat flux & active volcanism, e.g. Mount St. Helens (USA) during its “Couger Stage” (20.5-18 kyr) and its “Swift Creek Stage” (16-10.5 kyr) (pubs.usgs.gov/pp/p1563/table2).
There is no other plausible melting process that starts in the center of an ice sheet, and equally melts both northern and southern areas. At this point some skeptic usually heckles: but geothermal heat fluxes area too small!
Relatively high geothermal heat fluxes are typically on the order of 0.5 W/m2, and are therefore usually ignored when calculating energy balances. Some main differences with “Solar Incoming” however are that none of this power is reflected, all the power is supplied 24/7 and all the power must either pass upwards through the glacier or be laterally advected by meltwater to melt downstream glaciers.
Most of this power is therefore used to melt glaciers. The Antarctic ice sheet is currently demonstrably underlain by large meltwater lakes and rivers. In addition, areas overlying geothermal anomalies get a several-orders-of-magnitude-larger power boost from circulating hydrothermal fluids, that is fluids heated within the Earth and circulated back to surface, which in turn melt any overlying glaciers from the bottom up.
Iceland cannot heat 90 percent of its homes with a paltry 0.5 W/m2, but can do so by imitating nature: injecting water into the ground and producing the heated water back to surface.
Similar hydrothermal systems occur naturally in Western North America. It would be very difficult to establish a permanent glacier over e.g. Yellowstone, with its hot pools and periodically erupting geysers.
Yet its surface geothermal heat flux is on the order of 0.1 W/m2 (https://serc.carleton.edu/details/images/46195.html). Similar hot hydrothermal systems follow the edge of the Canadian Rockies, e.g. the Banff hot springs.
Geothermal heat warms 24/7, 365 days a year, and is currently responsible for melting the Antarctic Thwaites Glacier (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00242-3), i.e. has a demonstrated track record of being able to pull off this trick.
Conclusion Post 2:
What causes glacial to interglacial transitions? A 100 ka cycle of elevated geothermal heat. Which peels back one layer of the onion, but still leaves a lot of onion for the astro- and geophysicists to chew on.
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