Yes, our forebears started global warming by hunting the woolly mammoth. Right. Must be the mammoth albedo effect, much like the sheep albedo effect. Oh, wait, no it’s birch trees albedo calculated via pollen proxy. The mammoths stopped eating birch trees, that’s wot did it. And those hunters used cooking fires too. Gosh. I wish I had more time to refute this, travel beckons, but I’m sure readers can lend a hand in comments.
UPDATE: Carl Bussjaeger points out in comments that;
Just last month, USA Today told us that Felisa Smith of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque discovered that…
Mammoth extinction triggered climate COOLING
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/05/mammoth-extinction-triggered-climate-cooling/1
Man-made global warming started with ancient hunters
AGU Release No. 10–15 Link here
30 June 2010
For Immediate Release
WASHINGTON—Even before the dawn of agriculture, people may have caused the planet to warm up, a new study suggests.
Mammoths used to roam modern-day Russia and North America, but are now extinct—and there’s evidence that around 15,000 years ago, early hunters had a hand in wiping them out. A new study, accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), argues that this die-off had the side effect of heating up the planet.
“A lot of people still think that people are unable to affect the climate even now, even when there are more than 6 billion people,” says the lead author of the study, Chris Doughty of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. The new results, however, “show that even when we had populations orders of magnitude smaller than we do now, we still had a big impact.”
In the new study, Doughty, Adam Wolf, and Chris Field—all at Carnegie Institution for Science—propose a scenario to explain how hunters could have triggered global warming.
First, mammoth populations began to drop—both because of natural climate change as the planet emerged from the last ice age, and because of human hunting. Normally, mammoths would have grazed down any birch that grew, so the area stayed a grassland. But if the mammoths vanished, the birch could spread. In the cold of the far north, these trees would be dwarfs, only about 2 meters (6 feet) tall. Nonetheless, they would dominate the grasses.
The trees would change the color of the landscape, making it much darker so it would absorb more of the Sun’s heat, in turn heating up the air. This process would have added to natural climate change, making it harder for mammoths to cope, and helping the birch spread further.
To test how big of an effect this would have on climate, Field’s team looked at ancient records of pollen, preserved in lake sediments from Alaska, Siberia, and the Yukon Territory, built up over thousands of years. They looked at pollen from birch trees (the genus Betula), since this is “a pioneer species that can rapidly colonize open ground following disturbance,” the study says. The researchers found that around 15,000 years ago—the same time that mammoth populations dropped, and that hunters arrived in the area—the amount of birch pollen started to rise quickly.
To estimate how much additional area the birch might have covered, they started with the way modern-day elephants affect their environment by eating plants and uprooting trees. If mammoths had effects on vegetation similar to those of modern elephants , then the fall of mammoths would have allowed birch trees to spread over several centuries, expanding from very few trees to covering about one-quarter of Siberia and Beringia—the land bridge between Asia and Alaska. In those places where there was dense vegetation to start with and where mammoths had lived, the main reason for the spread of birch trees was the demise of mammoths, the model suggests.
Another study, published last year, shows that “the mammoths went extinct, and that was followed by a drastic change in the vegetation,” rather than the other way around, Doughty says. “With the extinction of this keystone species, it would have some impact on the ecology and vegetation—and vegetation has a large impact on climate.”
Doughty and colleagues then used a climate simulation to estimate that this spread of birch trees would have warmed the whole planet more than 0.1 degrees Celsius (0.18 degrees Fahrenheit) over the course of several centuries. (In comparison, the planet has warmed about six times more during the past 150 years, largely because of people’s greenhouse gas emissions.)
Only some portion—about one-quarter—of the spread of the birch trees would have been due to the mammoth extinctions, the researchers estimate. Natural climate change would have been responsible for the rest of the expansion of birch trees. Nonetheless, this suggests that when hunters helped finish off the mammoth, they could have caused some global warming.
In Siberia, Doughty says, “about 0.2 degrees C (0.36 degrees F) of regional warming is the part that is likely due to humans.”
Earlier research indicated that prehistoric farmers changed the climate by slashing and burning forests starting about 8,000 years ago, and when they introduced rice paddy farming about 5,000 years ago. This would suggest that the start of the so-called “Anthropocene”—a term used by some scientists to refer to the geological age when mankind began shaping the entire planet—should be dated to several thousand years ago.
However, Field and colleagues argue, the evidence of an even earlier man-made global climate impact suggests the Anthropocene could have started much earlier. Their results, they write, “suggest the human influence on climate began even earlier than previously believed, and that the onset of the Anthropocene should be extended back many thousands of years.”
This work was funded by the Carnegie Institution for Science and NASA.
Notes for Journalists
As of the date of this press release, the paper by Doughty et al. is still “in press” (i.e. not yet published). Journalists and public information officers (PIOs) of educational and scientific institutions who have registered with AGU can download a PDF copy of this paper in press.
Or, you may order a copy of the paper by emailing your request to Maria-José Viñas at mjvinas@agu.org. Please provide your name, the name of your publication, and your phone number.
Neither the paper nor this press release are under embargo.
Title:
“Biophysical feedbacks between the Pleistocene megafauna extinction and climate: The first human‐induced global warming?”
Authors:
Christopher E. Doughty, Adam Wolf, and Christopher B. Field, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, California, USA
======================
Readers, I urge you to write to newspapers and magazines that carry this story.
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There was this one particularly big mammoth who farted and then died. That was the tipping point which was then augmented because the local cavemen cooking the meat. They had to cut down almost the entire forests of North America in the process. It is so good to know exactly what the tipping point was. I can sleep tonight!
Of course, this article is amerocentric as the authors are willing to extend their prosthesis to the effect that the extinction of one species on one continent will change the climate of a whole planet.
They are no working on weaving the tooth fairy into the scenario to explain everything else.
In Whitehorse there is the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre, which has on display a history of that era.
“During each Ice Age, vast glaciers formed in the Northern Hemisphere, locking up much of the world’s water as ice. Global sea levels dropped as much as 100 – 150 meters as a result, revealing the floor of the Bering Sea and creating a land connection between Alaska and Siberia. This land bridge was part of a larger unglaciated area called Beringia.
Glaciers never formed in Beringia because the climate was too dry. Beringia, clothed in the hardy grasses and herbs of the mammoth steppe, was home to the giants of the Ice Age: the mammoth, the giant short-faced bear, the steppe bison, and the scimitar cat.”
http://www.beringia.com/index.html
Well, we all must have realized that after Climategate revealed the shoddy, incestuous state of AGW climatology, that the lies and propaganda would be stepped up an order of magnitude in desperation. This, however, is almost beyond my expectations. Almost.
The satire from the previous commentators is a tough act to follow. Nevertheless Wet-Blanket Larry has found a fly in the ointment of the Mammoth-cooling article. Suppose that we did do in the mammoths. So what? They weren’t the only flatulent herbivores adapted to living in the Arctic. A declining mammoth population meant more vegetation for the Moose and Muskoxen to nosh on. The M&M population should have gradually increased, as the mammoth population declined. Grazing-animal-source methane production should have been constant. Evil destructive humans had no effect on it.
I call this Larry’s Herbivorous Arctic Farting Homeostasis Hypothesis. Do I have to go all the way to Sweden to collect my Nobel?
There has only been about 30 ice ages / interglacials in the last 2.5 million years. The first ice age started when our ancestors were just Australopithecines. Give or take the 1000’s of different animal and plant species that were around at any one time, the ice age / interglacial process seems inevitable and any good climate scientist should have studied this in several different classes before he/she was given a PhD. This scientific field is very strange.
Hmm… Let me see if I have this straight :
Vast areas of grassland – good
Spear chuckers – bad
Large swaths of mammoths – good
Lots of trees – bad
Whale poop – good
Welp, I think we just figured out what we need to do folks :
Chop down all of the trees, grow wild grasses everywhere, breed megafauna like crazy (cows, whales, elephants, etc), and keep technology going so that we don’t have to resort to chucking spears (aka ‘caveman’ technology).
Whew ! We’re saved !
And this crap is peer reviewed? They obviously don’t make peers like they used to.
The mammoth and the elephant, one ranged in the north and the other to the south and what pray happened to one that did not happen to the other?
Both populations existed alongside sizeable albeit scattered populations of human hunters with more or less the same technological expertise, possibly the African hunter populations were greater in number. Why did hunter gatherers manage to wipe out a whole species of mammoths when the elephant was not?
Why did the hunters prey on on a most difficult target when a much easier prey the buffalo and other herd animals were left to prosper? Has anyone found the remains in bones of the kind of inustrial scale slaughtering that wiping out a species would leave behind?
I find it odd that a small widely scattered number of small hunter clans could wipe out a whole species while leaving other easier prey alone.
The Native American tribes were possibly greater in number than the pre ice age populations yet never did they manage to wipe out the buffalo, indeed the buffalo population increased untill the industrial slaughter of the white Americans.
What was the estimated population of humanity between 15-20 thousand years ago in the northern range versus the population of the south and why did one population have the numbers and ability to wipe out a species ond the other identical population did not?
One area of land might support one tribe of of 100 individuals of which only perhaps 20 would be fully fit experienced hunters, they would need to bring a certain quantity of food stuff(meat) with only the barest technology available, they would trap and hunt the easiest prey because any casualites could be devastating to the entire tribe, the hunters would also only wish to catch enough prey to feed their tribe as meat turns rotten very quickly. Catching a massive prey animal risking multiple casualties to the small number of essential hunters that far out supplied the tribes ability to consume that animal seems to fly in the face of the well known philosphical beliefs of the nearest equivolent human group of which we have huge direct knowledge, the American indians.
It seems counter intuitive to hunt one species when huge herds of easier prey that travelled on well recognized migration routes were available and far easier to catch with the technology of the age. I think its more likely that cyclical climate cooling did for the mammoth, this cooling was fast and severe enough to deprive the mammoth of its range and grazing foodstuffs and thats why it became extinct.
Another shaggy mammoth story…
My new holistic climate theory is shaping up to make much more sense:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/holistic-climate-theory-part-1/
Please snip but its gotta be said Im afraid.
Humanity through the ages guilty of crimes against nature and pogroms and holocausts against defenceless animals EXCEPT for the native American indians who lived in harmony with gaia as guardians of nature living in perfect harmony as one with nature, we know this is so because we all watched the documentary ‘dancing with wolves’.
Witness the rewriting of the historical record to paint humanity as climate criminals.
if the manmade mammoth extinction triggered global cooling 15,000 yars ago, could the current warming just be bouncing back from those dark days?
/Mango
Gary Hladik says:
June 30, 2010 at 5:54 pm
“Taking this semi-seriously, ……. Could we even detect a difference of 0.1 degrees in ancient climate proxies?”
I can’t measure the temperature at home better than a few degrees. Around my place I have thermometers (thermocouples, thermistors, RTD, and standard bulb and bimetal) scattered around in various places. At any given time there’s at least a 2 to 4 degree F uncertainty between all measurements. And then there’s the fluctuation throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the season. As a statistician, if asked “what’s the temperature?” you can’t have certainty within real-time of more than a few degrees. Heck, there’s a 5-10 degree difference between my house and 10 miles down the road. So they claim accuracy of 0.1deg over hundreds of years, thousands of years ago, based on proxy data none-the-less? Give me a break!!! No effing way!
Another concern with this article is that they have placed the presence of significant numbers of human hunters in North America about 2-3 thousand years prior to most estimates of such an arrival IIRC.
If grassland is good and trees are bad, why don’t we torch the Amazon?
OK, after some searching, I see that there are competing theories as to the arrival and some of these assume prior to 15,000 years ago. Those guys must have been really proficient hunters.
This reminds me a lot of an article that appeared on MSNBC a while back where they reported on a paper that claimed that the fall of the Incas and Aztecs helped bring about the Little Ice Age:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28353083/
The claim was that at around that time the earth is known to have cooled by about .1 C and this was party due to the fact that the Incas and Aztecs died off around this time thus returning farmland to the wild which in turn sucked up CO2. This is just pure baloney on the face of it. There’s just no way they know the temperature of the time to that kind of accuracy, nor how many Incas and Aztecs there were or how many died or how much farmland that had, etc., etc.
Then in this article we see similar claims of more birch trees warming the planet by .1 degrees. There’s that .1 degrees again. Where do they get this stuff? What do we really know about how much humans hunted mammoths or how much of an effect it had on the mammoth population or how many birch trees there were or what their albedo effect is or if there were other factors that completely swamped all this crap anyway?
And besides .1 C over a couple centuries? There have been bigger swings than that over decades, yet this is supposed to be some big cautionary tale about how man has been destroying the planet since ancient times, blah blah blah.
Good lord after a while, how can you help but not tune this garbage out? And they wonder why everybody’s not convinced by now.
Actually some parts of this story are correct. Mammoths and the other Pleistocene megafauna were almost certainly wiped out by overhunting, yes. The absence of megafauna (except in Africa) has certainly affected the vegetation, yes.
However the previous interglacial, when the megafauna was intact was significantly WARMER than the current one, so any warming effect of the changes of vegetation on climate must have been minor. In any case the effect of vegetation on climate is complex since not only albedo but also effects on wind, rain and evaporation must be factored in. Also a few thousand years after the demise of the megafauna humans invented agriculture and stock-raising and started changing the vegetation in ways that to a large extent mimics the effects of megafauna.
Personally I think the theory that the aborigines caused the current interglacial to be much drier than earlier ones by turning most of the forest in Australia into eucalypt woodland by burning is a rather more plausible example of hunter-gatherers influencing climate on a large scale.
What’s PETA sayin’? And do whales count?
It is true that man alters the climate of the earth i believe but this paper singles out the actions of humans in the same way as people do today, the fact is i believe that all species change the earths climate to some extent so therefore we must adapt to these changes. When we look at how much species are changing the climate numbers are important and though we are told that the number of humans on the planet today is large it is small compared to the total biomass of all species on the planet today. As we have evolved our ability to reproduce ourself has decreased ,this is a negative thing as regards survival , and many of our closest relatives have become extinct not just mammoths .
A simple tenet. Before attempting to analyse climate, remove the following words and criteria:
Humans; cause; climate change; political advocacy. THEN start with a clean slate. Very simple.
John H wrote:
“We also have a guy painting the Andes this week.”
According to other reports it is a group of 4 men. The reasoning is very similar to that of the mammoth article. Trees change the colour of the landscape. We can also change it by painting it. See:
Peruvians to paint Andes white to stop glaciers melting
http://en.rian.ru/strange/20100621/159519203.html
“Four men in Peru are to paint Andes summits white in a bid to lower temperatures in the mountains and prevent glaciers from melting, Treehugger.com reports. The men believe that a special environmentally friendly white paint will reflect some 85% of the sun’s rays and the heat back into space, which will help to slow the glaciers’ melting. The World Bank has allocated $200,000 to allow them to implement their bizarre idea, which was chosen as one of the top proposals in the Bank’s “100 Ideas to Save the Planet” competition held last year. It is expected that the implementation of the project will take about a year.”
Why stop at mountains? Couldn’t painting houses also help? Perhaps the World Bank would be willing to pay for the exterior walls of my house to be repainted!
Martin Brumby says:
June 30, 2010 at 11:01 pm
If grassland is good and trees are bad, why don’t we torch the Amazon?
Good point – also raised by some others. We are told that loss of forests and their replacement with agricultural plants (often grasses) means loss of photosynthesis and thus less CO2 removal, more global warming. But now its the other way round, mammoth extinction causes trees to increase at the expense of grasses, with the result being – more global warming!
Trees and other “dicot” plants mostly do photosynthesis by the “C3” or Hatch-Slack cycle. Grasses (monocots) by contrast photosynthesise by the C4 cycle. The C4 cycle is more efficient than C3 since it eliminates the wasteful loss of CO2 through photorespiration:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation
So the argument that replacing forests (C3) with agriculture involving grasses (C4) means less CO2 uptake from photosynthesis, is wrong, the opposite is true.
And as Cassandra King points out, humans causing mammoth extinction is not very palusible anyway.
The creeping agenda behind all this is that the establishment will not accept any causation of climate change other than human activity. If they propose that human hunting and fires 10,000 odd years ago contributed to the current interglacial, then what about the other previous cycles of glacial and interglacial? Are they proposing that the mammoths repeatedly were driven to extinction by human hunting then each time re-evolved, to account for each of the interglacials? Will they also then decree that climate was static and uniform previous to the evolution of humans? The stupidity of this agenda beggars belief.
I wonder if the World Bank would pay the Climate Camp people in Parliament Square to paint the Andes. It would stop them [SNIP] on the grass.
Further to my comments on the project to paint the Andes I think that in all fairness I should point out that it is an experiment to see if the local climate can be altered by painting three peaks. Many people living in villages in the Andes depend on glaciers for their drinking water and if the rate of melting could be reduced a little that would prevent the water running off too quickly.
Therefore I don’t begruge the Peruvian team their World Bank funding. The experiment may not work but the whole point of such experiments is to find out what works and what doesn’t. However, if it does work I suppose it will only be a matter of time before somebody suggests painting all the Andes and the Rockies and the Himalayas and the Alps etc. to produce a global reduction in temperatures!
Uppyn says:
June 30, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Agreeing that the publication probably will not hold up, I would like to remark that it would be appropriate to await the publication of the paper, review the evidence in detail and then draw conclusions. Just thinking out loud here.
_____________________________________________________________________-
Whether or not this study gets peer-review published is inmaterial. MY TAXES PAID FOR IT! AND this idiot is teaching our children “Psycience” Felisa Smith is an associate professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico.
The University of New Mexico year 2008 funding from the US department of Energy for * Linking Ecosystem Scale Vegetation Change to Shifts in Carbon and Water Cycling: The Consequences of Widespread Pinon Mortality in the Southwest” is $419,000
Felisa Smith is a co-author of this paper Body mass of late Quaternary mammals The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) core funding is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The National Science Foundation was a US government agency.
From Wikipedia:
“The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about US$6.87 billion (fiscal year 2010), the NSF funds approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States’ colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.”
The University of New Mexico is a land grant college that is state supported; coeducational; chartered 1889, opened 1892