Guest post by by Michael A. Lewis, Ph.D.
In my work as an archaeologist in Alaska, I spent a good swat of my time hiking through forests along the Yukon River, scrambling over piles of driftwood along the northwest coast and pulling roof beams and house posts out of 2,000 year-old dwelling sites on St. Lawrence Island.
The object of my quest? Tree rings.
From hundreds of core samples and cross-section “cookies,” I developed a regional tree ring climate chronology that I compared with archaeological records of human population movements across the Bering Strait over the past 2,500 years. One thing stood out clearly in both independent data sets:
About a thousand years ago, a remarkable change occurred among all Arctic peoples from Siberia to Greenland in a period of less than 200 years. People moved long distances. New technologies supplanted old. Ground slate harpoon blades replaced chipped stone. The sea mammal hunting Thule people of Northern Canada completely replaced the land based Dorset culture that had been in place for thousands of years. The Inuit language spread from Northwestern Alaska to Greenland, the greatest areal extent of any language on earth. Whale hunters migrated across northern Canada, following whales across the ice-free Arctic Ocean.
The tree ring record reflected these cultural changes. Across the Bering Strait and into Interior Alaska, increasing temperatures and changing precipitation patterns were recorded in tree rings from Siberia to Fort Yukon around 1,000 BP.
Something was afoot and my further research revealed the Alaskan signature of the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) that had been experienced across North America, Iceland, Greenland and Europe.
So you can imagine my surprise to see the infamous Hockey Stick graph appear in the 2001 IPCC Report, completely missing the MWP that I knew from multiple independent data sets, as well as the subsequent Little Ice Age that brought to an end the European occupation of Greenland. Later IPCC reports and subsequent media hype increased my discomfort with the concepts of Anthropogenic Global Warming and the insistence that presently observed climate change is driven primarily by human greenhouse gas emissions.
Archaeologists are “hard” scientists, driven by data, uniformitarianism, and a deep time perspective on human and natural history. My research demonstrated that humans had reacted to complex climate variation from Lake Baikal to Greenland over the past 100,000 years, climate variations that occurred in the complete absence of human greenhouse gas emissions. I see no reason to accept the automatic assumption that observed rising CO2 levels are solely the result of human emissions, or that the observed increase is significant with respect to the geological record of CO2 and temperature fluctuations.
It makes much more sense to me to view the present dynamic climatic situation in light of historical and geological records, particularly those of the past 2,000 years, for which we have independent data sets to confirm our findings. Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu has presented this perspective with remarkable clarity in his paper, On the recovery from the Little Ice Age, Natural Science, Vol.2, No.11, 1211-1224 (2010) http://www.scirp.org/journal/NS/
From this perspective, observed climate fluctuation is viewed as a continuation of natural geological and physical processes, in this case, recovery from the Little Ice Age.
This is not to say that human emissions do not contribute to climate fluctuation. However, we cannot understand the extent of human contributions until we fully understand the ongoing natural forces that have shaped the Earth’s climate for millennia before humans appeared on the scene.
Oh, and about smoking… in those days of yore in the wilds of Alaska, I used to smoke a pipe to wile away the lonely hours in tents and log cabins across the Arctic landscape. As my work shifted from field to laboratory, I gradually eschewed the fragrant clouds of tobacco smoke, until the day I realized I no longer enjoyed smoking.
I’m still working on the Global Warming part.
Thanks all for the Greenland typo catch. While folks in Iceland did suffer during the MWP, they were able to hang on by concentrating on available resources such as cod.
As always, WUWT is the home of intelligent, thinking readers. It’s a pleasure to be here.
The tree ring graphic doesn’t appear to support the MWP that lead to the “remarkable change” discussed in the article.
The 4th paragraph makes quite an assertion “The tree ring record reflected these cultural changes. Across the Bering Strait and into Interior Alaska, increasing temperatures and changing precipitation patterns were recorded in tree rings from Siberia to Fort Yukon around 1,000 BP.”
A really good article.
PS ..all those Greenland/Iceland comments reveal the sad truth that most posters do not read the posts of others.
TallBloke I noted also the apparent downward trend from BC but then the noticeable RED spike at the 2000 mark.
What is interesting is that if you look at the LAMB papers his past temperature trend through most of the recent ice ages shows a ‘sharp’ rise in temperature from a long plateau and then a ‘sudden’ drop into the following ice age.
Interesting article. But I still don’t think that trees are very good thermometers.
CAGW is an end-of-world cult with no set date for the worlds destruction. In this way it’s a much harder Sasquatch to kill than your average doomsday cult scenario, such as Y2K. Those that have already accepted the premise as being true are faced with a choice every time the data goes against them, “Do I accept that I may have been wrong all of these years with my alarmism, or do I accept that man’s influence is more complicated than I thought?” You can’t fault them for finding ways to not face the music, anyone would. You also can’t fault them for finding the second part of the choice plausible, as certainly it is an easily acceptable statement that man’s influence on the world is complicated. You can fault them for trying to convert you, which they do just as quickly as any Jehovah’s Witness at your door.
In some ways, I think we’re witnessing a wave of human cognitive disruption the size of which we’ve never before seen. I remember the build up to Y2K, I remember all the doomsday predictions. I remember famous people publicly declaring they were moving to their well-stocked wind-powered burm-homes in the middle of the U.S. What’s hilarious is that with each passing day I find myself realizing that Y2K was a bigger threat than AGW ever was.
More interestingly in contrast: the worlds businesses responded to Y2K. They realized there was a real threat to business and they didn’t want to be the one major company who was unable to do make money after the calendar shift. There was an entire industry of people who worked at fixing the issues and resolving the real problems. Most of this happened (to their shame) outside of the media’s vision, so that when Y2K went off without a single major hitch… they were all left with nothing to say. By comparison, I see no real old-world business response to CAGW. One has to note this, as it should make you stop and think if you believe CAGW to be the truth.
Now the world’s fears (without a world fear, it seems the world will invent one) are directed towards the burning of fuel and the warming of climate that will supposedly come from it. I grew up in a cult. I’ve seen adults deliberately living in fear of an “end time” because they felt they simply knew the truth of existence when their heathen neighbors did not. These adults desperately clung to their belief because they had rationalized themselves into believing that everyone else was just ignorant. These people quit their jobs and put their families of in turmoil because of their beliefs. They subjected their children to ridicule at public school due to their beliefs. They divorced because of their beliefs. They even disowned their own blood, all because it was easier to accept that someone else is stupid than all the years of self-righteous preaching was vanity. It was just too big of an earthquake in thinking to go back and eat crow.
Supposing a sudden event forces a re-think of their position (fast glaciation?), it will still take years before any significant number of these cultish believers sing a different tune. We’re not even seeing the beginnings of such an event as far as I can see. Climategate, as disgusting as it was to read those e-mails, was more like the first firecracker of the 4th of July; it was a small bang that let you know what was coming but not enough to make you jump. Many of these people tied to CAGW will cling to their belief in cataclysm to their last breath on some normal partly-cloudy day decades in the future. They’ll be waving the flags of impending doom well after the next world food crisis is solved.
I look at all of that, having come out of a childhood where critical thinking was denied me, and I literally tear up at the silent human suffering in all of it. It is such a waste. Humanity has in the past challenged itself. Now with the world fully explored and everyone rejecting the push for a frontier existence, we invent ways to fear our own shadow. Pioneers 200 years ago had plenty to fear, from disease, malnutrition, a harsh winter, etc… those people had real fears in their lives and they suffered daily. In their efforts they also laid the foundation for a modern world so comfortable no one would have predicted it.
My fear is that humanity will continue to artificially construct its own next challenges. My fear is that the trap of intelligent life in the universe is quite literally being too capable of imagination for their own good. It may not be some weird and as-yet unknown fact of physics that makes interstellar travel impossible that keeps aliens from visiting. It may not be some planet-wide war that kills intelligent life off. It could instead be the inevitable plunge into our own mental fancies that keeps us from realizing the challenges we could be accepting. There seems to be a real reason humans sometimes accomplish more while under the influence of alcohol, their imagined and cherished fears are removed.
With that said, I fear I may be out of beer.
Yep, warmer is better. Ask the vikings who disappeared from Greenland as a result of the the Little Ice Age.
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
Tony
What a great name! You are right-people seem to read the article but then go straight to the Leave A reply section. That is a shame as on a long thread the comments can add a great deal to the article.
Incidentally Michael A Lewis, that was a very nice article. Your very first graphic shows summer anomalies. Is this for Alaska? The Arctic generally? A world View?
Tonyb
Pederson et al studied drought variability of the Rocky Mountain region, especially Glacier National Park, during 1540-2000, found definite decadal and multidecadal swings, and noted a pronounced wet period in the later stages of the Little Ice Age.
http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/cirmount/wkgrps/ecosys_resp/postings/pdf/pederson_etal2006.pdf
Tony said :
PS ..all those Greenland/Iceland comments reveal the sad truth that most posters do not read the posts of others.
I’d be inclined to put the blame on comments waiting in a moderation queue, so no-one sees anyone else commenting, and then all the comments turn up at once.
(I haven’t seen anyone else making this comment yet!)
tonyb and Tony,
Methinks we also need to be aware that comments do not appear instantaneously. For example, when I made my comment about Greenland, there was only one visible comment — that by tallbloke. Now revisiting several hours later, there are tweny comments above tallbloke’s comment that were not there when I read the post initially. It isn’t always a matter of people just jumping to comment without reading, although I’m sure that also happens.
You are jumping to a wrong conclusion. The many similar comments resulted from not yet being able to see the prior comments still awaiting approval by the moderators.
What will future historians tell? …..Americans then migrated to…..
Many may be wondering about the strange association, made by the author, between non smoking and global warming. Well: both were invented by the same people.
Actually – the Vikings enjoyed nothing more than perilous voyages to bury timber under permafrost, in order to annoy the archeologists of the future.
How do we know this? Global Circulation Models, of course. These are able to faithfully reproduce their input data and show that current warming is caused by human produced CO2. Hence, it was significantly colder in medieval times, and hence the Viking (etc.) remains on Greenland must have been placed there when it was colder than it is now.
All assertions to the contrary are churlish.
(I’m voting for swath in the first line)
The temperature graph doesn’t seem right. There must have been greater temperature differences between the hot periods and the cold periods.
A few days ago, Canadian media published an article about scientists finding 2 million years old fossilized remnants of a forest on the Baffin Island. The spin was that it will help scientists determine how plants adapt to warmer climate. They missed the whole forest !!! The question should be what caused this warm climate so far up North.
I bet it was not CO2.
One correction to the correction:
No. The Europeans (in this case Vikings) were decimated by the rapidly deteriorating climate as the globe ran downhill towards the Little Ice Age. They were trapped by lack of timber to make ships, or open harbours which became blocked by advancing glaciers so that their relatives in Iceland and Scandinavia could no longer reach them. Iceland and Scandinavia had extremely harsh climatic conditions as well and suffered large population losses.
The Vikings became extinct in Greenland. And their entire culture was buried by ice and permafrost that has recently begun to melt and reveal what was there.
When people glibly talk of geoengineering to cool the planet, I find myself wondering about the pathetic deaths of the Vikings of Greenland, and shudder.
It’s normal for forests to grow on Baffin Island, until the most glaciations in the most recent 6 million years. The real question is to ask why it has been so extraordinarily cold compared to the last 550 million years?
Your very first graphic shows summer anomalies. Is this for Alaska? The Arctic generally? A world View?
tonyb
tonyb, the file name for the graphic is ‘yamal503.gif’, so I’d guess it’s data derived from the Yamal tree ring series. The Yamal peninsula lies about 130deg west of Alaska, and about 3 or 4deg higher. I don’t know where on the Yamal the series was taken from but I would guess the souther end of the peninsula. In general I’d think the climate is similar to the North Slope of Alaska- really cold in the winter, really short summer.
The name on the file is Yamal. This might provide a clue as to where the data originated (also the cited author is Hantemirov, a Russian who has studied Yamal).
Doug
Yamal eh? Mmmm
Tonyb
All
Fair comments about many people commenting on the greenland/iceland mistake as the comments had not yet appeared on the screen. How many times have I thought I was the very first to comment on a new thread ony to find I turn out to be 20th 🙂
tonyb
Warm is undoubtedly good: When the climate has been benign countries and civilizations flourished, “social justice” reached all the people just because of nature not because somebody decided it so. During cold periods things were, also obviously, bad, and people became hungry and poor, and not because some bad people decided it so too.
It is the Sun…..!:
http://personal.inet.fi/tiede/tilmari/sunspot7.html
A lot of commenters are trying to correct Dr Lewis about the alleged “European occupation of Greenland/Iceland” which should have ended around the LIA. Neither the commenters nor Dr Lewis seem to be quite right about this. Greenland is still Danish territory but with autonomy.
See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland