Hundreds More Scientists Have Found the 1,500-Year Climate Cycle

Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008: 

The following list includes more than 400 additional qualified scientists, with their home institutions, and the peer-reviewed studies they have published in professional journals, which reveal evidence of the moderate 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles. Together with a previous list released by Hudson on Sept. 12, 2007, this brings the total of scientific researchers who have published evidence of this natural cycle to more than 700. The lists also include dozens of authors who have published studies on the linkage of the 1,500-year cycle to variations in solar activity. 

The Hudson lists include researchers from many of the world’s top scientific institutions, including the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory affiliated with Columbia University, the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, various branches of the University of California, Australia’s Macquarie University, Canada’s Simon Fraser University, the Geological Survey of Denmark, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, among many others. 

The key question, of course, is whether the earth’ recent warming has been due to humans burning fossil fuels, or to the natural, moderate 1,500-year cycle discovered in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores in the 1980s.  Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland discovered the climate cycle in the first long Greenland ice cores on which they reported in 1984.  Claude Lorius of France led the Antarctic team which found the same cycle in the still-longer Vostok Glacier ice core in 1985.  They shared the Tyler Prize—the environmental version of the Nobel—in 1996, but recently they have seldom been mentioned in the debate. 

The Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle has also been found in seabed and lake sediments, ancient tree rings, boreholes, cave stalagmites, fossil pollen, historic records, ancient paintings, glacier movements and archeological artifacts all over the world.  We rejoice that the existence of the cycle is now so widely supported, with additional evidence being published almost by the week. 

This is not to imply that all of these authors would call themselves “skeptics” in regard to man-made global warming, and indeed there is room for both human and natural impacts in the recent climate record.  However, the totality of the evidence shows that the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles have dominated the earth’s temperatures for the past 12,000 years and continue to do so today. 

The evidence, produced by the keen intellectual insights and arduous labors of these researchers, speaks for itself.

(Some of the authors in this list of studies have already been cited for other papers in Hudson’s list release September 2007.  They are not included in the alphabetic listing nor are they double-counted in the author total.)  

Click here to download the full list (PDF).