Canadian Harp Seals may have “read” the predictions of the coming decades of stabilization of global temperatures and perhaps some cooling. Animals like the Harp Seal have experienced many millions of years of climatic change and, through the complex processes of evolution and natural selection, may have developed an ability to sense coming changes.
This is from The Boston Channel:
Small numbers of juvenile harp seals are typically found each winter stranded along the coast of the northeastern United States. But this year, well over 100 adult harp seals – not juveniles – have been spotted … In some areas they’re reporting three times the normal number of sightings … we’ve had four sightings of adult harp seals in North Carolina, which we’ve never had before. We typically don’t see them that far south. …
For now, there is no clear explanation for why more seals are showing up in U.S. waters, said Gordon Waring, who heads the seal program at NOAA’s fisheries science center in Woods Hole, Mass.
They could be making their way south because of climatic conditions or perhaps in search of food, Waring said.
“These animals are known to wander a lot,” Waring said. “Whether they’re following food down or whatever, we don’t really have a good understanding of it.”
Garron said she and the seal organizations will look at environmental trends, such as water temperatures, to see if it’s influencing the harp seal range.
Regardless of the reason, biologists are taking notice, Doughty said.
Read more from The Boston Channel here.
Here is a 2009 WUWT item about Henrik Svensmark and his Global Cosmic Ray theory of how reduced Solar activity leads to cooling periods. Svensmark says “In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable …”
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Alexander Feht says:
March 21, 2011 at 7:16 pm
Poor, poor us, ignorant unpublished masses! We are left in total confusion.
The usual phrase is ‘unwashed masses’. But you are right, your total confusion shows.
With an as yet undetermined appendage Ira writes:
“Animals like the Harp Seal have experienced many millions of years of climatic change and, through the complex processes of evolution and natural selection, may have developed an ability to sense coming changes.”
One you buy into the narrative that random mutation and natural selection turned some ancient bacteria into a Harp Seal it’s pretty easy to believe the same process could give it the ability to predict the climate years in advance, huh?
Stupid is as stupid does.
I can’t wait for Polar Bears to show up in Harvard Yard and take to predating Environmental Science post-docs. I wonder what they taste like.
Sharp eyes, P. F. ! The photo, which I took from the story I quoted from The Boston Channel, is a juvenile Harp Seal, not an adult. The story is that juveniles have been seen in the past, but the special thing about the sightings this year is that they are of adults. I guess The Boston Channel either did not have a handy photo of an adult, or they used the photo of the juvenile because it was taken in Boston Harbor in 2009. Here is the caption for the photo:
Sorry, Leif, but the GCR’s come from the Galaxy, and we have not been measuring so long that we can have confidence that the Galaxy cannot dish out the galactic equivalent of the 1850’s Carrington Event… and sustain it.
Hold the verdict until Svensmark has had a chance to do his physics.
Andrew30 says:
March 21, 2011 at 6:22 pm
Actually Andy, you’re wrong too. It’s not about surviving. It’s about reproducing mo’betta. In more up-to-date sciency terminology we call it differential reproduction. “Survival of the fittest” is so 19th century.
@Ira
You say animals like the Harp Seal have experienced many millions of years of climate change.
Here’s a clue, Ira. Every living cell line today has been “evolving” for the same length of time as every other living cell line. This is an unavoidable consequence of common ancestry. Given that all life evolved from a common ancestor and it all happened on this planet then every living thing (excepting those that don’t make a living near the surface) has experienced as much “climate change” as every other living thing. Therefore humans had an equal opportunity for evolution to give them the gift of climate prediction.
So I was just wondering if you had been feeling any unexplained urges to pack your bags and move to Africa.
rbateman says:
March 21, 2011 at 9:13 pm
Sorry, Leif, but the GCR’s come from the Galaxy, and we have not been measuring so long that we can have confidence that the Galaxy cannot dish out the galactic equivalent of the 1850′s Carrington Event… and sustain it.
We have been measuring GCRs covering 10,000 years…
Hold the verdict until Svensmark has had a chance to do his physics.
He has been at it since 1997…
Ira;
I disagree with you.
It may simply be because I appear to have a different definition of the word ‘develop’. I understand it to mean something that is learned, created, exploited or discovered by an already living thing.
I believe that natural mutation occurs as a consequence of fertilization, not before or after.
Mutation is not a development, it is an instantiated trait that may be beneficial or not, if it is beneficial then it moves on to form a larger portion of the population, it not it diminishes to extinction.
If I understand you correctly you are indicating that mutation is a development, I disagree, I think that some mutations enable development but they are not in and of themselves development, they are random chance.
The phrase ‘have evolved many traits’, implies a conscious control in the creation of mutation and evolution. I also believe that nature does not ‘recognize’ anything. To imply purpose or consciousness to nature enables people to ask why nature is the way it is.
In nature there is no why, only how; why is a theological question.
We are all free to believe what we choose to believe as long as we do not believe that other must believe it too. You and perhaps many other, believe that you are right; but disagree, and that’s allowed.
Perhaps all we disagree on is the use and meaning of a few words.
Leif Svalgaard says:
March 21, 2011 at 9:42 pm
If you mean we have been measuring rocks/ice etc., that’s not the same thing as a detector readout. Data gets mushed all too easily, or simply deteriorates.
Heck, I can see that in the Ice Cores. The natural variance simply feathers out into a solid line.
Leif Svalgaard says:
March 21, 2011 at 9:42 pm
He has been at it since 1997…
So? The CERN Cloud project was not available in 1997.
Percival Lowell drew canals on Mars, and it wasn’t until Mariner that we knew for certain, though rightly suspect.
Certainty has it’s own reward.
Leif Svalgaard says:
March 21, 2011 at 7:35 pm
“Species do not ‘develop’ to survive, they develop IF they survive.”
“That needed to be said.”
Stick to solar science, Leif. There are many critters alive today called “living fossils”. They don’t appear to have developed at all over enormous stretches of time. Sort of like the energizer bunny, some species just keep going and going and going for hundreds of millions of years without change. The average endurance of species from first appearance to extinction in the fossil record is just several million years. Yet some large animal species are hundreds of millions of years old and still around. In the case of things like blue-green algae they are presumed to be billions of years old with no substantial evolutionary changes. Evolution happens except when it doesn’t.
rbateman says:
March 21, 2011 at 10:01 pm
If you mean we have been measuring rocks/ice etc., that’s not the same thing as a detector readout.
There is a detector readout. You pass the detector over the ice core and watch the readout. The ice core data is good. Even shows the eleven year cycle.
rbateman says:
March 21, 2011 at 10:06 pm
Certainty has it’s own reward.
some people seem to be certain beforehand…
Andrew30,
Perhaps if if we restrict the word “evolution” to possessed genes you are right, but a quick search of “Lamarkism revisited” brought up some interesting papers dealing with the expression of these genes, and how later generations can be affected by the environmental conditions of their parents and grandparents.
“Because a genome can pick up or shed a methyl group much more readily than it can change its DNA sequence, Jirtle says epigenetic inheritance provides a “rapid mechanism by which [an organism] can respond to the environment without having to change its hardware.” Epigenetic patterns are so sensitive to environmental change that, in the case of the agouti mice, they can dramatically and heritably alter a phenotype in a single generation. If you liken the genome to the hardware of a computer, Jirtle explains, then “epigenetics is the software. It’s the grey area. It’s just so darn beautiful if you think about it.”
Read more: Epigenetics: Genome, Meet Your Environment – The Scientist – Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/14798/#ixzz1HInwzKkY
Dave Springer;
Therefore humans had an equal opportunity for evolution to give them the gift of climate prediction.>>>
Did Not! Discovered fire, agriculture, the wheel, carpentry, house building, combustion engine, electricity, central heating, central air conditioning, humidity control, we’ve long since taken control of our environment. We adapt the environment to us! No more evolving! And if bad traits emerge in our gene pool, we’ll find treatments for them and dag nabbit we’ll preserve those genes too. Preserve ’em all! Good ones! Bad ones! Useless ones!
We got so many bad genes running around because we’re immune to natural selection, we’ve even got a strain of humans emerging that figure the environment is out to kill us all. I think its the ipccgeneticdispositiontobeingfleeced gene. The only immunity they have is to logic, they insist all the fire, wheels, agriculture, etc are WHY the environment is out to kill us.
These however should not be confused with the pseudo strain the appears very similar. They can be differentiated by response to logic which follows a very predictable pattern:
“Needs more study. Send grant money”.
Andrew30 says:
March 21, 2011 at 9:46 pm
“I believe that natural mutation occurs as a consequence of fertilization, not before or after.”
If you’re struggling to say that heritable mutations must occur in germ cells then you’d be partially correct as that applies to all obligate sexual reproducers. Somatic cell mutations are not heritable in animals although they are in plants but they still most definitely play a role in natural selection as somatic cell mutations can change an individual’s reproductive success even when the mutation itself is not passed along to offspring. I won’t go into epigenetics but I easily could and that complicates things even more by blurring the line about where and how heritable change takes place. Most of the living world however reproduces asexually and do not have differentiated germ cells. In the prokaryotic world and even in a few asexual eukaryotes though there are genetic transfers that take place between individuals through what are called plasmids. Horizontal gene transfer can also take place in “higher” animals through retroviruses that happen to infect germ cells. Our genomes are littered with the carcasses of retroviruses. Some 8 percent of our DNA is composed of endogenous retroviruses. Compare that to genes (coding DNA) which only makes up about 2% of the human genome. Genes were once thought to be the only thing that mattered and the rest was functionless (so-called “junk DNA”). The rest is still called junk out of habit but a lot of the non-coding junk is now known to have other biological functionality.
I can’t believe this crowd missed the most obvious answer. The seals have been pushed out of their traditional living areas by artic researchers. When you have planeloads of guvment funded researchers hitting the beach, virtual armys of greenies with hockey stick graphs and lattes (skim milk) in hand watching guard over poor little baby seal nests, what do you think would happen? The seals just couldn’t take the pressure of the constant whining, ear bud adjusting, trying to get a signal for my cellphone by climbing up on this big old iceberg bunch. I’m sure the final straw though was the constant hum of the warmists chanting, its global warming/climate change/disruption followed by the warning cry, watch for rotten ice! Its here, its there, its everywhere….
They. Just. Couldn’t. Take. It. Anymore.
Speaking of epigenetics anyone interested in heritable change that drives evolution should be aware of the recently discovered roles for molecules called siRNA (small interfering RNA) and miRNA (micro RNA). The protoplasm of cells is swimming with a huge diverse horde of them and the mix changes due to external environmental factors. When a germ cell is created it gets a portion of the protoplasm from the originating cell. siRNA and miRNA have been found to play a major role in up regulating and down regulating targeted gene and gene family activity. Since the mix can change due to environmental factors and daughter cells inherit the mix from the mother cell when division takes place this is essentially epigenetic inheritance. For a over one hundred years, until very recently, Lamarkian evolution (the idea that traits acquired during the lifetime of an individual are passed on to offspring) was considered falsified by Mendelian genetics. Lamarckism today is known to be alive and well and probably (IMO) plays a more important role in evolution than random mutation. The numbers for random mutation and natural selection just don’t add up once you start digging deep enough into them. Charles Darwin was a Larmarckist. I doubt he would have swallowed the modern random mutation theory as the underlying source for diversity. Random (with regard to fitness) mutations in DNA are just too bloody unlikely to have any beneficial effect. Random mutation and natural selection is a conservative mechanism which inhibits species from wandering too far off the reservation and when they do wander too far they go extinct.
If armadillos started wandering across the border into Canada, the headline at the Warmist blogs would read:
Climate Refugees from the US!
And these blogs would offer precious few alternative hypotheses to CAGW. As usual, we nasty, evil humans would be to blame.
My stoopid question of the day:
Is realclimate covering the Harp Seal story?
Pamela Gray says:
March 21, 2011 at 7:12 pm
“And guess what animal loves to EAT these seals?”
I believe that is the most salient post here.
Bonus question: What species, while paddling around in the surf, is usually mistaken for a seal by that predator?
Joshua says:
March 21, 2011 at 6:27 pm
“Just curious. I remember seeing reports that of observed changes in migratory patterns in animals and zone changes in plants, the vast majority are consistent with global warming.”
Dr. Constance Millar looked at the remains of dead trees on Whitewing Mountain in the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains, in California. She found two things. First, dendrochronology (tree ring studies) showed that the trees died (apparently from venting of volcanic gases) in the year 1350, which is within the MWP. Second, the dead tree remains included species that today are only found at significantly lower altitudes. The inescapable conclusion: The year 1350 was appreciably warmer than anything we’ve experienced since the LIA. Here’s a link.
http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/millar/psw_2006_millar027.pdf
Having a case selective perception, are we?
Larry Fields,
the dead tree remains included species that today are only found at significantly lower altitudes. The inescapable conclusion: The year 1350 was appreciably warmer than anything we’ve experienced since the LIA.>>>
There are many, many, examples that fit that narrative. Can’t help but laugh when a warmist points to a receding glacier as proof of global warming while refusing to acknowledge the 600 year old remains of a primitive hunting camp that the receding glacier has exposed. Nope, never was warmer than it is now….
But the better one I think is pumping CO2 into greenhouses. The greenhouse to achieve higher growing temps and CO2 because the plant production sky rockets. Almost like the plants evolved through natural selection to be at maximum productivity at much higher temperatures and much higher CO2 levels than we have now.
But obviously that couldn’t be since it has never been warmer than it is now, and CO2 levels over 280ppm are unnatural. So there must be come other cause. That’s it! Plant genes can predict the future! They’re evolving in advance! Hey everybody! The plants are pre-evolving for higher CO2 and higher temps! How the heck did they know humans were going to show up and pump the atmosphere full of CO2 and warm up the planet?
Quick! Needs more study! Get a grant!
I have told this story before in a reply on WUWT, but the arguments above make it worth repeating.
In the mid 1950s, an older Maori was working with me building a new farm fence on pasture bordering a swamp. He was watching ducks building nests and remarked
“Gunna be very wet this coming season. Ducks are nestin’ real high up the banks of the creek that feeds that swamp.” I have no idea if the ducks actually had any foreknowledge of the coming wet season, but the very wet season certainly arrived as my workmate had deduced. Since that incident, I have observed many times that humans, animals and birds do vary their behaviours according to some sense of coming weather cycles and are sensitive to phenomena such as air pressure. Ask any teacher of infants how small children behave when a weather front is approaching! And no, I know of no academic papers or learned studies that might back me up with this.
Leif Svalgaard says:
March 21, 2011 at 10:21 pm
some people seem to be certain beforehand…
That in response to rbateman.
Please don’t think I’m setting out to be discourteous but doesn’t your remark apply to you in this instance? You appear to be implying in your earlier post (The long-term changes in cosmic ray intensity have been so small [e.g. http://www.puk.ac.za/opencms/export/PUK/html/fakulteite/natuur/nm_data/data/SRU_Graph.jpg ] that one cannot blame the cooling on the cosmic rays) that you’ve made up your mind on the issue. However, is it not the case that the whole point of the CERN Cloud project is to confirm or deny that which can only, thus far, be a hypothesis? If that is so, aren’t you being slightly premature in making your definitive statement?