From news.com.au this “stunning” development citing lake sediment and some midges “proves” everything. Glad that’s settled. See thoughts at the end.
This is the title of the story at news.com.au, link to story here
…
But here is the University of Colorado press release that started it all. Note that in no place in the release do they use the word “proof”.
Arctic Lake Sediment Record Shows Warming, Unique Ecological Changes in Recent Decades
October 19, 2009
An analysis of sediment cores indicates that biological and chemical changes occurring at a remote Arctic lake are unprecedented over the past 200,000 years and likely are the result of human-caused climate change, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
While environmental changes at the lake over the past millennia have been shown to be tightly linked with natural causes of climate change — like periodic, well-understood wobbles in Earth’s orbit — changes seen in the sediment cores since about 1950 indicate expected climate cooling is being overridden by human activity like greenhouse gas emissions. The research team reconstructed past climate and environmental changes at the lake on Baffin Island using indicators that included algae, fossil insects and geochemistry preserved in sediment cores that extend back 200,000 years.
“The past few decades have been unique in the past 200,000 years in terms of the changes we see in the biology and chemistry recorded in the cores,” said lead study author Yarrow Axford of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “We see clear evidence for warming in one of the most remote places on Earth at a time when the Arctic should be cooling because of natural processes.”
The study was published Oct. 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study included researchers from CU-Boulder, the State University of New York’s University at Buffalo, the University of Alberta, the University of Massachusetts and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
The sediment cores were extracted from the bottom of a roughly 100-acre, 30-foot-deep lake near the village of Clyde River on the east coast of Baffin Island, which is several hundred miles west of Greenland. The lake sediment cores go back in time 80,000 years beyond the oldest reliable ice cores from Greenland and capture the environmental conditions of two previous ice ages and three interglacial periods.
The sediment cores showed that several types of mosquito-like midges that flourish in very cold climates have been abundant at the lake for the past several thousand years. But the cold-adapted midge species abruptly began declining in about 1950, matching their lowest abundances of the last 200,000 years. Two of the midge species adapted to the coldest temperatures have completely disappeared from the lake region, said Axford.
In addition, a species of diatom, a lake algae that was relatively rare at the site before the 20th century, has undergone unprecedented increases in recent decades, possibly in response to declining ice cover on the Baffin Island lake.
“Our results show that the human footprint is overpowering long-standing natural processes even in remote Arctic regions,” said co-author John Smol of Queen’s University. “This historical record shows that we are dramatically affecting the ecosystems on which we depend.”
The ancient lake sediment cores are the oldest ever recovered from glaciated parts of Canada or Greenland. Massive ice sheets during ice ages generally scour the underlying bedrock and remove previous sediments.
“What is unique about these sediment cores is that even though glaciers covered this lake, for various reasons they did not erode it,” said study co-author Jason Briner of the University at Buffalo. The result is that we have a really long sequence of sediment that has survived Arctic glaciations.”
Axford emphasized the multiyear research project required expertise from each of the five institutions involved in the PNAS study. “This was a team effort all the way around, and each of the institutions has a unique set of skills that allowed us to carry out this study,” she said. “We needed people who understood algae, insects, glaciers and geochemistry, not to mention how to drive snowmobiles and extract the cores.”
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Geological Society of America.
A study published in Science magazine last month that involved CU-Boulder researchers and reconstructed past temperatures in the Arctic using ice cores, tree rings and lake sediments concluded that recent warming around the Arctic is overriding a cooling trend caused by Earth’s periodic wobble. Earth is now about 0.6 million miles further from the sun during the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice than it was in 1 B.C. — a trend that has caused overall cooling in the Arctic until recently.
INSTAAR researcher and CU-Boulder geological sciences Professor Gifford Miller was a co-author on both the PNAS study and the recent Science study.
A scientist on a mailing list I subscribe to put it in perspective this way:
1. “several types of mosquito-like midges that for many thousands of years thrived in cold climate surrounding the lake suddenly began declining at around 1950” — Have they accounted for the use of DDT, then? Seems to me that DDT on Baffin Island could have been very popular among trappers and the military in the 50s. Possibly pertinent too:
- DDT and its breakdown products are transported from warmer regions of the world to the Arctic by the phenomenon of global distillation, where they then accumulate in the region’s food web
- http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/DDT
Thus there might be a human impact on this parameter, but of another kind.
Beyond that, though, if the authors are suggesting that CO2 has caused a mosquito or midge shortage up north, they should consult caribou herds, whose route of wandering is traceable to wind direction, so desperate are these animals to escape the floating bloodsuckers.
- In the Canadian Arctic, researchers who bared their arms, legs, and torsos in an experiment reported as many as 9,000 [mosquito] bites per minute.
- http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/Fall02/Mosquitoes.html
Who knows, then? Changing wind patterns and a consequent shift of caribou migration (the supporting host) or DDT usage might account for the decline of midge bodies in this particular study of Ayr Lake. But CO2?
2. “The Earth is now some 600,000 miles (966,000 kilometers) further from the sun during the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice than it was at the time of Jesus Christ” — A sad example of allegation that’s already become a repeated “fact” simply because no one’s bothered to investigate it. I have, and find no indication that this million km claim is true.
– Alan
Just a note on DDT from Wikipedia:
First synthesized in 1874, DDT’s insecticidal properties were not discovered until 1939. In the second half of World War II, it was used with great effect to control mosquitoes spreading malaria and lice transmitting typhus among civilians and troops, resulting in dramatic reductions in the incidence of both diseases. The Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.” After the war, DDT was made available for use as an agricultural insecticide, and soon its production and use skyrocketed.
Here’ s a 2008 study on DDT in penguins that sums it up pretty well:
POPs (Persistent organic pollutants) accumulate in the Antarctic and Arctic via repeated cycles of evaporation and condensation as they move poleward through the atmosphere from the tropical and temperate zones where most are released.
Or how about this one:
Seabird Droppings Raising DDT, Mercury Levels in Arctic: Canadian Study
2005 TORONTO (CP) – Seabird droppings are leaving more than a foul mess in the Arctic – they’re contaminating northern lakes and ponds with extremely high levels of mercury and DDT, Canadian researchers have found.
Concentrations of the chemicals were found to be as much as 60 times higher in bodies of water on Devon Island, Nunavut, than in other Arctic areas, says a study to be published Friday in the journal Science.
No, no it couldn’t be DDT killing those midges, it has to be global warming since 1950.
Journalism is dead, science may not be far behind.
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“Proof” that media is hyping AGW shamelessly”
It is enevitable, there are too many billions riding on AGW becoming law. The economic inertia is too large for facts to stop it, unless it is something huge, like the Thames freezing over . (or the reality of a long term economic depression)
Sue: ‘Humans have nothing to do with “plastic soup”, either.’
Of course they have. That’s a real pollution issue. One of my main concerns with the CO2 mania is that if it turns out that the speculative claims of global warming disaster were wrong, it may severely damage future work to protect our environment from real dangers (and also severely damage the esteem of science, especially environmental studies).
Hey Ralph,
My feelings too. Copenhagen airport icebound. Please God!
Sue (02:52:40)
You are not necessarily wasting your time here. Are humans responsible for “plastic soup”? Absolutely. Massive aerosol particulate pollution in the developing world? Certainly. Should we be using fossil fuels in the wasteful way we do at present? Probably not. I feel it would be reasonable to claim that most people posting at this site are opposed to pollution, they just do not agree that CO2 is in any way a dangerous pollutant. The empirical evidence for the AGW hypothesis simply does not exist.
The question you might ask yourself is why a non car owning environmentally conscious person like myself would be a CO2 skeptic. One answer is that I am afraid the baby is going to be thrown out with the bath water. What do you think is going to happen to the environmental movement when the hoax of AGW becomes common knowledge? I think many people posting at this site know that the longer it takes for those supporting the AGW hoax to admit error, the worse the damage to the environmental movement and science is going to be.
>>Sue (02:52:40) :
>>>Humans have nothing to do with “plastic soup”, either. I mean,
>>>we mesh seamlessly into the environment and everything will fix itself.
Sue. If you want to reduce the pressure on the environment from human populations, then you need to reduce the number of humans in each country and on the planet in general.
But the Green movement “”has never and will never campaign on population issues”” as Greenpeace has informed me.
Instead we get unlimited immigration and no effort whatsoever to prevent Third World overpopulation. The West, without immigration, would be naturally reducing its population right now, to more sustainable levels. But no, the Greens and most Left-leaning governments do not want this at all, and Britain’s population is now at record levels.
So the Greens will not tackle the one primary issue affecting the environment. And if they will not do that, then how can we take them seriously on any other issue?
.
Hi Konrad
I don’t know if you are Australian but I am. Our public broadcaster here is very pro AGW. Do you think it is worse than the rest of the world? We have a journalist on it called Tony Jones. He did his utmost to discredit TGGWS by attacking Durkin’s creditability. Another great intellect is a science reporter called Robin Williams but he is also a joke. He reckons the sea will rise a 100 metres soon.
From: http://www.pinetreeline.org/misc/other/misc16c.html
In 1953, like all other bases and sites in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ernest Harmon became a part of the Northeast Air Command. Its mission was to participate in the supply and servicing of all US Installations in NEAC, including American bases in Greenland and Baffin Island. Ernest Harmon retained its importance as the first major overseas stop for military aircraft flying the North Atlantic to Greenland, England and Europe. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) operated out of Harmon from 1953 to 1958.
Here is her paper: http://rintintin.colorado.edu/~axford/axford_et_al_QR_2009_CF8.pdf
These are the locations of the US bases in Baffin Island:
http://www.pinetreeline.org/maps/frobis3.jpg
We just posted information about another high North Canadian lake 2009 study that found Medieval Warming higher than current temps.
Can be found here:
http://www.c3headlines.com/
C3H Editor
Funny thing, as soon as I started reading this article, I thought “DDT”. Then Anthony, mentioned it at the bottom.
Really, are they seriously expecting anyone to believe that the arctic is warmer now than at any time in the last 200,000 years? Utter tosh!
The only serious note to come out of the whole report, is their claim that the earth is in a cooling trend that we humans have interrupted. Hmm. Cooling = Bad. Interrupted Cooling = Good.
One more: This is from the USAF documents (1955) http://www.pinetreeline.org/other/other17/other17p.html
“An evaluation of the insect control problem, mainly that of mosquito control, was accomplished in June. Areas away from the site were treated with an oil surface layer and the areas in the immediate vicinity of the site were sprayed with DDT. These areas were kept under strict surveillance. Further, screen doors were installed on outside entrances to the mess hall and the garbage loading dock was sprayed daily.”
Rules of scientific publishing:
1. Always amplify the differences – start by making sure the start of the y-axis is not zero. It makes a 5% change look like a 50% change.
2. Always amplify the interpretations.
3. Highlight the need for further research.
4. Butter up all your colleagues who will also be looking for further research funding and especially those who sit on the committees that dole it out.
5. Get your institution publicity by attracting the interests of journalists.
6. Seek to influence Government policy to attract long-term stable funding to your research area.
You’ll note that none of those are compatible with the conclusion: there’s nothing really wrong, so we don’t need to spend so much money on this any more.
p.s. the study was not based on mosquitoes … she was looking at chironomids.
Ah, well. I’m sure somebody got a bonus anyway.
(Copenhagen 48 days and counting)
Sue (02:52:40) : “Humans have nothing to do with “plastic soup”, either. I mean, we mesh seamlessly into the environment and everything will fix itself”
Sue, you have just confirmed why many sceptics, such as myself, take the position that the spending of billions of dollars to try to influence climate are wasted when they would be better spent on real pollution problems. That is the tragedy of the AGW scare. But then fixing the environment is not the real intention of the green movement, it’s economic and political control.
“Sue” said:
Humans have nothing to do with “plastic soup”, either. I mean, we mesh seamlessly into the environment and everything will fix itself. My dying red oaks on my 2 acres mean nothing, it’s normal. They were seventy years old but that doesn’t mean a thing. And my tulip magnolia is sprouting its spring leaves….six months early, and that must be normal too.
Be sure to delete this. You don’t want to change your mind or learn any science or anything like that. I am wasting my time here.
What does “plastic soup” (undoubtedly a very real issue, unlike manmade warming), dying red oaks and tulip magnolias supposedly sprouting 6 months early have to do with the topic at hand? Absolutely nothing, of course. It was nothing but an emotional outburst by someone who clearly has no interest in science, or of learning anything, and who is indeed just “wasting her time here.”
Yes, Sue, we know man affects the environment, and real pollution (which doesn’t include C02) is an important issue. If you really cared about the environment though, you would see that it is wealth that is the friend of the environment, while poverty is the enemy. Punishing C02, a completely beneficial gas is the way to decreased wealth, and to increased poverty. But you don’t want to hear that, do you, having already made up your mind and all?
“I have, and find no indication that this million km claim is true.”
Not sure about that Anthony. The values I have for perihelion and aphelion are
aphelion distance = 94,511,989m
perihelion = 91,405,436m
———
3,107,553 miles
If the solstice moves with the earth’s precession which makes a complete cycle in 24,000 years, then in 12,000 the winter solstice would be at the opposite end of the orbit. 2,000 years is 1 sixth of this. 1 sixth of the difference between perihelion and aphelion is about 520,000 miles. Of course, the distance doesn’t change linearly but I would say their figure of 600,000 miles is roughly in the ballpark I would expect.
tty, many thanks. Very informative post.
We see clear evidence for warming in one of the most remote places on Earth at a time when the Arctic should be cooling because of natural processes.”
But the arctic was cooling in ~1950 – at ~0.3 deg per decade according to GISS. It carried on cooling for the next 2 decades.
They’ve not really thought this through have they?
“I know that clouds of mosquitoes appear in the forests of Finnland, even though they are over permafrost , the minute there is some heat. I was there a June 21st.”
Sounds very much like the woods outside of Fairbanks, AK in the middle of June. I remember Jersey mosquitos fifty years ago. Q: What is the state bird of New Jersey? A. The mosquito.
But the classic Meadowlands Anopheles was a wimp compared to his Yukon valley cousin on steroids.
I await correction on this sentiment, but simply from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, wouldn’t an increase in the numbers of a species, e.g. homo sapiens, be a sign of success?
As has been pointed out before, bad theories like AGW act to lower the intelligence of its believers.
This study is a perfect example of the credulity and lack of critical thinking characteristic of faith based beliefs.
Sue,
Does plastic mean AGW hysteria is true?
Has one person here denied plastic soup?
If we were not wasting so many billions on AGW, we could be resolving real problems.
AGW policies make real environmental problems worse.
That is only one of the many negatives the current obsession with incorrect climate models causes.
I think tty (00:57:38) has it as right as I can understand this issue right now. Regarding DDT, while it is definitely true that DDT can end up in the Arctic — volatilized in the warmest climates, it is carried in the atmosphere until the cold of the Arctic reconverts it to a solid, where it falls — the amounts aren’t nearly enough to actually inhibit mosquitos, I wouldn’t think. Midges, as several have pointed out, aren’t mosquitos, but I doubt it would be any different for them. The DDT is in trace amounts.
It does seem possible that Baffin Island has warmed since 1950. However, given the many ways and cases in which the official science world has changed into a publicity machine for global warming, violently trashing those who, like Roger Pielke Jr., publish excellent science that turns out to be correct but which doesn’t fit the narrative, I cannot take the stated implications of an article like this at face value. I need replication, especially by those without an axe to grind. That is why I value tty’s post — he suggests a reasonable alternative that the scientists may not be aware of, than acidity drops as an interglacial lengthens.
He also suggest that perhaps acidity from CO2 — in a small, shallow lake, not an ocean which can dilute the CO2 — might have contributed to the acidity, thus making it more hospitable to the diatoms (and less so for the midges??? tty?). Suppose that in a small lake this is the case — then it isn’t the warming that is at fault.
Yet, tty does indicate that summer water temps are the highest they have been in 4,000 years. That would mean higher than the MWP. This might indicate generalized Arctic warming, or it could have something to do with local conditions, which might include the relative intensity of modern settlement in some way.
I’d like to hear tty again on this, if he has more to say.
If algae has increased, couldn’t that be in response to an increase in CO2??? Of course it doesn’t mean MAN is the cause of the rising CO2, but it would be a natural response of the algae, just like all the other trees and plants responding to increased CO2. Correlation does not prove causation…