Before Caspar Ammann started playing for the Team, he was a geologist who wrote the following serviceable discussion of glaciation in the “dry” Andes between 19 and 27S (Quelccaya is at 12S). Under current climatic conditions, no glaciers can exist in the high Andes of the Western Cordillera in the high Andes of the Western […]
James Lane here noticed a couple of other useful references on Quelccaya and related the anecdotal information to this information. He observed: It took me ages to put this post together, juggling between different sites. I don’t think one can conclude anything from the information, as presented, except that the moss has grown at higher […]
Thompson et al (PNAS 2006) stated that the discovery of a plant deposit with radiocarbon age of around 4000 BP (calibrated to 5138 BP) near the receding margin of the Quelccaya glacier provided “strong evidence” that the “current retreat of Quelccaya is unprecedented for the last 5 millennia”. The plant deposit is Distichia muscoides, which […]
Just when I’d despaired of ever seeing anything as mundane as a site map of the Quelccaya glacier on a scale that did not also show all of South America, I stumbled (due to the wonders of google) on an interesting article by Mark et al (2002), a geologist from Ohio State – the same […]
Hormes et al 2001 is noted up in passing by the NAS panel, but is given short shrift relative to Thompson. It is not mentioned at all in the IPCC 4AR second draft. This article is one of the underpinnings for the view that there have been 8 warm intervals in the Alps during the […]
During the past few years, one sees from time to time news releases e.g. here about the “Green Alps”‘? from several German and Swiss scientists: Schlüchter, U Joerin, Holzhauser and Hormes in particular. The NAS panel mentioned Hormes et al 2001 in the sentence after Thompson’s organics, but paid no attention to it. It turns […]
The NAS panel mentioned the recent 5000-year organics from Quelccaya as being an important potential indicator of 20th century climatic uniqueness. (Lee seems to consider it some kind of smoking gun) I’ll discuss Thompson’s abysmal publication of the data – in particular, his total lack of any stratigraphic information – in a few days, but […]
Thompson et al said that "their [Thompson's four Tibetan ice core] dO18 histories or proxy temperature records, are remarkably similar at lower frequencies". They are not just similar – they are "remarkably similar" with correlations as high as one milllll-ion.
There’s a new Lonnie Thompson article online at PNAS (thanks to Steve Bloom for reference). It has some "supporting data" – "supporting data to Thompson means only digital versions of the graphics, rather than detailed archives such as Majewski provided for the Everest ice core. Just to annoy anyone who was actually interested in the […]
Now that I’ve caught my breath a little, just for fun, I’m parsing through sections of the NAS report on areas not directly involving the MM-MBH battle. In the press conference, I recall Cuffey placing a lot of emphasis on the "regional" MWP, and that it wasn’t in the Antarctic ice core data (although it […]
