From Ohio State, alarming news about ice, sediments, proxy algae, and other worrisome stuff. It has a familiar ring to it, plus some luck.
ARCTIC ICE AT LOW POINT COMPARED TO RECENT GEOLOGIC HISTORY
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Less ice covers the Arctic today than at any time in recent geologic history.
That’s the conclusion of an international group of researchers, who have compiled the first comprehensive history of Arctic ice.
For decades, scientists have strived to collect sediment cores from the difficult-to-access Arctic Ocean floor, to discover what the Arctic was like in the past. Their most recent goal: to bring a long-term perspective to the ice loss we see today.
Now, in an upcoming issue of Quarternary Science Reviews, a team led by Ohio State University has re-examined the data from past and ongoing studies — nearly 300 in all — and combined them to form a big-picture view of the pole’s climate history stretching back millions of years.
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Leonid Polyak
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“The ice loss that we see today — the ice loss that started in the early 20th Century and sped up during the last 30 years — appears to be unmatched over at least the last few thousand years,” said Leonid Polyak, a research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University. Polyak is lead author of the paper and a preceding report that he and his coauthors prepared for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.
Satellites can provide detailed measures of how much ice is covering the pole right now, but sediment cores are like fossils of the ocean’s history, he explained.
“Sediment cores are essentially a record of sediments that settled at the sea floor, layer by layer, and they record the conditions of the ocean system during the time they settled. When we look carefully at various chemical and biological components of the sediment, and how the sediment is distributed — then, with certain skills and luck, we can reconstruct the conditions at the time the sediment was deposited.”
For example, scientists can search for a biochemical marker that is tied to certain species of algae that live only in ice. If that marker is present in the sediment, then that location was likely covered in ice at the time. Scientists call such markers “proxies” for the thing they actually want to measure — in this case, the geographic extent of the ice in the past.
While knowing the loss of surface area of the ice is important, Polyak says that this work can’t yet reveal an even more important fact: how the total volume of ice — thickness as well as surface area — has changed over time.
“When we look carefully at various chemical and biological components of the seafloor sediment, and how the sediment is distributed — then, with certain skills and luck, we can reconstruct the conditions at the time the sediment was deposited.”
“Underneath the surface, the ice can be thick or thin. The newest satellite techniques and field observations allow us to see that the volume of ice is shrinking much faster than its area today. The picture is very troubling. We are losing ice very fast,” he said.
“Maybe sometime down the road we’ll develop proxies for the ice thickness. Right now, just looking at ice extent is very difficult.”
To review and combine the data from hundreds of studies, he and his cohorts had to combine information on many different proxies as well as modern observations. They searched for patterns in the proxy data that fit together like pieces of a puzzle.
Their conclusion: the current extent of Arctic ice is at its lowest point for at least the last few thousand years.
As scientists pull more sediment cores from the Arctic, Polyak and his collaborators want to understand more details of the past ice extent and to push this knowledge further back in time.
During the summer of 2011, they hope to draw cores from beneath the Chukchi Sea, just north of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia. The currents emanating from the northern Pacific Ocean bring heat that may play an important role in melting the ice across the Arctic, so Polyak expects that the history of this location will prove very important. He hopes to drill cores that date back thousands of years at the Chukchi Sea margin, providing a detailed history of interaction between oceanic currents and ice.
“Later on in this cruise, when we venture into the more central Arctic Ocean, we will aim at harvesting cores that go back even farther,” he said. “If we could go as far back as a million years, that would be perfect.”
Polyak’s coauthors on the report hailed from Penn State University, University of Colorado, University of Massachusetts, the U.S. Geological Survey, Old Dominion University, the Geological Survey of Canada, University of Copenhagen, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Stockholm University, McGill University, James Madison University, and the British Antarctic Survey.
This research was funded by the US Geological Survey and the National Science Foundation.
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Contact: Leonid Polyak, (614) 292-2602; Polyak.1@osu.edu
Written by Pam Frost Gorder, (614) 292-9475; Gorder.1@osu.edu
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Caleb says:
June 3, 2010 at 1:05 am
How much stimulus money has been spent on so-called “Climate research?”
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Here is some of the follow the money info:
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/03/the-climate-industry-wall-of-money/
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/05/the-smell-of-money/
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/07/climate-money/#more-3097
The Stimulus Plan: How to Spend $787 Billion: http://projects.nytimes.com/44th_president/stimulus
Science and Research: $9.33 billion
additional financing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration $830 million
additional financing National Aeronautics and Space Administration $1.0 billion
additional financing National Science Foundation $3.0 billion
energy efficiency renewable energy research $2.5 billion
additional $$ research at the Dept of Energy $2.0 billion
Other CAGW type money $41.154 billion
Finance research, focusing on the environment and global competitiveness. $3.0 billion
Energy Provide grants to increase energy efficiency $6.3 billion
Energy Provide r Innovative Energy Loan – renewable energy…. $6.0 billion
Energy Increase energy efficiency in federal buildings $4.5 billion
Infrastructure Make military facilities more energy efficient $4.2 billion
Energy; Infrastructure; Housing modernize public housing units $4.0 billion
Energy; Increase tax credits residential energy efficiency $2.0 billion
Energy; Incentive for alternative vehicle $2.0 billion
Energy Support battery manufacturing $2.0 billion
Tax Cuts for Individuals: Incentive for car buyers $1.7 billion
Tax Cuts for Businesses; Energy Incentive for advanced energy investment $1.6 billion
Authorize more state and local bonds for energy-related purpose $1.4 billion
School technology upgrades computer & science labs & teacher tech training $650 mill
Train workers for careers in energy efficiency & renewable energy fields $500 million
Provide grants to states for energy-efficient vehicles and infrastructure $400 million
Provide consumers rebates for energy-efficient appliances $300 million
Replace older vehicles owned by the fed gov’t with hybrid & electric cars $300 million
Improve energy efficiency in government-subsidized apartment buildings $250 million
Incentive for alternative fuel pumps $54 million
(Increase tax credits for gas stations and other businesses that install non-hydrogen, alternative fuel pumps to 50 percent through 2010, for up to $50,000.)
So How did this one get into the mix??
Transportation: Invest in air transportation $1.3 billion
OHhhh I see
“Make grants to airports to improve safety or increase capacity; repair Federal Aviation Administration equipment and facilities”
That would be more up to date airport weather stations of course./sarc
Ah, yes, science by press release. I imagine the IPCC has already included it in it’s next report.
Gail Combs says:
June 3, 2010 at 5:18 am
Here are the Greenland temperatures from Ice Core data. The temperature at that time was 2C warmer than today. http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
A minor detail but the most recent temperature data on that graph is 150 years old so that would be 2ºC warmer than 1855.
The article appears to be #38 in the list of forthcoming QSR articles at
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=PublicationURL&_tockey=%23TOC%235923%239999%23999999999%2399999%23FLA%23&_cdi=5923&_pubType=J&_auth=y&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=c826a32bf8f782638a5a32988054c75e.
It was accepted 3/12/10, but no date is scheduled yet for publication. A PDF is available for $31.50. Mann is not a co-author, but Richard Alley of PSU is.
From his posts on WUWT, we know that Steven has a deep knowledge of the arctic sea ice data. However, this claim doesn’t seem so preposterous to me — If open sea generates certain planktons or whatever that do not appear when the surface is frozen, years (or at least centuries) with September thaws might be easily spottable in the sediment record.
Let’s take a look at the paper first.
The arctic sea ice volume is a much better metric of climate change than extent. The same models that PIOMAS uses to project diminishing sea ice volume since 1980 have been used to hindcast the arctic sea ice volume back to 1948. The hindcast can be viewed on the PSC site as a plot againist the NAO index.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/IDAO/retro.html#Satellite_ice
The hincast shows that 1955 likely had as little sea ice volume as today. A JGR article published in 2007 concluded from a hindcast that there was no trend in arctic sea ice volume during the twentieth century.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006JC003616.shtml
This why this report does not want to take on sea ice volume.
Even though he is wrong I would suppose he and his team are putting food on the table anyway.
Ceri Phipps says:
June 3, 2010 at 2:29 am
Do these people seriously believe that there was more sea ice when the Vikings colonised Greenland. It seems unlikely to me.
Yes, it is highly unlikely. But if they say that the funding will end.
the first comprehensive history of Arctic ice
The word comprehensive clearly should not have been used.
Is it me, or does the statement: “a team led by Ohio State University has re-examined the data from past and ongoing studies — nearly 300 in all — and combined them to form a big-picture view of the pole’s climate history stretching back millions of years”, tell us nothing at all that is new or different than what they AND we already think we know? Do more bore fillings reveal anything until they’re drilled, and filled, and analyzed in a dozen or so years?
This is like analyzing everything that has ever been written about American General Elections and then doing another analysis of all the raw data to put on top of all the other material to determine something –as yet unknown, but about which they already have a good idea what the analysis will show– about the voting patterns of the past 240 years. And, they’re NOT going to tell us anything NEW.
Is this a Federally Funded AND “Managed” Program? Like The Current Greatest Oil Spill in US History?
Brace yourselves Guys!
I think we’re in for a steady stream of government-sponsored reports intended to show us all just how bad things are. The only way out is for Congress to quicly pass the pending “energy” legislation!!
G.
What bothers me is how anyone can fail to see that this is total rubbish. Unless the authors are just fools, then the only conclusion I can make is that it is yet another study deliberately designed for public consumption to deceive and alarm. How depressing.
Gail Combs says:
June 3, 2010 at 6:29 am
Excellent list Gail! I think Anthony should consider creating a link to these resources so that people can see how awash in (tax) money the Global Warming research community is these days. I’ve also recently discovered that many of our climate luminaries like Hansen, Schmidt, Karl etc. are pulling down six figure base salaries as government employees…
NSF Award Abstract #0612473
Collaborative research: Investigating Holocene Paleoclimate in the Western Arctic Ocean Using Very High-Resolution Marine Records off Alaska
Leonid Polyak polyak.1@osu.edu (Principal Investigator)
Start Date: October 1, 2006
Expires: September 30, 2010 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date: $274655
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0612473
Grant’s running out, it’s time to scare up another one…
I’m a graduate of OSU’s geology department but ever since they (especially the Byrd Polar Institute) jumped on the global warming bandwagon my respect for my old school has dropped enormously. I think its not insignificant that one member of the Polar Institute’s faculty is BS artist Lonnie Thompson who is (was?) a powerful advisor to Al Gore and I believe had significant input in the making of the Sci Fi thriller “An Inconvenient Truth”
The article says the researchers hope to eventually obtain cores from Chukchi Sea and central Arctic Ocean so they can offer a more complete picture of the geologic history of Arctic ice. Yet, they are confident to say Arctic ice extent is at its lowest in the past “few thousand years.”
I am curious to discover where the available data came from, upon which the authors conclusions were drawn. I’m guessing their conclusions are based on modelling of missing data (i.e. skills and luck).
It is good to see this one come out because the extent of BS involved makes the results easy for a 10 year old to find the problems. I want to see more research like this!
Geoff Sherrington:
“Question from Antarctica. If the bottom of the Vostok core, 700,000 years ago, is now just above basement, does that mean that there was a quite small thickness of Antarctic Ice then? Or did a huge thickness of ice that was once below the bottom point of drilling get squeezed sideways over those 700,000 years, so we conclude that we have a dynamic Antarctic ice thickness? If so, how do we create a datum that shows how thick it was at a nominated time? These so-called proxies can be so loose as to be incredible.”
The ice of course gets squeezed sideways. If you drill exactly on the ice-divide you could theoretically find almost infinitely old ice (with almost infinitely thin annual layers) at the bottom. In practice this does not work, since the ice-divide is not completely static, and there is also often some basal melting from geothermic heat. And, no there is no good way to reconstruct the thickness of the ice directly from an ice core. In the case of Greenland it can be done very approximately because there is a core from the small Renland icecap whose altitude cannot have varied much for topographic reasons. If you derive the temperature changes from Renland and compare them to contemporary values a nearby core from on the main icecap, you can estimate very approximately changes in relative altitude from the temperature differences, it is very approximate though.
Incidentally the paper is out, it must be this one:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VBC-4YKFMY0-2&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F12%2F2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=74058b1ad94658ced1aaf5ea8c598906
I remember reading it when it came out in March and being very unimpressed. It is essentialy a write-up of carefully selected older papers plus some unwarranted conclusions based on computer modelling. No new data whatsoever. Neither luck nor skill really needed.
Right after it was announced that Michael Mann was being investigated by the state AG, Mann was given a grant of $1,800,000 to study mosquito vectors. That gift was a bribe, intended to hold the “team” together; they can not afford to have anyone go weak-kneed on them when the public is beginning to understand the CAGW scam. Thus, the payola.
Had Mann’s new benefactors actually wanted a study done on mosquitoes, they would have gone straight to a biologist or an epidemiologist, not a geologist. And they would have received a much better study for about one-tenth the cost.
Money has corrupted science. Leonid Polyak is hammering his selected, cherry-picked facts into the CAGW scare to obtain money. Anywhere else, that would be known as lying for money. There are two problems in particular with this in climate science:
First, public tax money is being paid for scientific misrepresentation. And second, even though these pampered and tenured university propagandists are already extremely well paid, outside organizations with a climate alarmist agenda, such as the Joyce Foundation, numerous Soros foundations, the Grantham Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, and many others pay big money in order to influence corrupt scientists to produce these misleading studies — while skeptical scientists [the only honest kind] have to get by on approximately one one-thousandth of the amount the alarmists get.
Someone always gets cheated when others lie for money. In this case, it is the taxpaying public. Maybe Cuccinelli will take a close look at Polyak, et al. while he’s investigating Mann.
“Later on in this cruise, when we venture into the more ……dangerously polluted yellow ice and discarded fuel barrels left by the Catlin Expedition.
tty says:
Incidentally the paper is out, it must be this one:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VBC-4YKFMY0-2&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F12%2F2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid
Well if that is the paper folks, you need to read it. And focus on the data extrapolation from three, (3), tres, ice cores from the artic ocean: (If this link works)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiCaptionURL&_method=retrieve&_udi=B6VBC-4YKFMY0-2&_image=fig3&_ba=3&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F12%2F2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=full&_orig=search&_cdi=5923&_issn=02773791&_pii=S0277379110000429&view=c&_acct=C000052423&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1450477&md5=ca392cac7ff8d2cd4a35b6e0f5b9a314
And Anthony, Mann isn’t one of the listed authors, but Mark Serreze is.
With the variability in what is in the ice and the variability of the currents moving stuff around, your going to make a couple pinholes in the Arctic and conclude what?!
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram says:
June 3, 2010 at 6:14 am
Volume is everything, NOT cover.
+++
It would be. . . if we had enough volume data. I think we have something close to 3 orders of magnitude more extent data than volume data, however.
It’s not just the number of years covered that makes that true, it’s mostly the granularity. We have daily extent data for 30 years, and a few piddling volume data points when even in periods when we have them they are months apart in granularity.
My idle thought for today: If you use the last time planet Earth was in its snowball form as the baseline, every temperature at any time since will be warmer.
Sometimes you can tell when a paper is bogus by the reduced number of trolls attempting to validate the thesis. We have none here so far. Maybe it’s because of this passage from the paper (coupled with the number of cores taken in the ocean itself, see above):
Sediment cores that represent the long-term history of sea ice embracing millions of years are most likely to be found in the deep, central part of the Arctic Ocean, where the seafloor was not eroded during periods of lower sea-level and the passage of large ice sheets. On the other hand, rates of sediment deposition in the central Arctic Ocean are generally low, on the order of centimeters or even millimeters per thousand years ([Backman et al., 2004] and Polyak et al., 2009 L. Polyak, J. Bischof, J. Ortiz, D. Darby, J. Channell, C. Xuan, D. Kaufman, R. Lovlie, D. Schneider and R. Adler, Late Quaternary stratigraphy and sedimentation patterns in the western Arctic Ocean. Global Planet, Change 68 (2009), pp. 5–17. Article | PDF (896 K) | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (5)[Polyak et al., 2009]), so that sedimentary records from these areas may not capture short-term (submillennial or even millennial-scale) variations in paleoenvironments.
Phil. says:
June 3, 2010 at 6:47 am
Gail Combs says:
June 3, 2010 at 5:18 am
Here are the Greenland temperatures from Ice Core data. The temperature at that time was 2C warmer than today. http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
A minor detail but the most recent temperature data on that graph is 150 years old so that would be 2ºC warmer than 1855.
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You missed the red line adding in the more recent data just after the Little Ice Age