UPDATE BELOW: Peer reviewed science supports the title!
By Steve Goddard
In part two of Dr. Meier’s post , he mentioned :
“Examination of several proxy records (e.g., sediment cores) of sea ice indicate ice-free or near ice-free summer conditions for at least some time during the period of 15,000 to 5,000 years ago”
WUWT Reader David Penny astutely noted the implication that Polar Bears must have already survived an ice free Arctic in the not too distant past. According to Wikipedia :
…the polar bear diverged from the brown bear, Ursus arctos, roughly 150,000 years ago
That must mean it is OK to take Polar Bears of the endangered species list. But the decision to put them on the list never had anything to do with science anyway.
The other implication of Dr. Meier’s statement is that a warmer, ice free Arctic occurred when CO2 levels were less than 290 ppm. This implies that there is no long term correlation between CO2 and Arctic temperatures.
Conversely, there was an ice age during the Ordovician 450 million years ago, when CO2 levels were 10X higher than today
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/2005-08-18/dioxide_files/image002.gif
Conclusion: There is no evidence that Arctic warming over the last 30 years has anything to do with CO2. If it were CO2 causing it, we would see warming at both poles.
UPDATE:
An ancient jawbone has led scientists to believe that polar bears survived a period thousands of years ago that was warmer than today.
Sandra Talbot of the U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center in Anchorage was one of 14 scientists who teamed to write a paper based on a polar bear jawbone found amid rocks on a frigid island of the Svalbard Archipelago. The scientists determined the bear was an adult male that lived and died somewhere between 130,000 to 110,000 years ago, and that bear was similar to polar bears today. Charlotte Lindqvist of the University at Buffalo in New York was the lead author on the paper, published in the March 2010 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Details here and here (source)
You do know that Rachel Carson supported the use of indoor residual spraying with DDT for public health uses don’t you? Good, I thought you did. I wouldn’t want you to engage in a display of ignorance that might otherwise damage your credibility.
TheGoodProfessor
On what proxies is that graph of CO2 concentrations vs global temperature based?
I presume it’s not accepted as valid by the pro-AGW crowd, since if it could be verified as being 100% reliable, it offers conclusive proof that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has literally no significant bearing on global temperatures (barring an initial small warming effect logarithmically tailing off as shown in this article)
As with most global warming gobledee-gook (sp?) AGW alarmists are only telling one side of the polar bear story. If you ask the Inuit, who actually live WITH the polar bears, they say they are they ones in trouble, not the polar bears!
http://arcticfocus.com/2010/01/08/polar-bear-hotline-%E2%80%9Cinuit-are-saying-they-are-the-ones-in-danger-not-the-polar-bear/
Polar bears have survivied many ice-free acrtic summers in the past 5 million years of glaciations/inter-glaciations. That is too short of a time frame for them to have evolved the adaptations they have developed to survive -50 degreee Arctic living and to also have survived the interglacial warm periods (like the one we are currently expereincing). They simply change their habits, adapt, if you will, to become land hunters.
If researchers would only ask the Inuit, they would find that the polar bear population is NOT suffering what so ever. They areadapting to this ice-free time (if it is truly ice-free) by: ….”coming into hamlets, chasing children and eating caches of stored food.”
And here is what we all know:
“Wildlife adviser with Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., Paul Irngaut, has taken about 30 (bear hotline) calls in the past weeks.
“People from the South only hear one side of the story, which is from polar bear biologists or scientists who are using predictions, using computer simulations and we don’t agree with that. That’s not what we’re seeing up there.” (that polar bear populations are in danger!)
Who knew? computer simulations and models are predicting incorrect outcomes verses reality. Huh.
tty says:
July 15, 2010 at 4:20 am
“Actually the virtual extermination of peregrines (and many other birds) in parts of Europe and North America in the 1960′s by pesticide poisoning (DDT and mercury compounds) is very well documented and the physiological mechanisms are well understood. I was present when it happened and you could find droves of dying birds during sowing where mercury doped seeds were scattered about. Any number of birds and eggs were analysed and the connection between high quantities of DDE and/or organomercury compounds and the characteristic symptoms was verified by feeding experiments.
[snip]”
Oops, combining organomercury and DDT and discussing sowing of seeds doesn’t work. Please provide the cited publications of the testing.
I’ve been trying to find them for a research project and I’m not having any luck on the web. Since you were there, may we presume that you co-authored the same? If not, I’m sure you can provide the names of the authors.
Polar bears are recent evolutionary responses, they found food in the arctic, moved north chasing a food source, seals they liked to eat and found easy to catch, and turned white to camouflage themselves better to hide from seals. So if they all die off, we can just make more, can’t we? Just ship brown bears north and let evolution fix the loss.
I doubt most people realize how short polar bears have been on earth, given earth’s 4.5 billion year age.
Polar Bears live well in ice free zoos all over the world.
“On what proxies is that graph of CO2 concentrations vs global temperature based? ”
Since I’ve seen basically the same graph here, with error-bars, I assume they’re both from the same sources. to wit: Temperature after C.R. Scotese http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm; CO2 after R.A. Berner, 2001 (GEOCARB III) http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Reference_Docs/Geocarb_III-Berner.pdf
CO2 appears to be a lag indicator of temperature based on the ice core charts. It appears to hang around as temperature drops due to the rate of oceanic intake and lags temperature uptrends.
Based on the link, there are periods when this doesn’t appear to follow the pattern indicating that something else was driving CO2. The something else is likely volcanic activity?
http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/
“You do know that Rachel Carson supported the use of indoor residual spraying with DDT for public health uses don’t you?”
And her science which over-hyped the result on humans in general had nothing to do with the ban at all? When you combine activism in science with politians, you get bad results, this should be a lesson to all.
It didn’t matter that she said it was better to use DDT indoors or not, her work got the chemical banned. Best intentions of mice and men….often go astray. She should be blamed for the ban for using bad science showing a correlation between cancer and DDT. I don’t care what she thought or believed, its the results of her research that matter. Thats what matters.
And yes, DDT has a detrimental impact on wildlife. This is why instead of over-hyping the impact on humans, the reality should be made crystal CLEAR to those in power because they do not understand what the science actually says versus what the scientists allude to that might be a possibility.
Which brings us back to global warming. We have a reality disfunction here where scientists say “this is possible and is one possibility with this GCM.” Activists run with this and convince everyone that CO2 CAUSES the temperature to rise when the correlation is still being worked on. This is science at its infancy, we can not say how much of an impact CO2 has on the environment because all the science is filled with weasel words such as “could” and “possible”.
Maybe the scientists did not say this, but they should be held accountable with their weasel words of “this is possible.” don’t put possibilities into scientific papers, put results and make it crystal clear without being a weasel.
Thats the moral of the entire DDT story. And that should have been a lesson for scientists everywhere on how to not act. Don’t be a weasel monkey. Show your results for what they are and don’t sell your soul for more grant money.
“Ken Hall says:
July 15, 2010 at 1:41 am
Polar bears are not on the endangered species list. This is a common misconception …..”
Ken,
you are right of course but look at a typical headline in the MSM!
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/055
cheers David
hell_is_like_newark: July 15, 2010 at 5:43 am
Wait a minute.. 15,000 years ago, were we not still in an ice age? Why would the arctic be ice free?
Good question. This article addresses it and is as good an explanation as I’ve found for the Arctic being ice-free in the summer — which it *had* to be, based on the types of extinct animals they’ve found.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/fit/chapter2.asp
“Glacial debris indicates that only the mountains of Siberia, Alaska, and the Yukon were actually glaciated. The lowlands, where the mammoth bones are found, were never glaciated. That would explain how the animals could live in these areas during the Ice Age.”
“…the ecology of the [extinct] Siberian animals suggests a much more diverse vegetation with a fertile soil. This further implies a comparatively mild winter with light snowfall and a long growing season. These conditions differ markedly from the modern environment and climate, not to mention uniformitarian computer simulations of the Ice Age climate.”
It looks like the terrain and the *climate* in the Arctic during the Ice Age was not only much different than we thought, it may have been more different than we could imagine.
‘Conclusion: There is no evidence that Arctic warming over the last 30 years has anything to do with CO2. If it were CO2 causing it, we would see warming at both poles.’
It would be rather fun it it instead was all those enviromuppets research vessels, chopper and planes was the tipping point of all those government research, military, et cetera vessels, choppers, and planes, not to mention tourism, helping to break up the ice by plowing through the ice, and by vibration, and changing the landscape by buildings, thereby making it much easier for weather to finnish the job.
Joel, look here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/12/new-bear-species-discovered-ursus-bogus/
As to the assumption by some that numbers are declining, it may just simply be that a number of ‘pioneering’ individuals have decided to further extend their geographical range, thereby decreasing population density. As this link from the RSPB Isle of Mull (Scotland) shows,
http://birdguides.com/webzine/article.asp?a=2027 ,
March 2010 was a good month for them, perhaps aided by the ‘titanic’ effects of our exceptionally prolonged and cold winter.
/;-])
jcrabb says:
July 15, 2010 at 2:18 am
Hmm, so two things that appear to be true, but contradict each other, so both can’t be true. So either (a) polar bears don’t require summer sea ice to survive, or (b) the pre-historical record is not as true as sold. Actually, I’ll take (c), which is both of the above. I take any pre-historical scientific “facts” to be highly questionable because of the number of assumptions going into radiometric dating, and I also seriously doubt that polar bears can’t survive without summer sea ice.
-Scott
tarpon says:
July 15, 2010 at 6:20 am
You realize that’s just a speculative story, right? According to the above article, polar bears and brown bears diverged only 150,000 years ago. Is that legitimate? Hard to say…assuming a generation of 10 years for polar bears (someone please correct me if that’s far off), that’s only 15,000 generations. Seems like a lot, but it’s not a whole lot to work with really…Lenski’s long-term evolution study has topped 50,000 generations with relatively large population sizes and hasn’t shown very much change. Thus, I’m finding it doubtful that all the above can be true.
Just some thoughts and numbers,
-Scott
The bear facts:
Kate at 2:28 am contributed a good deal of information regarding the P-bear that anyone speaking to the subject should know (but most don’t). Here are a couple more:
The divergence between brown bears and polar bears occurred in Southeast Alaska, likely near Admiralty Island. Genetically speaking, the brown bears of Admiralty are closer to polar bears than either are to any other species of bear, even though there are brown bears on the islands (Baranof and Chichagof) and mainland that surround Admiralty.
Adult male bears eating cubs is not an issue of hunger, but a genetic strategy to increase the odds that their DNA survives and the other guys’ doesn’t. It’s a Darwinian sort of evolutionary strategy — survival of the fittest. It doesn’t always work out as planned when the boar nails one of its own, but there’s no way of him knowing that. The same behavior occurs with brown bears in Southeast Alaska and elsewhere.
StanWilli at 6:08 am misstated when he wrote: ? Polar bears have survivied many ice-free acrtic summers in the past 5 million years of glaciations/inter-glaciations.”
Polar bears have not been around 5 million years, rather not more than about 180,000. Much of the assemblage of modern higher mammal species is a product of the Pleistocene climate swings. The modern genera show up around 2.8 mya and the species more recently than that. Take your own species for example. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens begin to show up in the fossil record only about 180,000 years ago. There was something special about the period between 190,000 and 150,000 years ago that hasn’t been fully explored yet. It marks the time of radiation and speciation that appears in many marine mammal species (right whales, killer whales, Lagenorhynchus and Stenella dolphins) including the polar bear, as well as human beings.
Bill Tuttle says:
July 15, 2010 at 7:30 am
What about Greenland Bill? The ice-core samples have to be older than 15,000 years.
Note: the ice-cores reflect volcanic events and temperature but the Vostok Ice-Cores are from Antarctica so they don’t reflect Arctic conditions. The Vostok Ice-Cores supposedly don’t contain effects of catastrophic geological changes like petroleum, vermin, weird Venus gasses, red snow, manna in amongst the layers. Also no evidence for rapid rotational changes in the earth, no floods, and no major asteroid bombardments.
No idea why they might expect to find asteroid in the cores but I’m probably missing something.
I think it is interesting to note that the man that many skeptics love to bash, Dr. David Barber (i.e. rotten ice etc.) has noted in a recent presentation that some of the recent changes in Arctic Sea has caused the habitat to actually improve for polar bears in the short term. You can find that brief mention in this presentation:
http://video.hint.no/mmt201v10/osc/?vid=55
His point wasn’t that polar bears were not in jeopardy of losing their habitat in the longer term, and certainly polar bears are not the focus of his research. Like all species, if a habitat changes they will adapt or perish. From what I’ve seen, polar bears are pretty rugged animals, and probably have survived other periods of change in the Arctic, and if they need to move south to hunt because of melting ice, the upside is they’ll reduce the population Canadians…
The logic is impeccable and unimpeachable regarding the Hudson Bay ice and polar bears. Therefore I shall use it.
To wit: The warm phase of the Pacific Decadel Oscillation is a reliable predictor of low salmon populations. Therefore we should enact legislation to remove/reduce/control the cause of the warm phase of the PDO.
The post above is the reason why I have remained sceptical of AGW. They need to explain the ice-free / co2 low and the ice-age / co2 ten times higher. As for the polar bear survival I have always maintained that polar bear have survived ice free / low ice extents in the past. They scavenge for goodness sake!
http://www.ngu.no/en-gb/Aktuelt/2008/Less-ice-in-the-Arctic-Ocean-6000-7000-years-ago/
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice-tony-b/
http://co2science.org/articles/V12/N32/C2.php
As for albedo:
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/pub/gorodetskaya/irina_ipccpaper.pdf
“The predicted substantial decrease in Arctic summer sea ice concentrations during the twenty-first century may favor cloud formation, which should diminish or even cancel the ice-albedo feedback by shielding the surface.”
R Gates, your foot will be vastly improved with a bit of seasoning and perhaps some ketchup?
On 9/22/09 — in this post — I made a similar argument regarding polar bears having already survived one or more summers with zero Arctic sea ice.
I am VERY happy to see the same argument made at WUWT (where a far larger audience will see the evidence). Polar bears are very intelligent and very adaptable creatures. They are doing just fine and they will continue to do so. How well Homo sapiens will survive eco-extremist political tyranny is more in question.
Thanks!
I am always intrigued by graphs depicting eras, temps, and CO2. The oceanic currents and tectonic plates have quite an impact on both. I wish the graph had blow-out pictures of the estimated position of land masses and possible oceanic currents for each era. The graph would be vastly improved in terms of its informational content along with its data presentation.
jcrabb says:
July 15, 2010 at 2:18 am
“[…] As for what happened thousands of years ago, maybe not all sea ice disappeared or the population became very small then flourished when Ice returned, who really knows and is somewhat irrelevant when there is concrete evidence of Polar Bear reliance of Arctic sea ice now.”
Good point. Who really knows and it’s somewhat irrelevant what happened in the past. So CO2 didn’t cause global warming in the past, but it does now, so we have to decarbonize our economy and raise a lot of taxes, well very good argument that is. Thanks for giving us an example of the strident adherence to logic that is all things AGW.