magnetism on the sun...

Abstract

The Late Bronze Age world of the Eastern Mediterranean, a rich linkage of Aegean, Egyptian, Syro-Palestinian, and Hittite civilizations, collapsed famously 3200 years ago and has remained one of the mysteries of the ancient world since the event’s retrieval began in the late 19th century AD/CE. Iconic Egyptian bas-reliefs and graphic hieroglyphic and cuneiform texts portray the proximate cause of the collapse as the invasions of the “Peoples-of-the-Sea” at the Nile Delta, the Turkish coast, and down into the heartlands of Syria and Palestine where armies clashed, famine-ravaged cities abandoned, and countrysides depopulated. Here we report palaeoclimate data from Cyprus for the Late Bronze Age crisis, alongside a radiocarbon-based chronology integrating both archaeological and palaeoclimate proxies, which reveal the effects of abrupt climate change-driven famine and causal linkage with the Sea People invasions in Cyprus and Syria. The statistical analysis of proximate and ultimate features of the sequential collapse reveals the relationships of climate-driven famine, sea-borne-invasion, region-wide warfare, and politico-economic collapse, in whose wake new societies and new ideologies were created.

Citation: Kaniewski D, Van Campo E, Guiot J, Le Burel S, Otto T, et al. (2013) Environmental Roots of the Late Bronze Age Crisis. PLoS ONE 8(8): e71004. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0071004

Editor: Michael D. Petraglia, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Received: May 28, 2013; Accepted: June 28, 2013; Published: August 14, 2013

Copyright: © 2013 Kaniewski et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This research was funded by the Geological Survey of Belgium, the Université Paul Sabatier - Toulouse 3, and the PAI PVI/34 (Belspo) project. This work is also a contribution to the Labex OT-Med (ANR-11-LABX-0061) funded by the « Investissements d’Avenir», French Government program of the French National Research Agency(ANR) through the A-Midex project (ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Compared to the Last Glacial period, the amplitude of Holocene climate fluctuations is less pronounced. Nevertheless, climate fluctuations on multi-centennial to millennial time-scales and rapid shifts occurred during the Holocene [1]–[4], and significantly impacted human societies [5]–[10]. New light has recently been shed by both paleoclimate [11]–[16] and archaeological communities 17–19 on the so-called 3.2 ka event, also termed Late Bronze Age (LBA) collapse or crisis [20]–[21] This event was associated with a major cultural disruption at ca. 1200 BC, with population migrations and wars. From this crisis arose new societies and new ideologies [22].

read more: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0071004

 Some of the images from NASA’s flagship Terra and Aqua satellites are downright heartbreaking. They seem to make the case that we’re inexplicably intent on engineering our own expulsion from the garden, in a kind of late-breaking, self-inflicted Old Testament dismissal. But as five decades of space exploration make clear, there are no other worlds even remotely suitable for human life — at least not in this solar system. We simply have no other place to go.

The mid-Pliocene epoch, some three million years ago, was the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide was at the levels we are now approaching; some scientists estimate that mid-latitude temperatures then were between 16 and 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today, and sea levels may have been up to 115 feet higher. In our own era in the 48 contiguous states, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, 7 of the 10 warmest years since 1901 have occurred since 1998. Welcome to the Anthropocene.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/opinion/sunday/gorgeous-glimpses-of-ca...      

"Australia has warmed by around a degree since the 1950s, which has affected every month and season. So it's hardly any surprise that we are seeing warmer winter after warmer winter.

"In the last decade, we've had two winters slightly below average in temperature and eight above average. The cooler weather is becoming less frequent."

This warmer weather is having a variety of impacts, on land and sea. Research shows that fish species are moving towards the poles by 7km each year, resulting in some unusual species turning up in Tasmanian waters.

Warmer weather is also bad for undertakers, the industry has told the Sydney Morning Herald, with some experiencing a 10 to 15% drop in the death rate, and therefore business, as vulnerable people survive the milder temperatures.

The spring-like weather is also having a slightly less-expected impact on plants, with some suffering from frost damage.

"There's been an increase in frost damage to plants, which at first doesn't seem to make sense," said Jones. "Plants are responding to the warmer climate earlier, so when the inevitable frost does come, they aren't prepared and are vulnerable. There are few counter-intuitive impacts like that happening."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/australia-weather-australia

Warming up, slowly (fast in geological terms) but surely... Read article at top.

Calculations suggest that the overall heat balance of the Earth is showing a positive trend, with more solar heat coming in than thermal energy that is lost into space. Climate researchers have argued that the deep parts of the ocean are likely to be absorbing this extra heat, rather than it accumulating at the Earth's surface.

The latest study by Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego supports this idea by a theoretical study of the cold La Nina current in the eastern Pacific which they found is capable of taking up huge amounts of heat from the atmosphere over a period of decades.

"Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Nina-like decadal cooling," the researchers said in the journal Nature.

"Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase," they said.

In their computer modelling experiment, the two researchers altered the amount of heat flowing between the east Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere so that the sea surface temperatures in the computer model were forced to agree with the actual observations.

"This results in the realistic simulation of the recent surface warming slowdown globally and some unusual weather patterns such as drought experienced in the southern United States," said Richard Allan, a climate scientist at Reading University, who was not involved with the research.

"This new study adds further evidence that the recent slowdown in the rate of global warming at the Earth's surface is explained by natural fluctuations in the ocean and is therefore likely to be a temporary respite from warming in response to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases," Dr Allan said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/how-the-pacific-has-paused-global-warming-on-hold-but-not-for-long-8788403.html

See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/21472

and: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/blog/11?page=5

and: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/26550#comments

and : http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence

The latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted “there are indications the mean magnetic field in sunspots may be diminishing on (a) decadal level”, but added the decrease in solar activity “will be much smaller in magnitude than the projected increased forcing due to greenhouse gases”.

Michael Ashley, a physics professor at the University of NSW, said weaker solar activity in past decades had contributed to a cooling of the planet of about 0.1-0.2 degrees. “To counteract global warming you’d need 10 times that,” he said.

“What is more worrying is if (the sun) warms up to its long-term average, then we’re going be a lot worse off,” Professor Ashley said.

Interest in the role of the sun in driving climate change picked particularly after the 1960s when researchers identified the so-called Maunder Minimum of low sunspot activity between about 1645 and 1715.

That period coincided with the so-called Little Ice Age when Europe especially experienced a drop in temperatures of about half a degree compared with the start of the 20th century, according to Steve Sherwood, a professor specialising in atmospheric climate dynamics, also at the UNSW.

In recent years, though, scientists have begun to downplay the role of the sun in shifting climates, viewing volcanic activity, ocean current changes and other factors playing important parts.

The Maunder Minimum, for instance, was about 50-60 years in the middle of the Little Ice Age but the cool period extended “a lot longer either side...so it couldn’t have just been the sun”, Professor  Ashley said.

The solar cycle “does have an impact but it’s overwhelmed by the greenhouse-gas effect,” he said, referring to emissions produced by humans burning fossil fuels and clearing land.

A rare double burst of magnetically charged solar storms has hit Earth, lighting up social media with pictures of the stunning night-time auroras.

The United States' National Weather Service Space Weather Prediction Centre said on its website the storm had entered its main phase on Saturday.

"Solar wind conditions suggest that this activity will continue for many hours and aurora watchers should be in for a good treat," it said.

Avid storm chasers have been documenting their sights on Twitter under the hashtag #solarstorm.

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Best pic tonight. #Aurora over Mount Washington Observatory in NH Credit: R. Knapp http://www.flickr.com/photos/4caster/15033867020 … #solarstorm