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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@Bill Tuttle
lol, “Or they may have invented the all-night poker game…”
To be honest, I think there is a whole lot more here then meets the eye.
For instance, if the sea level drop was greater than 100m, most of the Siberian Shelf would have been above sea level. It’s the widest continental shelf in the world extending 1,200 kilometers offshore. But it would have been one big salty beach – its largely sandbar and silt.
So, it was probably an all-night Mammoth Beach Party until the crazy cave men showed up.
John from CA: July 16, 2010 at 5:34 pm
But it would have been one big salty beach – its largely sandbar and silt.
A lot of the silt has accumulated from runoff since the glaciers melted, but *at the time*, it probably would have been a pretty interesting area. Salt would have leached downward through the sand after a few seasons, and topsoil would have collected in the lower areas, allowing tree seedlings to take root (all of southern New Jersey is sand overlying granite, with shallow areas of topsoil) and dune grasses would have stabilized the areas where the topsoil couldn’t collect. Think prairie, with “islands” of small trees and shrubs.
Bill Tuttle says:
July 17, 2010 at 4:56 am
“Think prairie, with “islands” of small trees and shrubs.”
I just spent 4 days observing the habitat surrounding the Pedersen Glacier in early spring on a recent trip the Kenai Fjords Glacier Lodge next to the Aialik Glacial Basin which is a rain forest. http://www.kenaifjordsglacierlodge.com/
I was amazed by the speed at which nature reclaims the land exposed by receding ice. Admittedly, the spot where I was observing the habitat was under the ice which carved the Glacial Basin but, even at the glacial maximum about 8 degrees C below current average temperature (-46.4 degree Fahrenheit) the mode of action should have been similar. Yet at the glacial minimum, a gross estimate indicates temperature in Fairbanks was always below freezing. Mammoth are found and date to the time frame.
Long Climate Records in Alaska
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ResearchProjects/pages/AKpaper9.html
…stations in Alaska with the best historical climate information:
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/history/History.html
Fairbanks
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/history/Interior/Fairbanks.html
There are so many problems with an attempt to reconstruct what was actually occurring. What was the actual depth of the Bering Strait, the depth of the shelfs in the Arctic Basin, the actual temperature given the reduction in current and increase of fresh water in the arctic, volcanic activity in the Ring of Fire and possibly on the floor of the Arctic Basin due to plate changes over the 10,000-20,000 year time frame.
With the Bering Strait cut off and a sea level drop of 100m+, the Alaska Gyre must have been a massive snow maker closer to the Strait.
LATEST ICE CORE MAY SOLVE MYSTERY OF ANCIENT VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/bonaback.htm
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/national_parks/wrangell_st._elias_map.jpg
Or Not solve them, its quite a puzzle.
last post:
Sorry really messed up the Fairbanks temperature conversion in my last post.
Assuming an annual mean maximum temperature of 40 degrees F, which is appears to be above the 1900-2000 mean, 40F = 4.45C -8C = -3.55C or 25.61 degrees Fahrenheit at the Last Glacial Maximum approximately 20,000 years ago. The -8C is the worst case based on the Antarctic ice-cores.
This is all absurd without temperature related ice-core data from the glaciers in Alaska.
I was amazed when I read about the field research that went into COHMAP and CLIMAP and found my way to PMIP 2.
If you scroll down on this page you will find a chart indicating tundra and dry tundra in 18 ka Alaska; http://pmip2.lsce.ipsl.fr/
The other interesting footnote so far is the disagreement on Pacific SST with IPCC models from the last glacial era. IPCC appears to use much colder values.
Its a shame the climate simulations are so [enter the word I’m looking for]. It’ll be great when they start doing 3D simulations using higher end rendering approaches that zoom into the specifics; see the demo:
http://www.visiblebody.com/tour_demos;jsessionid=HjUQd7TcnbYHeNTnpZQOiw**.node2