This is a paleoclimatology finding, with current spin added. I guess they haven’t seen the latest on the NAO and AO.
USGS Press Release: Arctic Could Face Warmer and Ice-Free Conditions
Released: 12/29/2009 6:20:34 AM
There is increased evidence that the Arctic could face seasonally ice-free conditions and much warmer temperatures in the future.
Scientists documented evidence that the Arctic Ocean and Nordic Seas were too warm to support summer sea ice during the mid-Pliocene warm period (3.3 to 3 million years ago). This period is characterized by warm temperatures similar to those projected for the end of this century, and is used as an analog to understand future conditions.
The U.S. Geological Survey found that summer sea-surface temperatures in the Arctic were between 10 to 18°C (50 to 64°F) during the mid-Pliocene, while current temperatures are around or below 0°C (32°F).
Examining past climate conditions allows for a true understanding of how Earth’s climate system really functions. USGS research on the mid-Pliocene is the most comprehensive global reconstruction for any warm period. This will help refine climate models, which currently underestimate the rate of sea ice loss in the Arctic.
Loss of sea ice could have varied and extensive consequences, such as contributions to continued Arctic warming, accelerated coastal erosion due to increased wave activity, impacts to large predators (polar bears and seals) that depend on sea ice cover, intensified mid-latitude storm tracks and increased winter precipitation in western and southern Europe, and less rainfall in the American west.
“In looking back 3 million years, we see a very different pattern of heat distribution than today with much warmer waters in the high latitudes,” said USGS scientist Marci Robinson. “The lack of summer sea ice during the mid-Pliocene suggests that the record-setting melting of Arctic sea ice over the past few years could be an early warning of more significant changes to come.”
Global average surface temperatures during the mid-Pliocene were about 3°C (5.5°F) greater than today and within the range projected for the 21st century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Read the full article at http://micropress.org/stratigraphy/.
[ PDF is here http://micropress.org/stratigraphy/papers/Stratigraphy_6_4_265-275.pdf – Anthony ]
Scientists studied conditions during the mid-Pliocene by analyzing fossils dated back to this time period. The USGS led this research through the Pliocene Research, Interpretation and Synoptic Mapping group. The primary collaborators in PRISM are Columbia University, Brown University, University of Leeds, University of Bristol, the British Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey. Learn more about PRISM research.
USGS provides science for a changing world. For more information, visit www.usgs.gov.
Durn it….
It seems that the whole point of this “study” is to obfuscate established fact in order to put a Marxist spin on it. It contains no added knowledge what so ever. The only real facts it supposedly presents are concerning Arctic SST and summer ice cover that have been know for at least 10 years. The rest is just non-scientific supposition and political posturing. What a farce!
Every time I read some new study that purports to be presenting some recently discovered knowledge regarding palaeoclimatology, I cringe. Invariably all that is presented is a misrepresentation of that which is already know to science, twisted to support the IPPC. Its like Satan using truth to lie!
I can’t believe such pseudo-scientific babbling was published in what was once a respected Scientific Journal. Its frightening. What ever happened to Science?
BTW, to those talking about Polar Bears, they separated from Brown Bears 250,00 years ago, not 3mya, though the genus Arctis was alive and well.
Barry R. (19:37:02)
The collision of India with Asia and the formation of the Himalayas is also believed ( at least it is until the Marxist revisionist get to work repining the data) to be a factor in creating the current climate regime.
How a legitimate result -the existence of warmer areas in the Piacenzian arctic ocean- can be savagely highjacked into an alarmist piece of propaganda.
So there was a warm period yet “Beryllium isotopes suggest essentially continuous sea ice cover over the past 12.3 Ma with short periods of diminished sea ice at 7.8 and 5.5 Ma (Frank et al. 2008).”
Further: “No micropaleontological evidence exists that has bearing on the presence of perennial sea ice in the central Arctic Ocean during the mid-Piacenzian.”
But,
“Despite the state of sea ice in the central Artic during the mid to late Neogene, the micropaleontologic data and SST estimates presented here suggest that perennial sea ice did not exist continuously in the subpolar North Atlantic or nearby Arctic
Oceans during this time interval and that the total extent of summer sea ice was reduced relative to modern. These conclusions echo those of Cronin et al. (1993) based on ostracode analyses from the North American continental margin.”
Fine and now let’s really look at the map of figure 5. Considering we are playing with models and uncertainties, the only significant trend in the arctic is surprisingly not uniform but very limited to the Eastern Greenland/Western Scandinavia area. Thus the only claim she can make has to do with this likely hot spot area. Anything else is entirely speculative.
Obviously Marci Robinson’s knowledge in atmospheric circulation is limited at best. And that shows in her made up conclusions. Since even the NSIDC is blaming the 2007 record and the 2009 non record on atmospheric patterns, one can see that the hot spot zone is the preferential zone of warm air advection along the eastern edge of MPHs. We also know through Leroux and Pommier works that a renewed strength in MPHs confirmed by pressure data -like since the 1970s- can easily create a stronger advection of warm air and a regional warming -eastern Greenland melting, warmer SST in this area, birds migration patterns and Globe and Mail articles by Martin Mittelsteadt…-. Thus this 3 sites study is at best, should all its results be confirmed and deemed real (the 911 site is quite anomalous), a regional study documenting a strong advection of warmer air driving surface currents. Period.
To dare extend this to the entire Arctic Ocean, sea ice patterns are a precursor of global warming is simply preposterous.
James F. Evans (17:38:59) :
Nobody predicted snow storm.
Same here in NW Calif. 4000 foot snow level possibly down to 3500 feet.
Snowed down to 1000 feet.
Would like to see Piers Corbyn weigh in on why this happened, since he had Dec 28-30th as one of his targeted periods of weather predicted months in advance.
It just …. got colder. No polar air came down from the north. Storm came straight off the Pacific, just like you say.
If it was cold air on the ground, it would not have snowed all day here, as the warmer air from the Pacific would have swamped it by now.
I find this event very intriguing.
The summer surface temperatures they are citing are about the same as Lake Superior today. They may well be right, but doesn’t that imply the ARCTIC as part of the grain belt?
Reason anthropithecus erectus went extinct lacking cash for their clunker dinosaurs,
DirkH (16:44:18) : “From the article: ‘A lot of individuals and a lot of companies have grossly overpaid.’ You know what that means? LAWSUITS!”
True, and there’s no statute of limitations for fraud.
Dave F (20:24:30) :
All that work is North American-centric. I use that as reference site frequently for reference in my work – but all of that work is in North Am so I haven’t had the need to search for similar maps for other parts of the world. I would suggest Googling images with “paleogeography” for the area & time of interest to see if other areas are out on the web.
Pascvaks (17:26:31) : “When the planet’s human inhabitants get too excited about something they usually, unlike lemmings who jump into the sea, start a war for no good reason, any reason in a pinch, and no reason if they’re really upset. Humans are as predictable as the weather. I don’t trust none of ‘em. Specially the ones that carry banners and signs with slogans, they’s the worst.”
Especially if they tell you how much they care about people:
“…the Khmer Rouge view(ed) themselves as superhuman saints whose enormous kindness, benevolence, and goodness justifies the savage torture of everyone who fails to live up to the impeccable example of kindliness and saintliness set by the good Khmer Rouge themselves.”
http://www.jim.com/chomsdis.htm
Jeff L (21:23:17) :
Thanks, I actually found what I was looking for on that site soon after I posted my question. That’s how things go, I guess.
I once read an unsupported speculation that the inclination of the Earth’s axis of rotation with respect to the ecliptic changes as the solar system moves around the Galaxy and the Earth may have gone through periods in the past when the arctic circle was at the equator.
For most of the last 2.5 million years, global temps and CO2 have been at their lowest levels in the last 250 million years. Modern plants evolved in much denser CO2. In much of the Northern Hemisphere the normative condition has been no vegetation at all, since plants don’t grow on continental ice sheets.
A better benchmark or target temperature would be the Miocene (29.3-6.7 mya). It had a Holocene-like climate, perhaps 5 degrees C higher than now, but without the punishing 100,000-year-long glaciations. Co2 was perhaps 500 to 800 ppm (proxies = poor measurements fraught with error), which would be a good target concentration for vegetation.
I mean, if we are going to modify the Earth’s climate (not a completely farfetched idea — many are convinced we can and even are), then we ought to pick a good target to shoot for.
Warmer Is Better. Fight the Ice.
Pictures of the Arctic 3 million years ago I just did not realize how long we have had submarines!
http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0857806.jpg
http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0857814.jpg
Having much less sea ice is not unusual and you do not have to go back very far. If we lose all the Artic ice it would be an advantage!
Mike D. (22:39:57) :
And just how do you propose to fight the ice?
Madmen are proposing stuffing nukes in volcanoes or injecting the atmosphere with S02 or sulphur compounds ( Intergovermental Panic Climactic Convulsion) to cool the Earth, but I have not yet come across how the UNDO button is supposed to work.
Law of Unintended Consequences.
I hear the equivalent of an Alan Greenspan ‘oops’ here.
So, when this Pandorras Box opens and it destroys half the biosphere, how is it supposed to be closed, other than equally massive measures that would result in the destruction of the remaining part of the biosphere?
I see no point or gain in saving the world by destroying it, unless one is of an alien race wishing to colonize.
Be sure to study Scotese’s Paleomap Project at:
http://www.scotese.com
We presently live in a relatively very brief interglacial warming period during the latest of only about 5 major ice ages to occur during Earths 4 plus billion year history and 3 major ice ages to occur during the last 550 million years of the Phanerozoic eon in which multicellular life has so greatly proliferated. During the occurrence of these major ice ages, it has been extraordinarily rare for the polar seas within the Arctic Circle to freeze solid at all. Even within the present Quaternary major ice age, the Arctic seas have frozen for only relatively limited periods of time. The typical state of the Arctic Circle has been ice free and warm enough to be inhabited by temperate or tropical fauna and flora.
Carbon dioxide levels have typically been 3 to 18 times their present levels, with the notable exception of limied periods during the Karoo Ice Age and the present Quaternary Ice Age. When looking at the longer trends of the geological periods, there is no consistent trend in the correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Millions of year pass with the actual values going in the same direction and then opposite directions. The most notable feature of the present trends in temperature and carbon dioxide is their extremely low relative values in comparison to Earth’s past history, the Plant Kingdom’s mnimum requirements for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and a warm atmosphere to maintain and enhance the hydrologic cycle and maintain high sea levels moderating seasonality.
Eventually, the Sun will progress far enough along the main sequence and expand to destroy the Earth’s hydrosphere and atmosphere. There is, however, an immense period of time to come and further occasional major ice ages and longer warm ages to come long before the Earth’s ultimate warming to destruction by the Sun and other cosmic events can occur.
Now this is a beautiful example of press-release scienc: re-hash some already well-known facts, jazz it up with some PC verbiage and voilà you get published (not in a very prestigious journal in this particular case, but what the hell…)
So what do they actually say:
1. It was a lot warmer in the Arctic in the mid-Pliocene. Yes, we already know that, there was taiga in northern Greenland and Nunavut at the time, and pollen analysis from the very same samples indicate deciduous forest not too far away.
2. There was no perennial sea ice at ODP drillsites 907, 909 and 911 at that time. Well, there isn’t any perennial sea ice at those sites today, so it would have been very surprising if there was any at a time when climate was a lot warmer than now. They do note that there are a few dropstones in the ODP 909 sample which suggests that tidewater glaciers existed in Greenland even during this warm interval, which is a bit surprising.
3. Using proxy methods they claim that summer SST:s were 12-18 centigrade (11.7 at ODP 907, 12.7 at ODP 909 and 18.1 at ODP 911). The first two seem fairly reasonable, and are more or less in line with more reliable ostracod data from the same time interval from northern Iceland (13.6). That temperature at the most northern site would have been 6 degrees warmer than from the more southern ones seems highly unlikely, and if you read carefully it is clear that the ODP 911 sample was in pretty bad shape.
However there is good evidence that the Central Arctic Basin has not been ice-free, at least not more than very briefly, since the Miocene, more than 10 million years ago, and that there has been more or less continuous mountain glaciation in eastern Greenland for more than 6 million years. The first glaciation known to have covered lowland areas in Greenland (the Praetiglian) occurred a few hundred thousand years after the time interval (Piacenzian) covered in this paper.
And by the way, no polar bears this far back. Polar Bears are a young species.
According to John Cheever’s book, The Wapshot Chronicle, the safe way to test that rumor is in a bathtub. (Maybe the BBC can run a demo.)
‘“In looking back 3 million years, we see a very different pattern of heat distribution than today with much warmer waters in the high latitudes,” said USGS scientist Marci Robinson. “The lack of summer sea ice during the mid-Pliocene suggests that the record-setting melting of Arctic sea ice over the past few years could be an early warning of more significant changes to come.”’
A different pattern indeed. Forget for a moment the shifting tectonic plates and that the land mass had a tad bit other layout back then. Greenland apparently lacked an ice sheet 3 million years ago, it was apparently not until during the end of that time, before the pleistocene, when Greenland actually started to get an ice sheet or so those Greenlandic ice historian scientists believe anyway.
But of course the 2.5 million year long cool period that “ended” some 12 000 years ago is of course the standard with which we should live with, ‘course damn the evolutions of the 12 000 long warmer period to date.
I watch an segment of “How the Earth was Made, Sahara Desert” . Every interesting. Here is a lead in for the HDVD.
“Africa’s Sahara Desert is the size of the United States, making it the largest desert in the world. It’s also the hottest place on the planet. But now an astonishing series of geological discoveries has revealed this searing wasteland hides a dramatically different past. Scientists have unearthed the fossils of whales, freshwater shells and even ancient human settlements. All clues to a story that would alter the course of human evolution and culminate in biggest climate change event of the last 10,000 years.”
They contribute the climate change to a little wobble in the rotation of the earth that happens every 20,000 years. They last time it happen was 7,000 years ago.
Very interesting, very interesting indeed.
xyzlatin (15:59:20) :
Seeing who the authors are makes me think something fishy is going on here.
My guess is they know the planet is cooling for the next 30 yrs or so. This is their little plan to get a quick fix in (methane, but only temporary my dear, only temporary), when the planet does show cooling, they’ll say “it’s working, but only temporary untill we get CO2 down as well”.
That should buy them enough time until the next warming begins around 2045
The Mid-Pliocene Warm Period is a very interesting subject. While it is true that the Earth was a bit different back then, tectonically speaking… One of the oddities is that it was just too darn warm with too little CO2 to suit modern GCM’s…
Fig. 3: Pliocene OHT v CO2
GCM Simulations Of The Pliocene Climate: Feedbacks, Ocean Transports, And CO2
For Mid-Pliocene SST’s to have been as high as they were, either CO2 levels had to be about 4.5X modern levels (1400 ppmv) or Ocean Heat Transport (OHT) must have been about 22% greater than modern times.
Most estimates put Mid-Pliocene CO2 in the 400 to 500 ppmv range. So… Either the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 is totally misunderstood or Mid-Pliocene OHT was significantly more effective than it is now.
It’s certainly possible that the formation of the Isthmus of Panama and significant growth of the Himalayas since the MPWP could have reduced the OHT to its modern level.
The crazy thing is that some warmists are trying to spin the MPWP as evidence that the Earth’s climate is 30% to 50% more sensitive to CO2 than previously thought….
Climate Projections Underestimate CO2 Impact
E.M.Smith (19:29:56)
I too saw someone do that but he was youg and hairless so no permenant damage except to his brain but it was never noted.
So what caused the warming?
If it was CO2 then why no runaway warming?
The study is an illustration of lack of Arctic ice without man’s input. I mean at 18°C you could swim there, that was some serious warming without runaway. :o)
Oh and here are some more recent Arctic warming stories some of which happened over 50 years ago!
http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/08578.htm
http://www.icue.com/portal/site/iCue/flatview/?cuecard=41751
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/RS_Arctic.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1078291/
http://co2science.org/articles/V12/N32/C2.php
Recently the Arctic melt in the summer is recovering from it 2007 record low,
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
http://nsidc.org/news/press/20091005_minimumpr.html
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao_index.html
and all we get is a ‘story’ about what might happen (based on proxies) while all signs are pointing to cooler conditions ahead.