Posted by
BLOGASSAULT on Saturday, November 14, 2009 12:34:53 PM
According to this group of scientists climate can change in mere months.
(Via Instapundit)
Until now, it was thought that the mini ice age took a decade or so to take hold, on the evidence provided by Greenland ice cores. Not so, say
William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and his colleagues.
The group studied a mud core from an ancient lake, Lough Monreagh, in western Ireland. Using a scalpel they sliced off layers 0.5 to 1 millimetre thick, each representing up to three months of time. No other measurements from the period have approached this level of detail.
Carbon isotopes in each slice revealed how productive the lake was and oxygen isotopes gave a picture of temperature and rainfall. They show that at the start of the Big Freeze, temperatures plummeted and lake productivity stopped within months, or a year at most. "It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to Svalbard" in the Arctic, says Patterson, who presented the findings at the
BOREAS conference in Rovaniemi, Finland, on 31 October.
Well, what do you suppose that means? Nothing, probably. If you do enough digging around and enough "scientific" research, you can get just about any answer you want to describe climate. I believe we have no clear idea what is going on. The research is good, but let's not jump to conclusions about how it all comes together.