More Southern Hemisphere Evidence for Global Millennial-Scale Cycling of Climate
Kemp, J., Radke, L.C., Olley, J., Juggins, S. and De Deckker, P. 2012. Holocene lake salinity changes in the Wimmera, southeastern Australia, provide evidence for millennial-scale climate variability. Quaternary Research 77: 65-76.
In an effort designed to either support or contest this growing body of evidence, Kemp et al. developed palaeosalinity records for groundwater-influenced lakes in the Murray Basin of Australia using "an ostracod-based, weighted-averaging transfer function, supplemented with evidence from Campylodiscus clypeus (diatom), charophyte oogonia, Coxiella striata (gastropod), Elphidium sp. (foraminifera), Daphniopsis sp. ephippia (Cladocera), and brine shrimp (Parartemia zietziana) fecal pellets, the δ18O of ostracods, and >130 µm quartz sand counts," together with a chronology based on optically-stimulated luminescence and calibrated radio-carbon ages. From those records, the five UK and Australian researchers determined that the Holocene in Australia "was more variable than previous studies have shown," noting that their work provided evidence for recurrent intervals of low salinity cold periods having an approximate spacing of 1400 ± 550 years, which periodicity they say is "indistinguishable from climatic instabilities with a period of ~1500 ± 500 years observed in glacial and interglacial records from around the world (Mayewski et al., 2004)," which colder periods have come to be known as Bond events, due to the pioneering work of Bond et al. (1997, 2001), who associated them with periods of reduced solar activity. In between these colder periods, of course, are warmer periods, the one that preceded the Current Warm Period being the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), which their data show to have peaked between AD 1040 and 1220, and of which they say "there is supporting evidence for the MWP from tree-ring (Cook et al., 2002) and speleothem (Williams et al., 2005) evidence in New Zealand."
In discussing their findings, Kemp et al. state that the lower salinity phases they identified likely represent "cooler intervals with more intense westerly circulation." In addition, they indicate that "evidence suggests that variations in solar output may have caused the position of the westerly flow to vary at centennial to millennial timescales in the late Holocene," citing the work of Varma et al. (2010). And they write that "this interpretation is consistent with climatic excursions during the Holocene recorded in South America (Lamy et al., 2001; Moreno, 2004; Kaiser et al., 2005; Moreno et al., 2009) and in glacial surges in New Zealand's South Island (Gellatly et al., 1988; Suggate, 1990), both linked to varying westerly influence (Fitzharris et al., 1992; Hooker and Fitzharris, 1999), and which are in good agreement with the records obtained here." Thus, the evidence continues to grow ever stronger for a solar-induced millennial-scale cycling of Earth's global climate that is totally independent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
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