G'day,
An interesting point. The melt of Greenland needs a bit of clarification first. To be a record you need data that has a timeframe and prior periods all of which are less than the data being declared to be a record. Greenland is especially probematic because there has been very little good data on greenland's ice coverege until very recently. Even with satellites, the greenland ice coverage was not specifically measured and even today there is still significant problems with giving an actual measurement of the coverage. For instance, you need to know the exact position of the structure below the ice before you can meause the thickness of the ice. Even with the antarctic this is a problem. About the only area where this problem does not occur is measurements of ocean sea ice in the Arctic or Antarctic.
So we will leave that aside for the time being.
Max, you have made a very valid point and done something that all scientists should do regularly, speculate. Now I don't mean make press announcements on your speculation or worse still put speculation into a scientific paper, except in those areas of the paper where it is very clearly declared it is speculation, for instance, to suggest areas where further study might be warranted.
Newton didn't just think of gravity and, presto, a scientific theory was born. Actually, he speculated about what held things to the earth, why the moon actually seemed to stay with the earth, and if you believe the story, why an apple fell from a tree. All that was speculation until he started to try and put scientific reasoning to it. Then he went further and looked at the mathematics that might be involved and continued until he had what was a very long way from speculation indeed, but the speculation part was essential in the whole process.
I spend some years developing a paper on the mechanics of flips from a glacial period to an interglacial period because a professor wanted to shake up a class I was in, the vast majority very much very conservative in their views and at that time openly scoffing at the "global cooling" that was then the rage. They were almost all totally convinced that the transition to an interglacial period took between three and five thousand years, as was the very intrenched thinking at the time. So my professor set us a task. He stated: "The transition to a full blown interglacial period took seven years!". Now his intent was for us to prove him wrong. The trouble was that all those that seriously tried could not and the more diverse our enquiries and data that we collected, the worse our position was.
It is known that the first Iraqi conflict caused significant effects to weather around at least a narrow band of the world for about 18 months. It is suggested, with good evidence, to support it, that it effect the weather of Europe for several months, although short term climate can be effected by so many things it is rather dificult to tell if a drop in temperatures, or a change in rain patterns can be attributed to one thing.
As I have mentioned on this site many times, the last seven out of ten flips between glacial and interglacial periods in this Ice Age have been occupanied by increased volcanic activity.
In 1833 a Volcano erupted in Iceland. Now it wasn't a really big eruption. It killed a few hundred people is Iceland at the time and was the largest Icleandic eruption in about 1,000 years but Krakatoa left it for dead, as did a number of other eruptions in the last millenia or so. However, over the next year the temperatures over Europe dropped because a strange cloud or sometimes a "fog" turned up and stuck around for a pretty long time. While the residents of Europe did not know it at the time, this cloud or fog came from the eruption in Iceland. It was very often described as having a sulphur smell and many many people declared it was the work of the devil, sulphurous fumes being closely related to medieaval belief in hell.
This "soot" or small particles in the air changed the climate of at least Europe of one year and killed between 100,000 and 500,000 people in Europe. The numbers are impossible to work out precisely because most countries, with the exception of Britain, did not keep good death records. The deaths were normally those of fit healthy people that were required to do manual activity such as farm labourers. The death tolls are extrapolated from the English records and these indicates that the death toll was around 5% of the population of the towns where records were well kept.
Now in 1816 the whole world (actually all of the Northern Hemisphere, the effect on the Southern Hemisphere was either nil or records were not kept well enough to establish any effect), experienced what was called "the Year without a Summer". Actually the climate changes seemed to have also occured to a much smaller extent in 1815 and to a still marked effect in 1817 and 1818.
It is pretty clear that the reason for the lack of a summer in 1816 was due to upper atmosphere particles, as it coincided with amazing sunsets, well recorded in various places and celebrated in paintings such as those of Turner. So while we do not have evidence in the form of atmospheric readings of particle dispersement and quantity, the evidence that we do have, indirect as it is, is still pretty darn conclusive that the climate change was directly related to the high particle "pollution" in the air. If it was a murder trial the particles would certainly be found guilty of alteration of climates to the level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and for the purposes of this type of discussion, that's good enough for me.
Most people think that the lost summer was caused by the massive eruption in the Dutch East Indies in 1815 but actually it was probably a combination of a number of eruptions of a somewhat leasser scale but scattered from the equator and well up into the Northern Hemisphere latitudes.
So your comments relating to the Middle East, imho, are very probably well worth a post here and for those interested in Climatology are worth serious consideration.
The pollution from the Middle East isn't just the Iraqi problems. There are all sorts of soot and pollutants that the oil producers in the Mid East are creating, as well as many countries in that region, have little consideration for the environment. You might have Dubai that builds the world in Islands and refuses to use concrete or steel because it might have damaged the eco-system seriously, but you also countries that generate enormous polution without even very cheap preventative measures from all manner of heavy industry that may be there for ideological reasons rather than because of economics. As one that has lived in the Middle East for a time, the think that amazed me was even in the very wealthy countries have little they seemed to care about the environment.
Regards
Richard
