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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R Pearse … if you look back at my earlier posting you will see that DDT was indeed sprayed in the southern part of Baffin Island in the 50’s by the USAF!
This is another hockey stick study where ONE lake has all the weight and we are asked to forget about the rest of the world and history (i.e. the Vikings in Greenland during the MWP).
The use and global-distillation of DDT is the best hypothesis to explain this discrepancy since before the 20th Century DDT did not exist in nature.
“Sue” sounds like she has SODS – sudden Oak death syndrome – widely spreading in Marin County, CA. Most likely brought to Marin via contaminated hiking boots, and/or mountain bike tires.
As a “Denier”, and having lived in Marin County, (not that “Sue” does), I can tell you that the wailing and gnashing of teeth over SODS, quieted when “Industrial Pollution” wasn’t the culprit. Funny how when it’s “just nature” the bitching goes away.
I too am appalled at the plastic sea, mercury in fish, and all other easily avoided pollution problems. Let’s work on them together, Sue.
Near the lake in study there where a cold-war era Norad radar station in 1950s:
http://tinyurl.com/ygkbjba
Mosquitoes where quite annoying in such places and DDT was available… Makes we wonder why the number of mosquitoes went down in 1950s.
The paper (sorry, press release) raises more questions than it answers.
Just off the top of my head:
1. Are the midge populations sensitive to small differences in temperature? That ought to be easy enough to test. Or is it the all too common circular reasoning, i.e. midge populations have dropped therefore the temperature must have increased therefore the midge populations dropped?
2. Do the population numbers correlate well with the local historical temperature records (assuming there are any)?
3. Were all the other possible reasons for a decrease in midge populations considered?
How do you get from midge population decrease to “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.” Why should the Artic be cooling?
Does anyone have access to the paper yet?
Article from 1998, “DDT in the Dirt”… “DDT is one of the Persistent Organic Pollutant’s (POP’s), also known as the “irty dozen,” up for a worldwide ban by the UN treaty in December of this year. They can be found almost everywhere on the planet. In addition, because they spontaneously migrate towards the colder regions of the planet, these pollutants pose a critical threat to northern indigenous people, whose survival health and well-being depend on their traditional relationship with the ecosystem and the food it provides. Some of the most highly exposed populations are indigenous people living in polar regions far from major POPs sources. For example, the Inuit living in Baffin Island carry seven times as many contaminants in their bodies as people living in lower latitudes.
Yarmy … I posted this earlier:
Here is her paper: http://rintintin.colorado.edu/~axford/axford_et_al_QR_2009_CF8.pdf
There has been a plethora of cogent responses to Sue, so I hesitate to pile on. Yet I would like to add one more nuance. There seems to be a belief amongst my AGW friends that if pass the Waxman bill, then we need not worry about a whole host of environmental problems. The bee population will recover, spruces will stop dying in the Rockies, mosquitoes will retreat – indeed AGW pessimists seem to believe that the Plains will no longer have tornadoes and the coasts will no longer suffer hurricanes. (Okay, the last two claims are exaggerations, but not much.) As has been pointed out, passing the Waxman bill – or even achieving AGW’s dream treaty in Copenhagen — will not help the bees, the spruce, or Sue’s maple trees. We take focus away from what causes the problem, using AGW as a convenient excuse.
The bees most likely are suffering from a mite infection that is unaffected by AGW treaties.
My green friend built a cabin in the mountains, storing firewood – infected with Mountain Pine Beetle and Western Spruce Budworm – next to his cabin. The warmth of the cabin enabled those pests to survive the winter and ravage the spruce the following summer.
In our area, mosquito populations have been larger in the last 2 decades, and I would point to the windmills that were installed twenty years ago. The windmills are quite an efficient killer of birds and bats; the latter would consume many mosquitoes in their diet.
Out in the Pacific Ocean, the Maldives and Tuvalu suffer flooding problems because of coral reef extraction and imprudent freshwater management. No AGW treaty will overcome those problems.
The list goes on. Meanwhile, real environmental problems are not solved because of the attention and resources being given to AGW.
Sue seems to have caused a fair amount of reflex didacticism among the learned gentry. Try putting “sarcon” before the first sentence of the post and “sarcoff” after the last. Methinks Sue was attempting irony; you know, like when your wife says: “That was a particularly charming lamp shade you wore home from the party last night.” I could be wrong, somebody did do a song about a boy named Sue.
John Finn (05:20:14) :
They surely do not think things through, John. These are marketing driven statements they make, and they mean to sell something, whether it’s a philosophy or a carbon credit. They are trying to drive the support for thier need-based product enough to avoid the semblance of being an outright coup. So, if you boil the essence of what’s dear to them down, you end up with concepts not unlike “futuristic”, “moral high ground”, and “everybody’s doing it”.
Sue (02:52:40) :
Plastic soup is man’ invention. Before all this big AGW distraction, we were making good strides towards cleaning up toxins, and we should dump the AGW and go back to doing that.
As for the double-growth season, we see that too on the opposite side of the continent. Things grew in the spring and again in the fall, and it’s sun-angle dependant. We saw some plants get ‘sunburned’ on cool days. Not all plants did well, and not all trees did well. But some trees, plants & weeds thrived. What do you suppose is the common thread?
Add “Arctic Lake” to the list of things affected by global warming:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
BTW, notice how they are slipping in the assertion ‘over riding an otherwise cooling trend’?
This is a new dodge they are using to explain why there has in reality been so little temp change.
This is almost as good as the ten tree hockey stick data. They find fewer dead bugs on the bottom of a lake with an area of about 1/8 square mile and that proves the entire planet is getting warmer and that it’s our fault. Give me a break!
The press release is the new form of misleading spin in this country for alarmists. So I am not surprised by this. But anything that does in biting insects, whether they are called mosquitoes or chironomids, can’t be all bad.
Sue: The plastic pollution problem …
1. is real
2. can be halted fairly easily, and
3. can be cleaned up.
None of those are true for CO2.
ralph (04:11:38) :
‘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?’
So ralph-I agree that the route of all enviromental issue is population growth, but I think your criticism here to be a little misdirected. Why do you suppose Greenpeace does not take up the population issue directly? The furor that would ensue from the right charging “death panels”, eugenics, etc etc would be overwhelming. I see no mention of the Catholic Church in your post. Hardly green and hardly leftist yet probably the single biggest advocate for unlimited population growth that there is. I mean, if you’re looking for someone or something to blame, that is.
This is a comman statement
“and likely are the result of human-caused climate change”
No evidence required, LIKELY to be used to justify the next grant.
Espen (03:40:05) :
“There’s a long-running GISS station at Clyde which shows a slight downward trend from the 50s until the 90s:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=403710900006&data_set=0&num_neighbors=1”
Espen makes an excellent point. The instrument record shows the area was cooling from 1950 until 1995.
Maybe the poor bugs froze to death.
tty (00:57:38) : “Far from it, the chironomids (not mosquitos, please note) indicate that summer water temperatures have risen from 6 to 7.5 degrees centigrade, which is indeed the highest for about 4000 years. However it was as high as 12 degrees during the Holocene optimum 8000-10,000 years ago and during the previous interglacial about 120,000 years ago, and the most sthenoterm chironomids were periodically gone from the lake at those times too.”
tty, thanks for reading and summarizing the paper. Apparently they missed the Medieval and Roman warm periods, and don’t see the local cooling trend recorded (according to WUWT posters) at nearby temperature stations, but their method may not have that kind of resolution. I’m guessing they didn’t (or couldn’t) do a Briffa-type “calibration” against modern temperature records.
This paper would seem to belong with the body of evidence indicating modern temps are NOT unprecedented.
This is a lot like the claim I saw the Lake Champlain stopped freezing over reliably right around 1970. Year round ice-breaking ferries were introduced in 1968.
Hey Sue,
This isn’t a lefty blog like RealClimate. You are welcome to post here as much as you like, if you can stay away from baseless accusations and ad hominems.
Konrad said: “What do you think is going to happen to the environmental movement when the hoax of AGW becomes common knowledge?”
That may be the least of our worries. What do you think will happen to the entire reputation of “Science”? We’ve already got a situation where more people believe in daily horoscopes than believe in the moon landings. How do Evolutionists think this will impact the debate over Creationism, when all some Elmer Gantry preacher will have to say is, “yeah, well, you sure got that Global Warming thing right, didn’t you?”
>>>Why do you suppose Greenpeace does not take up the
>>>population issue directly? The furor that would ensue from
>>>the right charging “death panels”, eugenics, etc etc would
>>>be overwhelming.
I know that Greenpeace will not campaign on population issues, because they told me so:
Quote:
From: Lisa Weatherley
Subject: RE: Population increase
Date: 13 March 2006 17:22:42 CET
To: Ellis Ralph
Hello Ralph,
Thanks for your e-mail. Greenpeace works, as our name suggests, on
environmental and peace issues. We have never campaigned on the issue
of human population and have no plans to do so. …………
Best wishes,
Lisa Weatherley
Supporter Services, Greenpeace UK
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk
Endquote.
As to charges of eugenics, well that is the battle-cry of the Left, rather than the Right. But you are right that this is the reason that Greenpeace and the Left will not talk about population controls. They have thrown accusations of racism and eugenics about so freely, that they are petrified of being accused of this themselves.
The Catholic Church? Yes, there is an anomaly here, I suppose, as conservative Catholicism is generally Right wing. But I would suggest that the Church has always had an alternate, egocentric reason for their opposition to population reduction. They realise, as do most religious sects, that their future growth depends on promoting as many offspring among their membership – for it is far easier to make converts of Catholic children than evangelising among adults.
But the net result of all this opposition is that we have overpopulated the Earth, and are running out of resources. For example – we had much hand-wringing and appeals for charity because of famine in Ethiopia in the 1960s and 70s, when their population was some 25 million. But now we have yet more hand-wringing and appeals for charity because of famine in Ethiopia in the 2000s; and it is implied that it is our (the West’s) fault that Ethiopia is still ravaged by famine. But their population has increased from 25 million to more than 70 million in this time! So whose fault is this famine? Whose fault is this ravage of the Earth’s resources?
http://www.un.org/popin/regional/africa/ethiopia/index.htm
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1413&fuseaction=topics.event_summary&event_id=121044
.
>>>Sue (02:52:40) :
>> 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.
This was meant to be sarcastic, I presume.
But Sue, you should understand that 99.9999% of all trees in the history of this planet have died, long before we came along.
.