The publicity and debate that sprang up in the 9 months after release of e-mails stolen (17 November 2009) from the British University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, and several debacles regarding pronouncements by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have in fact cleared the air on several purely scientific matters. , Contrary to what had become the broad public conception, thanks to massive and continuous propaganda about global warming that barely mentions anything else, greenhouse gas emissions are widely revealed to be not the ‘only game in town’ when it comes to past changes in climate. That is very much the lesson learned by decades of study of the greatest climate change that fully modern humans have experienced: the last glacial termination when the deepest frigidity about 20 ka ago gave way to very rapid warming. A review of that enormous world event carries important lessons about what really controls climate on our world and how complex that is (Denton, G.H. et al. 2010. The last glacial termination. Science, v. 328, p. 1652-1656).

Since the 1970s proxy data from deep-sea sediments that reveal the variation in the volume of glacial ice on land have showed how climate changes over the last 2.5 Ma are broadly correlated with the periods of astronomical effects on the amount of solar energy received by Earth or insolation, particularly that at high northern latitudes. This might suggest that glacial terminations occur when insolation reaches maxima. In fact over the last 800 ka terminations have also occurred at times of low insolation. The Milankovich signal is ubiquitous but it is not the primary driving factor for the end of glacial episodes. Nor do they tally exactly with increased CO2 in the atmosphere, as recorded in air bubble trapped in polar ice. In fact there is a lag between the record for greenhouse gases and those for warming and cooling. The clearest correlation is between terminations and the maximum volume of land ice in each glacial epoch, towards which Denton et al. direct most attention. Since Antarctic ice has barely changed volume since the Pliocene, pulsation in land-ice volume must stem mostly from Northern Hemisphere glaciation and deglaciation. That repeatedly occurred around the North Atlantic where the main sites for ocean-water downwelling occur. At their thickest the North American and European ice sheets also had their greatest isostatic effects, bowing down the crust, and increasing ice flow towards the ocean. Time after time in each glacial build-up such a configuration became unstable so that marginal ice collapsed to produce the iceberg ‘armadas’ known as Heinrich events. Freshening of the North Atlantic by iceberg melting shut down the downwelling, thereby thermally isolating high northern latitudes to give Dansgaard-Oeschger events comprising paired coolings, or stadials, followed by suddenly warming interstadials once deep circulation restarted.

What is also emerging is that, to maintain heat balance, as each stadial developed in the North Atlantic more heat was shifted to the Southern Hemisphere. Increased downwelling of cold saline water of the Southern Ocean drove this warming to higher southern latitudes. The net observed effect is a southern reversal of sea-surface and polar air temperatures compared with those of the Northern Hemisphere, especially clear in the late stages of the last termination, including the Younger Dryas. Each warming of the south encouraged the southern oceans to emit stored CO2 to the atmosphere, until finally sufficient to maintain global warm conditions when the arose during terminations.

Flatulence and the Younger Dryas
There is a widespread belief that the enlargement of domesticated ruminant herds, mainly cattle, goats and sheep, may have had some effect on recent climate: their enteric fermentation of grass cellulose generates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Livestock produce an estimated 80 million metric tons of methane annually, accounting for about 28% of anthropogenic methane emissions. Livestock aren’t the only methane emitting ruminants: giraffe; bison; yaks; water buffalo; deer; camels (including llamas and alpacas); and antelope. Elephants are not so efficient, but they do break wind a great deal. An adult elephant emits about half a ton of methane annually; enough to run a car 20 miles per day; on the school run for instance.

Livestock have become the dominant herbivores on the planet, but far more wild ruminants roamed the Earth during the last glacial epoch because of the much greater expanses of grasslands during cooler, more arid conditions. This was especially the case in North America, a much diminished impression being given by the vast herds of bison that were almost exterminated in the 19th century and those of caribou that still migrate across Alaska and northern Canada. The estimated ruminant population of late-Pleistocene prairies was so large that it too has been implicated in climate change during the last glacial termination (Smith, F.A. et al. 2010. Methane emissions from extinct megafauna. Nature Geoscience, v. 3, p. 374-375), with estimated annual emissions around 10 million tons. With atmospheric methane concentrations having reached around 650 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) by 15 ka – a third of those today – the farting animals of the prairies may have made a significant contribution to post-glacial global warming. Sometime around 13 ka immigrant humans from Asia entered the scene, armed with efficient hunting weapons. By 11.5 ka, the vast herds had more or less vanished through extinction, and the 10 megaton methane emission went with them. Felisa Smith and her colleagues from the University of New Mexico, Los Alamos National National Laboratory and the Smithsonian Institution, USA, note that over the same period atmospheric methane content fell from 650 to <500 ppbv. They speculate that part of this decline may have resulted from the extinction of the North American ‘megafauna’ and contributed to the Younger Dryas cooling between 12.8 to 11.5 ka. If that were the case, it would have been the earliest instance of a human effect on the Earth and, opine the authors, ought to be used to mark the start of what some geoscientists propose as a new geological Period: the ‘Anthropocene’. This parochial view surely ranks alongside that of a shower of nano-diamonds from an extraterrestrial explosion as the cause of the Younger Dryas, to the posthumous annoyance of William Seach of Occam.

Doubt cast on erosion and weathering theory of climate change
A seminal paper in the late 1980’s by Maureen Raymo, Flip Froelich and Bill Ruddiman proposed that the uplift of mountain ranges, their erosion and associated chemical weathering helped gradually shift global climate. Their main reasoning was that rotting of feldspars by carbonic acid formed when CO2 dissolves in rainwater locked the greenhouse gas in soil carbonates and supplied bicarbonate ions to sea water, where they would recombine with calcium and magnesium ions also released by weathering to form limestones. This process would draw down greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere faster during episodes of major mountain building. Such carbonate burial has since been assumed to have helped the Earth’s climate cool during the Cenozoic era, after the Alps, Andes and especially the Himalaya began to form. There have been many publications about the processes involved and the geochemical signature of varying erosion, such as changes in the strontium isotope composition of limestones as a proxy for that of sea water. But the real test for whether or not there have been pulses in erosion controlled by orogeny would involve measuring changes over time in sediment deposition in all the world’s sedimentary basins. In a recent paper (Willenbring, J.K. & von Blanckenburg, F. 2010. Long-term stability of global erosion rates and weathering during late-Cenozoic cooling. Nature, v. 465, p. 211-214) published estimates of continent derived sedimentation plotted against atmospheric CO2 derived from various proxies show two features. First, there hasn’t been a truly significant decrease in CO2 since the end of the Oligocene (23 Ma). Secondly, although sedimentation over every 5 Ma rose from about 6 x 1015 to 1016 t between the end of the Oligocene and the start of the Pliocene. Repeated glaciation over the last 5 Ma helped increase global sedimentation to 3 x 1016 t, but even that tripling seems not to have had much effect on atmospheric CO2.

Willenbring and von Blanckenburg have attempted to improve the very uncertain evolution of the sedimentary record based on basin stratigraphy – despite seismic sections in many basins, costly and still rare 3-D cross sections are the only means of working out actual masses of sediment deposited through time. The authors re-examined the record of beryllium isotopes in sediments and manganese crusts from the deep-ocean floor, as a proxy for rates of weathering of continental debris. The principle behind this is the continuous production of radioactive 10Be in the atmosphere by cosmic rays, and its entry into the oceans. There it mixes with stable 9Be released to solution by weathering of rocks. Allowing for the decay of 10Be and assuming constant rates at which it is produced, the 10Be/9Be ratio in ocean water and sediments in contact with it is a proxy for global weathering. A decrease in the ratio implies an increase in continental weathering, while decreases signify periods of slowing rock breakdown. Over the last 10 Ma, the ratio has stayed more or less constant in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The obvious conclusion is that the last 10 Ma showed no pulse in weathering and that period did not follow the Raymo-Froelich-Ruddiman model. There are several explanations for the ‘flat-lining’ Be isotopes (Goddéris, Y. 2010. Mountains without erosion. Nature, v. 465, p. 169-171), but a rethink of the significance of any link between orogeny and climate is clearly on the cards.

On the same topic, the start of Northern Hemisphere glaciations and its 30-40 Ma lead-in, Bill Ruddiman of the University of Virginia reviews a broader range of evidence (Ruddiman, W.F. 2010. A paleoclimatic enigma. Science, v. 328, p. 838-839) but not that presented by Willenbring and von Blanckenburg. He concludes that little has changed by way of explanation since the late 1990s, and decreased CO2¬ was the primary forcing factor. Yet his own plot of atmospheric CO2 estimated from marine-sediment alkenones (organic compounds produced by some phytoplankton) shows little fluctuation in the mean concentration since 20 Ma, which is around that for the Pliocene-Pleistocene Great Ice Age.