In Part Six we looked at some of the different theories that confusingly go by the same name. The “Milankovitch” theories.
The essence of these many theories – even though the changes in “tilt” of the earth’s axis and the time of closest approach to the sun don’t change the total annual solar energy incident on the climate, the changing distribution of energy causes massive climate change over thousands of years.
One of the “classic” hypotheses is increases in July insolation at 65ºN cause the ice sheets to melt. Or conversely, reductions in July insolation at 65ºN cause the ice sheets to grow.
The hypotheses described can sound quite convincing. Well, one at a time can sound quite convincing – when all of the “Milankovitch theories” are all lined up alongside each other they start to sound more like hopeful ideas.
Many readers of this blog have varying degrees of suspicion about GCMs. But as regular commenter DeWitt Payne often says, “all models are wrong, but some are useful“, that is, none are perfect, but some can shed light on the climate mechanisms we want to understand.
In fact, GCMs are essential to understand many climate mechanisms and essential to understand the interaction between different parts of the climate system.
Digression – Ice Sheets and Positive Feedback
For beginners, a quick digression into ice sheets and positive feedback. Melting and forming of ice & snow is undisputably a positive feedback within the climate system.
Snow reflects around 60-90% of incident solar radiation. Water reflects less than 10% and most ground surfaces reflect less than 25%. If a region heats up sufficiently, ice and snow melt. Which means less solar radiation gets reflected, which means more radiation is absorbed, which means the region heats up some more. The effect “feeds itself”. It’s a positive feedback.
In the annual cycle it doesn’t lead to any kind of thermal runaway or a snowball earth because the solar radiation goes through a much bigger cycle.
Over much longer time periods it’s conceivable that (regional) melting of ice sheets leads to more (regional) solar radiation absorbed, causing more melting of ice sheets which leads to yet more melting. And the converse for growth of ice sheets. The reason it’s conceivable is because it’s just that same mechanism.
Why GCMs ?
The only alternative is to do the calculation in your head or on paper. Take a piece of paper, plot a graph of the incident radiation at all latitudes vs the time period we are interested in – say 150 kyrs ago through to 100 kyrs – now work out by year, decade or century, how much ice melts. Work out the new albedo for each region. Calculate the change in absorbed radiation. Calculate the regional temperature changes. Calculated the new heat transfer from low to high latitudes (lots of heat is exported from the equator to the poles via the atmosphere and the ocean) due to the latitudinal temperature gradient, the water vapor transported, and the rainfall and snowfall. Don’t forget to track ice melt at high latitudes and its impact on the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) which drives a significant part of the heat transfer from the equator to poles. Step to the next year, decade or century and repeat.
How are those calculations coming along?
A GCM uses some fundamental physics equations like energy balance and mass balance. It uses a lot of parameterized equations to calculate things like heat transfer from the surface to the atmosphere dependent on the wind speed, cloud formation, momentum transfer from wind to ocean, etc. Whatever we have in a GCM is better than trying to do it on a sheet of paper (and in the end you will be using the same equations with much less spatial and time granularity).
If we are interested in the “classic” Milankovitch theory mentioned above we need to find out the impact of an increase of 50W/m² (over 10,000 years) in summer at 65ºN – see figure 1 in Ghosts of Climates Past – Part Five – Obliquity & Precession Changes. What effect does the simultaneous spring reduction at 65ºN have. Do these two effects cancel each other out? Is the summer increase more significant than the spring reduction?
How quickly does the circulation lessen the impact? The equator-pole export of heat is driven by the temperature difference – as with all heat transfer. So if the northern polar region is heating up due to ice melting, the ocean and atmospheric circulation will change and less heat will be driven to the poles. What effect does this have?
How quickly does an ice sheet melt and form? Can the increases and reductions in solar radiation absorbed explain the massive ice sheet growth and shrinking?
If the positive feedback is so strong how does an ice age terminate and how does it restart 10,000 years later?
We can only assess all of these with a general circulation model.
There is a problem though. A typical GCM run is a few decades or a century. We need a 10,000 – 50,000 year run with a GCM. So we need 500x the computing power – or we have to reduce the complexity of the model.
Alternatively we can run a model to equilibrium at a particular time in history to see what effect the historical parameters had on the changes we are interested in.
Many readers of this blog are frequently mystified by my choosing “old work” to illuminate a topic. Why not pick the most up to date research?
Because the older papers usually explain the problem more clearly and give more detail on the approach to the problem.
The latest papers are written for researchers in the field and assume most of the preceding knowledge – that everyone in that field already has. A good example is the Myhre et al (1998) paper on the “logarithmic formula” for radiative forcing with increasing CO2, cited by the IPCC TAR in 2001. This paper has mystified so many bloggers. I have read many blog articles where the blog authors and commenters throw up their metaphorical hands at the lack of justification for the contents of this paper. However, it is not mystifying if you are familiar with the physics of radiative transfer and the papers from the 70’s through the 90’s calculating radiative imbalance as a result of more “greenhouse” gases.
It’s all about the context.
We’ll take a walk through a few decades of GCMs..
We’ll start with Rind, Peteet & Kukla (1989). They review the classic thinking on the problem:
Kukla et al.  described how the orbital configurations seemed to match up with gross climate variations for the last 150 millennia or so. As a result of these and other geological studies, the consensus exists that orbital variations are responsible for initiating glacial and interglacial climatic regimes. The most obvious difference between these two regimes, the existence of subpolar continental ice sheets, appears related to solar insolation at northern hemisphere high latitudes in summer. For example, solar insolation at these latitudes in August and September was reduced, compared with today’s values, around 116,000 years before the present (116 kyr B.P.), during the time when ice growth apparently began, and it was increased around 10 kyr B.P. during a time of rapid ice sheet retreat [e.g., Berger, 1978] (Figure 1).
And the question of whether basic physics can link the supposed cause and effect:
Are the solar radiation variations themselves sufficient to produce or destroy the continental ice sheets?
The July solar radiation incident at 50ºN and 60ºN over the past 170 kyr is shown in Figure 1, along with August and September values at 50ºN (as shown by the example for July, values at the various latitudes of concern for ice age initiation all have similar insolation fluctuations). The peak variations are of the order of 10%, which if translated with an equal percentage into surface air temperature changes would be of the order of 30ºC. This would certainly be sufficient to allow snow to remain throughout the summer in extreme northern portions of North America, where July surface temperatures today are only about 10ºC above freezing.
However, the direct translation ignores all of the other features which influence surface air temperature during summer, such as cloud cover and albedo variations, long wave radiation, surface flux effects, and advection.
Various energy balance climate models have been used to assess how much cooling would be associated with changed orbital parameters. As the initiation of ice growth will alter the surface albedo and provide feedback to the climate change, the models also have to include crude estimates of how ice cover will change with climate. With the proper tuning of parameters, some of which is justified on observational grounds, the models can be made to simulate the gross glacial/interglacial climate changes.
However, these models do not calculate from first principles all the various influences on surface air temperature noted above, nor do they contain a hydrologic cycle which would allow snow cover to be generated or increase. The actual processes associated with allowing snow cover to remain through the summer will involve complex hydrologic and thermal influences, for which simple models can only provide gross approximations.
They comment then on the practical problems of using GCMs for 10 kyr runs that we noted above. The problem is worked around by using prescribed values for certain parameters and by using a coarse grid – 8° x 10° and 9 vertical layers.
The various GCMs runs are typical of the approach to using GCMs to “figure stuff out” – try different runs with different things changed to see what variations have the most impact and what variations, if any, result in the most realistic answers:
We have thus used the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) GCM for a series of experiments in which orbital parameters, atmospheric composition, and sea surface temperatures are changed. We examine how the various influences affect snow cover and low-elevation ice sheets in regions of the northern hemisphere where ice existed at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). As we show, the GCM is generally incapable of simulating the beginnings of ice sheet growth, or of maintaining low-elevation ice sheets, regardless of the orbital parameters or sea surface temperatures used.
And the result:
The experiments indicate there is a wide discrepancy between the model’s response to Milankovitch perturbations and the geophysical evidence of ice sheet initiation. As the model failed to grow or sustain low-altitude ice during the time of high-latitude maximum solar radiation reduction (120-110 kyrB.P.), it is unlikely it could have done so at any other time within the last several hundred thousand years.
If the model results are correct, it indicates that the growth of ice occurred in an extremely ablative environment, and thus demanded some complicated strategy, or else some other climate forcing occurred in addition to the orbital variation influence (and CO2 reduction), which would imply we do not really understand the cause of the ice ages and the Milankovitch connection. If the model is not nearly sensitive enough to climate forcing, it could have implications for projections of future climate change.
The basic model experiment on the ability of Milankovitch variations by themselves to generate ice sheets in a GCM, experiment 2, shows that in the GISS GCM even exaggerated summer radiation deficits are not sufficient. If widespread ice sheets at 10-m elevation are inserted, CO2 reduced by 70ppm, sea ice increases to full ice age conditions, and sea surface temperatures reduced to CLIMAP 18 kyr BP estimates or below, the model is just barely able keep these ice sheets from melting in restricted regions. How likely are these results to represent the actual state of affairs?
That was 1989 GCM’s.
Phillipps & Held (1994) had basically the same problem. This is the famous Isaac Held, who has written extensively on climate dynamics, water vapor feedback, GCMs and runs an excellent blog that is well-worth reading.
While paleoclimatic records provide considerable evidence in support of the astronomical, or Milankovitch, theory of the ice ages (Hays et al. 1976), the mechanisms by which the orbital changes influence the climate are still poorly understood..
..For this study we utilize the atmosphere-mixed layer ocean model.. In examining this model’s sensitivity to different orbital parameter combinations, we have compared three numerical experiments.
They describe the comparison models:
Our starting point was to choose the two experiments that are likely to generate the largest differences in climate, given the range of the parameter variations computed to have occurred over the past few hundred thousand years. The eccentricity is set equal to 0.04 in both cases. This is considerably larger than the present value of 0.016 but comparable to that which existed from ~90 to 150k BP.
In the first experiment, the perihelion is located at NH summer solstice and the obliquity is set at the high value of 24°.
In the second case, perihelion is at NH winter solstice and the obliquity equals 22°.
The perihelion and obliquity are both favorable for warm northern summers in the first case, and for cool northern summers in the second. These experiments are referred to as WS and CS respectively.
We then performed another calculation to determine how much of the difference between these two integrations is due to the perihelion shift and how much to the change in obliquity. This third model has perihelion at summer solstice, but a low value (22°) of the obliquity. The eccentricity is still set at 0.04. This experiment is referred to as WS22.
We find that the favorable orbital configuration is far from being able to maintain snow cover throughout the summer anywhere in North America..
..Despite the large temperature changes on land the CS experiment does not generate any new regions of permanent snow cover over the NH. All snow cover melts away completely in the summer. Thus, the model as presently constituted is unable to initiate the growth of ice sheets from orbital perturbations alone. This is consistent with the results of Rind with a GCM (Rind et al. 1989)..
In the next article we will look at more favorable results in the 2000’s.
Articles in the Series
Part One – An introduction
Part Two – Lorenz – one point of view from the exceptional E.N. Lorenz
Part Three – Hays, Imbrie & Shackleton – how everyone got onto the Milankovitch theory
Part Four – Understanding Orbits, Seasons and Stuff – how the wobbles and movements of the earth’s orbit affect incoming solar radiation
Part Five – Obliquity & Precession Changes – and in a bit more detail
Part Six – “Hypotheses Abound” – lots of different theories that confusingly go by the same name
Part Seven and a Half – Mindmap – my mind map at that time, with many of the papers I have been reviewing and categorizing plus key extracts from those papers
Part Eight – GCM II – more recent work from the “noughties” – GCM results plus EMIC (earth models of intermediate complexity) again trying to produce perennial snow cover
Part Nine – GCM III – very recent work from 2012, a full GCM, with reduced spatial resolution and speeding up external forcings by a factors of 10, modeling the last 120 kyrs
Part Ten – GCM IV – very recent work from 2012, a high resolution GCM called CCSM4, producing glacial inception at 115 kyrs
Pop Quiz: End of An Ice Age – a chance for people to test their ideas about whether solar insolation is the factor that ended the last ice age
Eleven – End of the Last Ice age – latest data showing relationship between Southern Hemisphere temperatures, global temperatures and CO2
Twelve – GCM V – Ice Age Termination – very recent work from He et al 2013, using a high resolution GCM (CCSM3) to analyze the end of the last ice age and the complex link between Antarctic and Greenland
Thirteen – Terminator II – looking at the date of Termination II, the end of the penultimate ice age – and implications for the cause of Termination II
Fourteen – Concepts & HD Data – getting a conceptual feel for the impacts of obliquity and precession, and some ice age datasets in high resolution
Fifteen – Roe vs Huybers – reviewing In Defence of Milankovitch, by Gerard Roe
Sixteen – Roe vs Huybers II – remapping a deep ocean core dataset and updating the previous article
Seventeen – Proxies under Water I – explaining the isotopic proxies and what they actually measure
Eighteen – “Probably Nonlinearity” of Unknown Origin – what is believed and what is put forward as evidence for the theory that ice age terminations were caused by orbital changes
Nineteen – Ice Sheet Models I – looking at the state of ice sheet models
Can Milankovitch Orbital Variations Initiate the Growth of Ice Sheets in a General Circulation Model?, Rind, Peteet & Kukla, JGR (1989) – behind a paywall, email me if you want to read it, scienceofdoom – you know what goes here – gmail.com
Response to Orbital Perturbations in an Atmospheric Model Coupled to a Slab Ocean, Phillipps & Held, Journal of Climate (1994) – free paper
New estimates of radiative forcing due to well-mixed greenhouse gases, Myhre et al, GRL (1998)