ShortBrutishNasty was thoughtful enough to send a link to me about James Hansen's latest article about paleo, and model, evidence about slowing of the MOC during periods of high GMSTA, see below:
Title: "Every Rock Has a Story & The Rock Whisperer" by James Hansen July 17, 2020
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200717_RockStories.pdfExtract: "Curiously, at almost exactly the same moment that I received an e-mail from Ethan Baxter, I received one from the Rock Whisperer, my friend Paul Hearty, with a copy of his current paper on rocks in South Africa. He and co-authors show that in the Mid-Pliocene (about 3 million years ago), when atmospheric CO2 was about the same as today, it was a few degrees warmer and sea level was 15-30 meters higher (50-100 feet). One of Paul’s co-authors is Maureen Raymo, the new Director of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who dubbed Paul the Rock Whisperer for his remarkable ability to read the story in the rocks.
In 2006, when I was concerned that the IPCC projections of sea level rise were unrealistically conservative, I suspected that something was wrong with the ocean models that IPCC relied on. For one thing, the models did not properly include the cooling effect of ice melt on the North Atlantic and Southern Oceans. So, we ran climate simulations with our coarse-resolution global model, and were startled by the result: we found that the world was on the verge of shutting down both the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic overturning circulations, with enormous potential consequences for future sea level, because of amplifying feedbacks for Antarctic ice.
This would be a hard story to sell, given the coarse resolution of our model, and the fact that our result seemed to differ from all the other models. And why did Earth’s history not reveal such rapid feedback-driven change in the past? That’s when I discovered the papers of Paul Hearty for the last interglacial period, the Eemian, about 120,000 years ago, when global temperature reached levels perhaps as much as 1-2°C warmer than the preindustrial (1880-1920) level.
Hearty’s reading of the rocks painted a picture of the Eemian that was consistent with what we were finding in our climate modeling. We needed to develop that story, so we started to work with Paul Hearty, but first we needed an explanation for what was wrong with the ocean models.
The most crucial information about the ocean models was provided by observations of heat uptake by the oceans. Here the expert, the ocean heat whisperer if there is such a thing, was a young post-doc, Karina von Schuckmann, with whom we began to collaborate in about 2010."
Hearty, P. J., Rovere, A., Sandstrom, M. R., O'Leary, M. J., Roberts, D., & Raymo, M. E. (2020). Pliocene‐Pleistocene stratigraphy and sea‐level estimates, Republic of South Africa with implications for a 400 ppmv CO2 world. Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, 35, e2019PA003835.
https://doi.org/10.1029/2019PA003835https://www.essoar.org/doi/10.1002/essoar.10503699.1Abstract: "The Mid-Pliocene Warm Period (MPWP, 2.9 to 3.3 Ma), along with older Pliocene (3.2 to 5.3 Ma) records, offers potential past analogues for our 400-ppmv world. The coastal geology of western and southern coasts of the Republic of South Africa expose an abundance of marine deposits of Pliocene and Pleistocene age. In this study, we report differential GPS elevations, detailed stratigraphic descriptions, standardized interpretations, and dating of relative sea-level indicators measured across ~700 km from the western and southern coasts of the Cape Provinces. Wave abrasion surfaces on bedrock, intertidal sedimentary structures, and in situ marine invertebrates including oysters and barnacles provide precise indicators of past sea levels. Multiple sea-level highstands imprinted at different elevations along South African coastlines were identified. Zone I sites average +32 ± 5 m (6 sites). A lower topographic Zone II of sea stands were measured at several sites around +17 ± 5 m. Middle and late Pleistocene sites are included in Zone III. Shoreline chronologies using 87Sr/86Sr ages on shells from these zones yield ages from Zone I at 4.6 and 3.0 Ma, and Zone II at 1.04 Ma. Our results show that polar ice sheets during the Plio-Pleistocene were dynamic and subject to significant melting under modestly warmer global temperatures. These processes occurred during a period when CO2 concentrations were comparable to our current and rapidly rising values above 400 ppmv."
