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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John from CA says:
July 15, 2010 at 8:33 am
….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.
________________________________________________________________
The differences in the Greenland and Vostok Ice-Cores could be because NH air does not get past the equator very easily. I guess the asteroids have us up north in their sights instead of NZ or OZ.
(The reference is some where in the WUWT article http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/07/some-people-claim-that-theres-a-human-to-blame/
I aam not going to wade thru the comments looking for it )
No idea why they might expect to find asteroid in the cores but I’m probably missing something.
John from CA: July 15, 2010 at 2:53 pm
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.
Nice find — the detail beats the daylights out of the topo/hydro chart I have. Go to 100% for greater color resolution and look at the -50 meter line. That would have been the *minimum* extent of the dry land back then.
If only shark DNA could talk.
Imagine the the tales it could tell.
Asteroids, volcanoes, ice ages, warm periods, more asteroids, etc.
Bipeds behaving like lemmings.
To clarify, yes, it is quite possible that polar bears survived an ice-free or near ice-free environment. Even in worst-case scenarios, there will still be ice in winter. In the high Arctic, along the north coast of Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago, ice-free periods may only be a few weeks. Polar bears in Hudson Bay already survive ice-free periods of about 4 weeks. So there certainly may be a small population that could survive, but in much reduced numbers and with a much reduced range. I would hardly call that a triumph for those that don’t accept the evidence for anthropogenic global warming.
Nonetheless, I do agree that the polar bear issue is sometimes overblown. Losing polar bears from most of their already limited range would be tragic to those that care about nature, but there will be more important issues than polar bears.
Having said that, I can understand the rationale for making them an “icon” of global warming. They are a characteristic megafauna that people can easily identify with – much more so than “less cute” creatures and other problems such as future drought, sea level rise, etc. It may not make sense, but people often make decisions, even correct decisions, as much on emotion as on reason and polar bears appeal to the emotions.
walt
And though I think it was mentioned above, a recent report already indicates that the Hudson Bay population will go extinct within as little as a few decades:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/hudson-bay-polar-bears-could-soon-be-extinct-2026755.html
REPLY: See upcoming post on the polar bear issue -A
An ice free arctic means, Im sure you must agree, that polar bears must have moved onto land.
5000 and longer ago this would have caused no problem – no one lived in the arctic (The earliest inhabitants of North America’s central and eastern Arctic are referred to as the Arctic small tool tradition (AST) and existed circa 2500 BC – wiki). Today humans are not happy when polar bears take up residence in the back yard.
If the swimming to find land does not kill them then the guns will!
\harry
Bill Tuttle says:
July 15, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Nice find
===
Its a great map. It looks to me like the area between the Kolyma River and the Indigirka River in the East Siberian Sea as well as some of the inlet areas in the and Laptev Sea and Kara Sea were exposed land.
Interesting, these are also major fresh water inlets to the basin. Do you have any idea where they found the Mammoths and other grassland animal deposits in Siberia?
Harry Lu (July 15, 2010 at 5:05 pm),
There is just one small flaw in your argument.
The “normal range” for Polar Bears is on land.
Pack ice and (so-called) permanent ice are only “occasional” ranges.
Click here for one of many substantiating sources.
John from CA
Mammoths have actually been found on the New Siberian Islands off the coast of Siberia north of Indigirka R. The Russians used to “mine” mammoth ivory there in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Siberia they are often found along meandering rivers where they are washed out.
AJB (July 15, 2010 at 2:09 am),
Your link suggests Polar Bears are at risk of extinction because of shrinking body fat.
BALDERDASH!
Shrinking body fat is merely a natural adaptation to warmer temperatures.
Witness this image (taken from this page) documenting how zoo keepers in San Diego keep their Polar Bears thinner.
If summertime Arctic ice melted completely (as it previously has), Polar Bears might find fewer (fat rich) seals. Okay, so they eat leaner foods, lose some body fat and adapt to warmer temperatures! No problem!
Right now, the poor things are so dang cold that they are desperate for fat rich seals just to keep from freezing to death. Geez! Show some compassion! 😉
John from CA: July 15, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Interesting, these are also major fresh water inlets to the basin. Do you have any idea where they found the Mammoths and other grassland animal deposits in Siberia?
As a reader noted, they’ve found both fossil and skeletal remains all over the place. I’ve gone looking for papers (and news releases) mentioning specific sites for *intact* mammoth discoveries and haven’t found any pattern other than the obvious one — near permanent and semipermanent human settlements. One that tickled me was the baby found in Yamal — conjured a vision of mammoths munching larches and messing up tree ring counts.
More time in one area equals more time to explore and find out where that awful smell is coming from — people following dogs are usually the first ones to find thawing mammoths.
Thanks a reader and Bill Tuttle
I did some research last night and immediately found numerous articles related to Alaska finds including Mammoth in Fairbanks, central Alaska above Anchorage, and the Klondike region. Mastodon was also mentioned but the finds are relatively rare.
I also ran across a map of human settlements dating 8,000 years ago across Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. One appears to be on Kodiak Island.
I guess the first issue is plate movement at the Bering Strait in an attempt to confirm the depth and composition of the channel bed over the last 20,000 years.
I suspect there are a number of papers out there – the physical limitations of the strait during glacial sea level drop and potential impact on the Arctic Ocean and climate is to obvious to have gone unnoticed.
Amblin’ to Alaska
http://whyfiles.org/061polar/anthro.html
Finding ice core sample findings from glaciers in the Bering Strait area would confirm volcanic activity.
Begs a question: Why do we go to the remotest parts of the world and assume its representative of global conditions? There aren’t any currents or volcanoes near the Antarctic ice-core samples.
Walt,
There were also many reports in the 1970s that American Bison would be extinct by 1980. But things change. This year Hudson Bay melted early, last year it didn’t.
And Hudson Bay is only a small percentage of the total bear population.
Gail Combs says:
July 15, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Um, so doesn’t this mean they’re the same species? Assuming the offspring can reproduce that is. I realize that some areas of science like to change the definition of species to fit their agenda, but that’s the definition I was taught in high school.
-Scott
Excerpt from: sphaerica on July 15, 2010 at 10:58 am
“This person did not kill that dog. They pulled the trigger on the gun. It was the gun that killed the dog.”
In the face of such overwhelming logic as sphaerica has displayed, what more is there to say? 😉
@Bill Tuttle
Related to the amount of water Mammoths need and their presence in Alaska, the floor of Alaska would have been warmer and wetter than the glacial and snow covered peaks. As the warm air rises over the colder peaks it condenses which would have created a significant amount of run-off and snow.
Yet, Siberia and northern Alaska like Prudhoe Bay and the town of Barrow have 2-3 months of darkness each year. I can’t imagine Mammoth’s huddle together for 2-3 months a year like Penguins. Who knows, maybe they did making them easy prey for crazy cave men running around in subzero temps and the snow.
Alaska Snowfall Totals
Here are some [current] average annual precipitation and snowfall totals for a cross section of Alaska.
Anchorage — 15.37″ precip —- 69.0″ snowfall
Barrow ——- 4.67″ ———– 28.0″
Fairbanks —- 10.37″ ———– 68.0″
Homer ——- 24.93″ ———– 58.0″
Juneau —— 52.86″ ———– 101.0″
McGrath —– 16.18″ ———– 93.0″
Nome ——– 15.64″ ———– 56.0″
Valdez ——- 61.50″ ———– 320.0″
“By comparison Buffalo, N.Y., receives an average of 80″ to 100″ of snow per year. Some sections of upstate New York, similarly affected by their proximity to the Great Lakes, receive an average of 150″ to 200″ of snowfall yearly. Hooker, N.Y., received 466″ of snow during the winter of 1976-1977.”
Curious, it takes a lot of snow pack to make an inch of glacial ice.
A very curious puzzle given Mammoth tusks found 130 miles inside of the arctic circle and mined from islands off the Siberian coast.
OT but a fun tangent:
Old and Getting Older
http://www.nps.gov/akso/AKParkScience/…/Old%20Is%20Getting%20Older.pdf
Peopling of the Americas: mtDNA tells us of the Beringian Standstill
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://anthropologynet.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/maternal-geneflow-in-and-out-of-beringia.png%3Fw%3D300&imgrefurl=http://anthropology.net/2007/10/31/people-of-the-americas-mtdna-tells-us-of-the-beringian-standstill/&h=2653&w=2126&sz=1910&tbnid=-4Y7B7BfL3lepM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=120&prev=/images%3Fq%3DBeringia&usg=__cfNZX8o06ZtdtCV-6rGnBf0ujS0=&sa=X&ei=O4xATJP2GIq4sQOQwvTaDA&ved=0CDcQ9QEwBw
I know, let’s add a few lines to the map and call it a day : )
Sorry, Beringia doesn’t look logical given the geologic formations on the floor of the Arctic basin and the tectonic plates don’t appear to support the idea within the timeframe mentioned.
“Well documented” indeed. So what totally falsified hypothesis or theory in history, accepted, nay, insisted upon by a great majority of natural philosophers or scientists has not been well documented? I can’t think of a single one.
Nowadays, peer review controls the documentation process. If a document hasn’t approval of s small group of the elite, it isn’t considered to be documentation. Peer review is no more than defending the faith, whatever the faith of the elite is at the time.
“The electric current can not be subdivided.” That it could not be was well documented. It took no “scientific” peer reviewed paper to falsify it, and the man who demonstrated to the world that it was a false theory had no more than an 8th grade formal education.
John from CA: July 16, 2010 at 9:21 am
@Bill Tuttle
Related to the amount of water Mammoths need and their presence in Alaska, the floor of Alaska would have been warmer and wetter than the glacial and snow covered peaks. As the warm air rises over the colder peaks it condenses which would have created a significant amount of run-off and snow.
And given the prevailing winds, most of it would land in the mountains *and* to the south, feeding the growing ice cap. Make sense?
Yet, Siberia and northern Alaska like Prudhoe Bay and the town of Barrow have 2-3 months of darkness each year. I can’t imagine Mammoth’s huddle together for 2-3 months a year like Penguins.
Or they may have adapted to a semi-nocturnal lifestyle. Or, given the ice cap as a backscatter mechanism for the winter sunlight further south, the “night” would have been more like a deep twilight for twelve hours a day.
Or they may have invented the all-night poker game…
Bering Strait influenced ice age climate patterns worldwide
January 10, 2010
Hu and his colleagues set out to solve a key mystery of the last glacial period: Why, starting about 116,000 years ago, did northern ice sheets repeatedly advance and retreat for about the next 70,000 years? The enormous ice sheets held so much water that sea levels rose and dropped by as much as about 100 feet (30 meters) during these intervals.
…
Using the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model, a powerful computer tool for studying worldwide climate, the researchers compared the responses of ice age climate to conditions in the Bering Strait. They ran the model on new supercomputers at NCAR and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, enabling them to focus on smaller-scale geographic features that, until recently, could not be captured in long-term simulations of global climate.
The simulations accounted for the changes in sea level, revealing a recurring pattern-each time playing out over several thousand years-in which the reopening and closing of the strait had a far-reaching impact on ocean currents and ice sheets.
• As the climate cooled because of changes in Earth’s orbit, northern ice sheets expanded. This caused sea levels to drop worldwide, forming a land bridge from Asia to North America and nearly closing the Bering Strait.
• With the flow of relatively fresh water from the Pacific to the Atlantic choked off, the Atlantic grew more saline. The saltier and heavier water led to an intensification of the Atlantic’s meridional overturning circulation, a current of rising and sinking water that, like a conveyor belt, pumps warmer water northward from the tropics.
• This circulation warmed Greenland and parts of North America by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius)-enough to reverse the advance of ice sheets in those regions and reduce their height by almost 400 feet (112 meters) every thousand years. Although the Pacific cooled by an equivalent amount, it did not have vast ice sheets that could be affected by the change in climate.
• Over thousands of years, the Greenland and North American ice sheets melted enough to raise sea levels and reopen the Bering Strait.
• The new inflow of fresher water from the Pacific weakened the meridional overturning circulation, allowing North America and Greenland to cool over time. The ice sheets resumed their advance, sea levels dropped, the Bering Strait again mostly closed, and the entire cycle was repeated.
The combination of the ocean circulation and the size of the ice sheets-which exerted a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight back into space-affected climate throughout the world. The computer simulations showed that North America and Eurasia warmed significantly during the times when the Bering Strait was open, with the tropical and subtropical Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as Antarctica, warming slightly.
Sorry, here’s the link:
Bering Strait influenced ice age climate patterns worldwide
http://www2.ucar.edu/news/bering-strait-influenced-ice-age-climate-patterns-worldwide
The study refers to a 100 foot drop (30m). The Bering Strait is currently 49m at its deepest point.
I’ve seen different accounts related to the sea level drop but the range was 85-120m at the last glacial minimum. I wonder if they used the 30-35m drop reported to be the level at the end of the last glacial which would have opened flow into the Strait by 14-19m.
Also, Bill Tuttle’s comments about the fresh water impact seems to conflict with the salinity theory.
oops, that should read:
I’ve seen different accounts related to the sea level drop but the range was 85-120m at the last glacial maximum.
Sea-level changes since the Last Glacial Maximum: an appraisal of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report
source: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122370564/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
Roland Gehrels
School of Geography, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK
ABSTRACT
Received: 1 October 2008; Revised: 2 February 2009; Accepted: 4 February 2009
The abstract is restricted under copyright so here’s my take.
– IPCC AR4 stated global sea level rise at about 120m between the Last Glacial Maximum and 3-2 ka
– rise didn’t resume until the late 1800s
– relevant literature indicates rise may have been larger than IPCC AR4 value and the timing is “poorly constrained”
– sea level rise is not global as AR4 indicates
– factors related to Meltwater Pulse (MWP) are under review by field scientists and modelers.
– corrections will help reduce current uncertainties for future sea-level predictions and help to establish a baseline for the past