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)
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was the arctic ice free during the medieval warming period, which was much warmer than today? was the arctic ice free during the roman warming period, which was even warmer than the medieval? The holocene optimum, even warmer yet?
how about, was the arctic ice free during the eemian, which was so much warmer than the holocene that trees grew above the arctic circle, much of northern europe was under water, and hippos swam in the rhine?
Instead, for now at least, the NOAA predicts COOLING at both poles this winter 2010/2011.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/images3/glbT2mSea.gif
Bill Tuttle says:
July 15, 2010 at 7:30 am
“…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.”
Good article and it got me to thinking about the Arctic Basin.
I ran across this and discovered the Bering Strait is 49m deep:
“During the Ice Age from about 35,000 years ago until about 11,600 years ago, sea levels were lower due to the water in the glaciers. At the peak of glaciation, about 18,000 years ago, sea level was about 85 meters lower than it is now (which is about 50 meters lower than it was when the Ice Age ended about 11,600 years ago).”
What would happen to Arctic if water was shut-off from the Bering Strait and the Arctic Ocean dropped 50-85m?
My first thought was that all the old ice would break-up due to the drop but I also ran across this:
Role of the Bering Strait in controlling North Atlantic ocean circulation and climate
RECENT climate records from ice cores and deep-sea sediments suggest that there has been considerable climate variability in the North Atlantic region over the past 250,000 years 1–3. Much of this variability may be linked to changes in thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic ocean 4–6. Model studies 7–9 have demonstrated that changes in the flux of fresh water to the ocean, resulting from changes in atmospheric transport or the waxing and waning of ice sheets, can have a significant effect on the thermohaline circulation. Here we present model simulations showing that increased flow of fresher North Pacific water through the Bering Strait into the northern North Atlantic can also affect the thermohaline circulation, by suppressing North Atlantic Deep Water formation; however, decreased flow does not necessarily cause deep-water formation to begin again. In our model, flow through the Bering Strait depends on eustatic sea level and the salinity difference between the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans. We suggest that the higher sea level during the last inter glacial period10, leading to greater flow through the Bering Strait, may have made the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation more sensitive than it is at present to fluctuations in the hydrological cycle, which may explain recent observations indicating that climate variability was greater then than it is today.
Question for our bear experts : Do polar bears rely on summer ice , or do they just deal with it ?
You do realise that you agree that thousands of years ago there was less sea ice than today, yet today we have more co2? Does this not bother you in the slightest?
The alarmists use polar bears beacause they look cute and cuddly. The truth is that they are voracious carnivores and will eat any protein including humans. They are a competitor species. I will not worry if polar bears vanish from the planet. There’s plenty of brown bears to replace them. The seals might vote in favour of polar bear extinction as well. So why do you worry about the Arctic so much? At best, it is only an indicator. We have no theory of climate change and cannot make serious predictions. Let’s just step back and see what happens and react to that.
Could you please direct me to who, anywhere, anywhen, actually said this? Or is this merely your interpretation of the current state of climate science?
Again, no one is saying CO2 causes ice to melt. Let me clarify. CO2 is causing temperatures to rise. Rising temperatures will cause the ice to melt.
It is, of course, possible to have higher CO2 levels and lower temperatures, as well as higher temperatures without higher CO2 levels. There are lots of factors in climate. The two are not inextricably and proportionally tied. If they were, kindergartners could do climate science. But it’s not nearly that simple.
But from what we know, it’s pretty clear that increased CO2 levels here and now are warming and will continue to warm our planet to dangerous levels.
The connection is not nearly as simplistic as you paint it, but I suspect you know that.
Scott says:
July 15, 2010 at 8:09 am
… 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.
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I think you’ll find it’s a more selection effect than genetic evolution. The story would go something like this: Some of the bears had some white fur. Some had brown fur. The whiter bears found they could hunt better on ice or snowy terrain than the brown bears, who did better in the woods. So they moved apart. Some of the offspring of the white bears were brown and moved back to the old country (1/4 of them, if white fur is determined by a single recessive gene); some of them were pure white and moved out further onto the ice, becoming polar bears (1/4 again, on the same assumption). The genes are already there in the gene pool; they’re just diverging into different breeds. This takes only a very few generations (up to 1/2 of the white genes could separate out per generation). It’s not the bears’ colouring adapting to the climate; it’s the bears’ adapting by choosing their niche according to their colouring.
Bill Tuttle says:
July 15, 2010 at 7:30 am
Add the idea that weather patterns would logically change due the ice sheets and exposed Arctic Ocean evaporation and more activity in the Ring of Fire and Mid-Atlantic trench due to the change in ocean mass which inhibits submerged volcanic impact and we end up with a Rainforest in the Arctic?
The Seward Alaska area is a rainforest today – why not further North?
“Talbot says the evidence of a polar bear from 130,000 years ago shows that the creatures somehow survived conditions warmer than they face today.
“This is verifying that the polar bear lived through at least one warming period,” Talbot says. “The Eemian was a very hot period, and polar bears survived it,” she says. ”
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF20/2018.html
In the meantime, with co2 going up, we have had the last 2 septembers of Arctic ice extent growth compared to 2007.
“it’s pretty clear that increased CO2 levels here and now… will continue to warm our planet to dangerous levels”
Kindly present your evidence (opinion will not suffice).
Click here for overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
sphaerica
What is clear is that temperature rise has been far below even Hansen’s most conservative forecast.
To add to your nice piece on Polar Bears I wrote this article just over a year ago on the same topic. In the comments of it I hammer down an environmentalist point by bloody point slaughtering her the bears are doomed arguments. Enjoy.
The article’s is titled: “The only way to save the polar bears is to send us money! – WWF TV Advertisement! Yeah right and I have a bridge to sell you in the arctic from Ellesmere Island to Hans Island!”
http://pathstoknowledge.net/2009/07/05/the-only-way-to-save-the-polar-bears-is-to-send-us-money-wwf-tv-advertisement
CAUTION: videos in the article depict graphic polar bear eating human violence. We are their food after all and it’s good to remember that bears are NOT our friends. Never approach bears, even ones in cages. They’d love a raw human steak for a snack.
John from CA: July 15, 2010 at 8:33 am
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.
Dunno — I’m thinking the stuff trapped in the ice in Greenland would be more a measure of conditions within a few hundred miles. The article pretty much confined itself to the Siberian/Alaskan/Yukon steppe, and 1,500 miles is quite a ways for windblown pollen to travel.
The land bridge across the Bering Straits resulting from the lower sea level would definitely block water from the Pacific and affect the Arctic, particularly the lowlands — remember the Sov proposal in the early ’60s to dam the straits? It was touted as a way to transform taiga, tundra, and muskeg into farmland by altering the salinity of the Arctic Ocean — theoretically, fresh water from the Yukon and Siberian watersheds wold float atop the salt water, freezing faster but melting sooner, thus allowing the Arctic Ocean to warm the land faster during spring and summer, and to slow the onset of winter.
Theoretically.
Pamela Gray says:
July 15, 2010 at 9:48 am
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.
No ocean currents but if you click on any era listed on the left hand side, estimated ocean coverage and plate positions are Illustrated.
http://www.scotese.com/earth.htm
Trap some polar bears, and insert them into an area overpopulated with lots of prey, say Washington DC, like they did with the wolves they put into Yellowstone Park. Do not allow anyone to harm them in any way. This would test if they can survive a warmer climate, probably increase their population and possibly help with many of our other problems here in the good old US of A.
Ken Hall: I take issue with your differentiation between endangered and threatened. Granted the threatened classification is endangered light, but the law still requires the designation and protection of critical habitat and preparation of a recovery plan. These functions can result in highly restrictive limitations on land uses and activities. In this sense your note distinctions without any substantive differences.
TheGoodProfessor says:
July 15, 2010 at 2:36 am
I am planning to point my students to this website – and this thread in particular – as an excellent example of a logical fallacy ‘in the wild’. You can all help out by not mentioning what the fallacy is in the comments, otherwise you will give the game away, so to speak.
Much obliged.
TheGoodProfessor
Happy to help out, I’m sure. However, I suspect that what you’ve done is to simply construct a straw man to help create your supposed logical fallacy, a common Warmist tactic. But that wouldn’t be teaching, really, but more along the line of indoctrination. And that would make you a Bad Professor.
during the last glaciation, if the bering were closed and the northslope/siberia were not glaciated then prodigal amounts of fresh water would have been flowing into the arctic.
Some polar bear stats from 40 or so years ago from old books and mags:
“Arctic Magazine” Sept. 1967 p. 148 “The Polar Bear: A Matter for International Concern” by Vagn Flyger : 15,000-20,000
“Alaska” by Bern Keating 1969 p.164 : 7,000-10,000
“Vanishing Wildlife of North America” by Thomas Allen 1974 p. 198 : 20,000
“National Geographic Magazine” April 1971 p. 581 : probably fewer than 20,000
Bill Tuttle says:
July 15, 2010 at 7:30 am
“thus allowing the Arctic Ocean to warm the land faster during spring and summer, and to slow the onset of winter.”
====
Sorry, I drifted off topic thinking about the Mammoth puzzle.
Check this map of the Arctic and imagine only the darker blues as possibly containing ice or salt water as the rest would have receded due to the drop in sea level. If this is what happened the exposed land would have been prime for new grasses and would catch fresh water run-off.
http://www.ipy.noaa.gov/education/4-Posters/ibcaoposter.pdf
And a little O/T but I couldn’t resist.
http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/Greener_Pastures/
With all the ‘humans are not a part of life’ propaganda in the Aussie media, this is a nice rebuttal of the eat less meat campaign.
regards
(it proves that BS is good for something.)
David Mayhew says:
“… Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ca 11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3° C above 20th century averages, enough to completely melt many small glaciers throughout the Arctic, although the Greenland Ice Sheet was only slightly smaller than at present. Early Holocene summer sea ice limits were substantially smaller than their 20th century average, and the flow of Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean was substantially greater. As summer solar energy decreased in the second half of the Holocene, glaciers reestablished or advanced, sea ice expanded, and the flow of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean diminished. Late Holocene cooling reached its nadir during the Little Ice Age (about 1250-1850 AD), when sun-blocking volcanic eruptions and perhaps other causes added to the orbital cooling, allowing most Arctic glaciers to reach their maximum Holocene extent…..
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OH! Oh! the Warmists are not going to like that statement.
Where is Dr. Svalgaard??? Solar energy was just mentioned.
That particular Abstract goes a long real well with this one for a late night horror story, especially if you do not think CO2 is raising the temp more than a degree if that.
“Abstract:
Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception
The community of climatologists predicts a progressive global warming [IPCC Fourth Assessment Report—Climate Change, 2007. The Scientific Basis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge] that will not be interrupted by a glacial inception for the next 50 ka [Berger and Loutre, 2002. An exceptionally long Interglacial ahead? Science 297, 1287–1288]. These predictions are based on continuously increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and on the orbital forcing that will provide only muted insolation variations for the next 50 ka. To assess the potential climate development without human interference, we analyse climate proxy records from Europe and the North Atlantic of Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 11 (423–362 ka BP), an interval when insolation variations show a strong linear correlation with those of the recent past and the future. This analysis suggests that the insolation minimum at 397 ka BP, which provides the best available analogue to the present insolation minimum, terminated interglacial conditions in Europe. At that time, tundra–steppe vegetation spread in Central Europe and pine forests dominated in the eastern Mediterranean region. Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started.“ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VBC-4R5G3HY-4&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=cb1e6a13c78265cfe621ac4fdeb8f7d3
Looks like if the “climate scientists” screwed up the calculation of the “climate sensitivity” to CO2 and skeptics are correct, we could be in a world of hurt. Solar minimum, cool phase of the ocean oscillations and rumbling Russian and Icelandic Volcanoes.
I am of the opinion that when the conditions are correct “the present insolation minimum” a grand solar minimum, the ocean oscillations in the 30 year cool phase, all it takes is a major volcanic eruption(s) providing very cool summers to throw the switch back to “glacial” something like a Laki volcanic eruption in southern Iceland. That volcano erupted over an eight-month period from 8 June 1783 to February 1784. Or the Edlgja eruption of 934 AD. http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/articles/article/Iceland/Laki-Volcano-Eruption-Iceland/529
closer look at the map depths which start at about 200M makes this a lot less exciting in terms of exposed land.
tarpon says:
July 15, 2010 at 6:20 am
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.
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Scott says:
July 15, 2010 at 8:09 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,
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The polar bear and grizzly can cross breed. That means they did not diverge all that long ago.
http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/hunting/2010/05/another-polar-beargrizzly-cross-shot-canadian-arctic
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=0c6ae388-05df-4f29-9ce9-7b7831c7f887&k=95255
Actually loss of pigment happens fairly rapidly if the study of cave crayfish I helped with is any indication. The herd of white deer in New York is another example. In an enclosed area without preditors to take out the easily seen white deer the entire herd turned white over the years. I was told by the people at the army base (when it was still active in 1976) that it was from one white buck. http://www.senecawhitedeer.org/