UPDATE 3/12/12 – a new study presents very strong evidence for the comet theory, see here
Bishop Hill alerts us to this news item in Miller-McCune, a policy and research website. It seems the scientific claims can’t be replicated by others…but wait for the kicker.
OK, having read that primer, it looks like a slam dunk for falsification, right?
Yet, the scientists who described the alleged impact in a hallowed U.S. scientific journal refuse to consider the critics’ evidence — insisting they are correct, even though no one can replicate their work: the hallmark of credibility in the scientific world.
…
“We are under a lot of duress,” said Kennett. “It has been quite painful.” So much so, that team members call their critics’ work “biased,” “nonsense” and “screwed up.”
…
“It is very peculiar,” Holliday said. “They propose an idea, a study contradicts it, then they criticize the scientists or the work.”
Hmm, where have we seen this sort of behavior before? Man o’ mann, I wish I could remember where contradictory peer reviewed scientific replication was dismissed as “biased,” “nonsense” and “screwed up.”.
But it reminds me of what might go on in scientific circles above Monks restaurant:
The news item in Miller-McCune is highly recommended reading
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This interesting link was posted here a while ago. Here is another post by the same reader.
$Billions wasted on harmless CO2, when the real threats are disregarded.
I increasingly feel that big chunks of science have gone bad. People claim all sorts of expertise – such as the ability to positively identify various nano-components in soil fragments – and in the end they can be just kidding themselves.
People claim they can take masses of data, corrupted in a variety of ill-defined ways, and process them to extract interesting information – climate change, and studying fluctuations in the background radiation, come to mind.
Cancer researchers are willing to turn a blind eye to the possibility that their cell cultures are corrupted, and they are not studying the right cells:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/file_on_4/7098882.stm
(this program is 4 years ago, but it still seems to be an on-going problem)
Peter Woit’s book details the way in which string theory has taken over theoretical physics, even though it has produced nothing testable.
The problem is that once science becomes dishonest, it is damn near impossible to know where the rot ends. There are rumors of other big scandals in science. Once I would not have believed them for a moment, but after watching the climategate coverup, I can’t be sure any more.
Don’t know what’s going on here, but this work being criticised, or rather the authors, was to check on someone else’s previous theory of a comet impact which wiped out rather a lot of species in North America. None of the ‘rebuttals’ make any sense, such as saying the mammoths were hunted to extinction (how by such a small population and not seen with the buffaloes and the vast population of later N.Americans until they were deliberately exterminated with superior fire power, etc.), or by saying the Clovis morphed into something else as this doesn’t explain the disappearance of these many and varied species, and, are all involved in the study of ‘dubious’ backgrounds as if that in itself makes the findings invalid anyway. In other words, the arguments against are really weird.
Anyway, here for the “Younger Dryas Boundary Impact Abstracts” http://www.georgehoward.net/final/AGUabstracts.pdf
What we do know is that we were coming to a periodic sudden rise in temps after about 100,000 years of being stuck in our Ice Age, this came to an abrupt end when we suddenly reverted back into it and when this happened a huge variety of species that had occupied those northern freed of ice climes, which had begun settling into seasonal patterns, became extinct at the same time. Maybe it was Summer.
Not sure of the dating of the ‘comet’, from this analysis. Maybe there’s a confusion between the end of the Ice Age into our Interglacial and the ‘comet’? Some stuff they found seems to have been rebutted as coming from a later date, 1,000 years later, which seems about right possibly for a beginning interglacial interrupted and then resumed another 1,000 years later – taking us more to the beginning of Holocene proper around 2-3 thousand years ago?
P.S. – There would therefore have been two huge melts associated with that time period. There could have been a first’s impact on whatever had begun to re-colonise the northern hemisphere, as land got swallowed up in huge rises in sea levels, some 300 ft, at the same time land rebounding when the final ice wall holding back melt to its north broke (there are native stories about such a thing, but not datable to 1st or 2nd event), and a second without the massive build up of ice of the first’s.
Something dramatic happened during the second that was ‘unprecedented’ in that the species which had adapted to being around further North after the beginning of the interglacial, suddenly disappeared. And, s’far as I can gather, we only know of them from remains found before the second cycle.
Eventually enough evidence will be accumulated to answer this question, but it will take time. The paper at the top of this thread isn’t much evidence at all, either way. Some researchers want to keep pushing the “man caused it” meme at all costs.
The below site isn’t conclusive for an impact, either, but certainly interesting:
http://craterhunter.wordpress.com/notes-on-ignimbrite-emplacement/part-two/
I think I have misremembered the sequence. It may have been that the Younger Dryas stopped the full effect of the first melt, at the beginning of the interglacial, and it didn’t come into full force as melt and huge rises in sea levels, the 300′ plus, until the interglacial could catch up with itself after another thousand years of extended cold.
Around the islands of ‘Britain’, the first melt caused a separation between England and Ireland, by the formation of the Irish Sea, but not until the second did the ice wall holding back the melted ice in huge lakes finally give way, flooding South creating the North Sea and separating England from the Continent.
This also shows up in animal migrations between England and Ireland. As the interglacial arrived and the climate became better further north, animals from ‘the continent’ began arriving in Britain and moving over to Ireland, the first wave of this was stopped by the creation of the Irish Sea and some creatures never made it over, the snakes, moles.
Yeah, Smokey, I don’t pretend to know exactly what happened but throwing all the baby out with the bath water seems foolish at this point. So, there might not have been a huge fire but a rain of melting ice from exploding core stream Taurids complex.
Quote: The disintegration of this massive Taurid Complex progenitor over some tens of thousands of years would yield meteoroid swarms which could easily lead to brief, catastrophic episodes of multiple bombardment by sub-kilometer bolides, and it is tempting to see the event at ∼ 12,900 BP as an instance of this. Whether it actually happened is a matter for Earth scientists, but from the astronomical point of view a meteoroid swarm is a much more probable event than a 4 km comet collision.
I suggest searching for Otto Mucks Secret of Atlantis at Google Books online and reading it.
Thanks. Some of you have provided some very interesting links & comments that makes the “certainty” that it wasn’t some type of extraterrestrial event, a definite uncertainty.
The origins issue of people in the Americas has a long history of politicking. The over-hunting of big game hypothesis is still the strongest, but it does not sit well with Native American activists and friendly environmentalists. It suggests, bluntly and ucomfortably, that the Amerindian was, like the rest of us, a mortal, greedy human after all, not the spiritually superior and environmentally super-aware “Avatar” caricature. The Clovis folk, like many human groups before them, chomped themselves into trouble because they couldn’t help themselves. The asteroid hypotheis, the weakest of all, hopes to aquit the Amerindian of sin, hence the emotional reaction to any challenge.
I tend to think that because all humans were and are, simply human, the Clovis culture adapted with ingenuity, brilliance and drive characteristic of all humans everywhere, ancient and modern, by rapidly adjusting their tool technology, thus seemingly “disappearing” from our perspective. Unfortunately, these qualities are not politically as admirable as the “being one with Nature” myth.
A G Foster says:
May 17, 2011 at 9:03 pm
###
The sudden appearance of the Grey Wolf in North America and a changing climate had as much to do with the mega fauna extinction as humans. The Dire wolf was an open planes hyper-carnivore. The Grey Wolf is a forest dwelling meso-carnivore, that also happened to have evolved specifically to hunt holarctic mega-fauna from wooded margins. Xiaoming Wang and Richard Tedford have written some papers on this. The anthropogenic mega-fauna extinction theory is very similar to the CAGW theory. Both are loved by greenies because the seem to show that man is evil, and they both rely on ignoring vast quantities of contrary evidence. Man most likely had a role, but that is defiantly not the whole story.
Desert Yote,
Evidently, the anthropogenic mega-fauna extinction theory serves the Greenies well in either arguing for humans as environmental huns, or as an example of a modern materialistic heresy which disses environmentally-friendly pristine peoples. However, it owes its origin in a good body of evidence and the emerging cultural materialism models of the 60s and 70s, which view humans as very focussed and extremely efficient in providing for themselves.
Oops, I think my brilliant riposte to Darren Parker’s Otto Muck recommendation was eaten by the site filters, never to be seen again on this plane of temporal existence, leaving humanity and posterity a little poorer for its disappearance. Sniff, sniff.
It would seem that with my listing a host of names of cockamanie pseudo-historical theories on origins of races and civilizations, many of them promoted by surviving acedemician relics of an evil, but unmentionable twentieth century regime, I inadvertantly overloaded the WUWT server.
@ur momisugly Peter Kovachev
The Secret of Atlantis – Otto Muck
http://www.archive.org/details/TheSecretOfAtlantis-OttoMuck
I am assuming it’s legal if you get it at a library . . . .
no real scientist has his/her head on a swivel … they know what they have done is ture and replicatable … the truth shall set you free …
its only the con-men who need to watch out …
I don’t think this is all over yet, as there are more pieces out there to be put together.
And I am not upset with the process, as it appears to me that there is an echo of the scientific method taking place: Data gathered. Someone sees connections, runs experiments, gathers additional data and posits a theory. Loudness ensues (testing). Theory is either upheld, modified or discarded. I think we are still in the Loudness ensues stage of this one. Unlike the glowarmers, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has been hiding data with this one.
Re: William’s Carolina Bays. Thanks for the photo of the bays. From the air, they look a lot like the small lakes that dot the Alaskan North Slope, which are all aligned in the same direction. Expect the mechanism for creation differs a bit, but amazing similarity from the air. Cheers –
Laurie Bowen,
Not sure I know what you mean, although I think the book is available in electronic format for free downloads. Regarding any bans, I only guessed that the automated filter banned an earlier post of mine because it listed by name a whole bunch of unwanted cooky theories which were fleshed out in war-time Germany, with many of the involved academics going back to teaching after the war and influencing a new cadre of believers. The hobgoblins include the hollow earth, ancient astronauts, Atlantis, Shangri La and flying saucers. The extent of pseudoscientific “research” in the Third Reich was quite significant and its inevitable re-emergence explains the explosion of weird theories in the happier and wealthier post-war years.
On the other hand, maybe there are no magical filters on the blog and I blew away my own post accidentally when I tried html tags.
The Grey Wolf competed with the Dire Wolves for 100s of ky before the mega-fauna extinction.
I remember reading an article on the atlatl, a researcher in Africa had trained himself to use one for years and got the chance to use in on an ill elephant that was to be put down anyway. One cast, the spear went all the way in and killed the elephant immediately.
Interesting analysis trying to work out why the Irish Elk became extinct in the Younger Dryas – http://bill.srnr.arizona.edu/classes/182/Giraffe/IrishElkExtinction.pdf
Just before the Younger Dryas there was the warm Allerod period during which the Elk flourished, (beginning around 12,000 BP). It had a longer growing season than the following Younger Dryas, or today, and the strain from juggling between the lack of sufficient nutrients to grow the huge antlers required for successful mating and the need to reduce size overall to survive poorer foraging, it seems, did for them.
And they put the trigger to the Younger Dryas cold down to Milankovitch of reduced Sun (Berger, 1978, 1992).
Personally, I like this variant of the theory http://cometstorm.wordpress.com/
On one extreme we have the dodo, which was wiped out in historical times (16th century as I recall), and on the other, the above mentioned Irish elk, which disappeared in Ireland shortly before the arrival of humans, hence due to climate changes. (But the theory that large antlers did them in seems rather specious–it requires a climate change so rapid that there was no time for adaptation, and we know that large antlered British deer were wiped out in historical times by selective hunting=selective breeding for small antlers.) Slightly removed from the dodo, is the elephant bird, which seems to have disappeared soon after the arrival of the Maoris. All your ideologies of evil or beneficent humans couldn’t save the elephant bird, or dodo, or thylacine, from annihilation at the hands of hungry humans–this is all historical fact, and it is pointless to argue the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna on any such ideological basis. We know human hunters were the “real men” who would burn down a forest to make a breakfast fire and wipe out a species for lunch. And we know that humans hunted mammoths. We also know that humans arrived suddenly in North America, and that human populations are capable of very rapid growth. After all, the Caucasion population of North America required only 400 years to reach 300 million. We know that buffalo are faster than elephants, and probably were faster than mammoths. We know that a mammoth can feed more people than a buffalo. And it is likely that mammoths had no instictive fear of humans. We know that 20th century Australians, even when they knew the thylacines were in danger of extinction, wiped them out anyway. And we can be sure that ancient Americans had little idea what mammoth populations were doing on a continental scale, nor would have care when starving.
So one of the few questions is, were the newcomers more likely to have practiced birth control and established an easy equilibrium with their prey, or have babies as fast as they could feed their mothers on mammoth meat? In other words, what advantages might we postulate the mammoth held over the dodo and the elephant bird? The most important factor may well have been how fast the prey could run, and the mammoth was probably somewhere between the elephant bird and the buffalo.
It’s true of course that the dodo and elephant bird were island species, which had no natural predators to worry about. But in some respects North America is an island when compared to Eurasia, and the arrival of the human predator spelled the arrival of the most ferocious predator of all. The two legged predator is neither good nor evil when he hunts, and he certainly was not environmentally concious–that is a luxury of a well fed, industrialized agricultural society, sufficiently removed from “nature” that it begins to distinguish between nature and technology.
On top of the appeal for a human invader which controls its population in some other manner than war and disease (and disease was probably not a problem for the first Americans) and famine, the nonhuman extinction hypothesis requires that we abandon all probability and statistics. Dozens of species thrive for millions of years, and at the precise moment in geological history that humans arrive, they disappear. Funny thing, that natural climate, which goes through its ice ages for three million years, and as soon as humans arrive it kills off the megafauna.
If it required unprecedented climate to bring humans to America you might make a case, but we are fairly certain that the timing of human arrival was determined by their newly acquired technology rather than unprecedented ice ages. They made better clothes and weapons and boats and lived further north so that they were ready when the path opened up.
CAGW has absolutely nothing to do with who or what wiped out the megafauna. That’s like saying modern humans are not capable of harming the environment. I for one am a “naysayer” because I consider AGW to be a farce by any scientific measure, just like I consider the nearly universal claim of a duck hawk stoop of 200mph+ to be utterly absurd, no matter who makes it. Such artificial linking of theories and ideologies is as when liberals lump creationists and “deniers” together. Not at all a propos. –AGF
Anthony –
The anti-Y-D impact side has had access to the main stream news media, and the pro-side has not. Supporting papers now number about 20, though mention of them gets left out when Vance Holliday and a few scientists whose long-held paradigms are threatened go to press in the guise of “objective” science reporters.
I will list here links to some articles at CosmicTusk.com, some of which have direct links to papers which have found supporting evidence for there having been a major impact and ejecta and impactites, including Helium 3, nanodiamonds, carbon spherules, etc., including elevated Iridium levels – not to mention the “black mat”.
Some of the studies purporting to “prove” there was no Y-D impactor have, in themselves, been sloppy, including the previously posted about Daulton “proof” that the Firestone people did not know their butts from holes in the ground about nanodiamonds – claiming that Firestone’s pre-2004 compatriots who did the crystallography should have known that what they were looking at was graphene and graphane – which is amazing, since graphene wasn’t even in existence before 2004. Daulton’s findings have been controverted by other studies since then – but those papers didn’t make it past the science reporters.
Anthony, you have this backward – it is the ANTI-Younger-Dryas Impact people who are gaming the science news system, not the Firestone people, who are merely keeping their noses to the grindstone and finding out what they can. The Y-D people don’t pretend (like AGW warmists) that they know everything; they admit thaat this is a complicated scenario, and multi-discipline. They have had to shift gears, but the broad scope seems to still point toward something happening at the 12.9 kya point in time, something that DID include the black mat (extending into Belgium and Venezuela, as the evidence shows so far).
Also, it is not the pro-Y-D side that is calling names and ducking behind ivory towers.
The list of links I have:
“Black Mat: Third paper details Venezuelan occurrence” (April 28th, 2011) – with link to full papers
http://cosmictusk.com/black-mat-third-paper-details-venezuelan-occurrence
“Vindication: Critic finds Nanodiamonds in Younger Dryas Boundary Claeys [sic]” (December 21st, 2010) – with link to full paper
http://cosmictusk.com/vindication
“Geomorphology Of Possible Younger Dryas Boundary Impact Structure A Cosmic Impact and Distal Ejecta Manifold” (November 26th, 2010 ) – with link to full paper
http://cosmictusk.com/geomorphology-of-possible-younger-dryas-boundary-impact-structure-a-cosmic-impact-and-distal-ejecta-manifold
“Article: Chilled Diamonds Shine Light on Comet Collision” (Published on September 16, 2010) – with link to full paper
http://cosmictusk.com/permanent-link-to-chilled-diamonds-shine-light-on-comet-collision
“YDB press release: Scientists discover nanodiamonds in Greenland ice
Scientists discover nanodiamonds in Greenland ice” (September 8th, 2010 in Space & Earth / Earth Sciences)
http://cosmictusk.com/ydb-press-release-scientists-discover-nanodiamonds-in-greenland-ice
“Black Mat: Third paper details Venezuelan occurrence”
http://cosmictusk.com/black-mat-third-paper-details-venezuelan-occurrence
“Clovis Age Crater Found in Canada: That Makes Three”
http://cosmictusk.com/clovis-age-crater-found-in-canada-that-makes-three
“Video: Evidence of Clovis Black Mat located in Ontario”
http://cosmictusk.com/video-evidence-of-clovis-black-mat-located-in-ontario
Anthony – I am perplexed how you can be taking the side you are, on this controversial topic. You are being a stooge for the very kinds of scientists as Mann and Phil Jones and at RealClimate.
The real scientists are the ones who were at the Acapulco conference in 2007 that brought this to the attention of the world. None of them is saying we need to kill off industry and put the whole world under the boot heels of some Uber-alles-comet-defending bureaucracy. It is a complicated theory, and some evidence is coming out in favor, and some (biased) studies are coming out claiming to hammer the nails in the Y-D Impact’s coffin. The evidence is still coming in, and it will be years before anyone really knows what happened.
Anthony, by taking the side you are, you are wrong. This is science in progress, with both sides looking for evidence. But the entrernched side has the red phone to the science reporters and editors, and they are getting MSM attention, while the upstarts have nos such advantage in getting their story out. Assertions by the “real” scientists that the pro-Y-D people are ignoring evidence is all a bunch of spin doctoring.
Anthony –
My apologies. I think I misconstrued your POV on this. You weren’t taking the side of the Holliday people, but seeing a parallel to AGW. I don’t know how I read that wrong. Mea culpa.
There is a definite “scientific insider” semi-coordinated attack going on. A paradigm is threatened, and the attack dogs are out in full force – mainly by controlling the “public” dialogue through science editors they are in bed with. Notice how all the news items that make it to the public are submissive of the whole idea, as if the 17 or so scientists on the Firestone paper were . . . . drum roll, please. . . . skeptics.
REPLY: Yes a parallel – No worries – Anthony
@DesertYote May 17, 2011 at 2:47 pm:
I’ve been keeping close tabs on this for quite some time, but don’t consider myself to be an expert. But what I’ve read is that the black mat is a dividing line. Before that, there were megafauna and Clovis man in the Americas. After that, for about 1100 years there were humans, but at that point humans start showing up. The megafauna didn’t come back at all after (above) the black mat. The Y-D theorists argue that the black mat is due to heavy duty and nearly continent-wide fires.
The main thing we should be aware of first is that it is technically the Younger-Dryas Stadial – a cooling period in between warm periods (at the end of the Bolling-Allerød Interstadial). Its onset was extremely sudden; after the planet had been warming up for several thousand years, we went back into an ice age again – but one that was too short to bring on massive glaciation (though some did expand). For all intents and purposes it is nearly impossible to say that the Younger-Dryas was not the end of the Pleistocene or the beginning of the Holocene.
As with the dying off of the megafauna, no one has a clear idea what brought on the Y-D Stadial, but it happened in so short a time that 10 years is an accepted figure. This sudden drop in temps was 27F in Greenland. That makes the 0.8C since 1900 a real piker. But the 10 years is only a best guess.
That all these things coincided – the great dying off of the NA megafauna, the disappearance of Clovis man, the black mat, the double-digit temperature drop – leaves it all wide open to interpretation.
Note the the “Clovis man kill-off” was only an idea, not proven science. How a few thousand spear-throwing guys could wipe out extremely large animals on a continent of 8 million square miles – that one is far less plausible than that a comet or meteor came and did them all in. But the kill-off also doesn’t explain why the black mat just happened to be right where the die-off was, and it doesn’t explain why the animals who had lived through ice ages before all of a sudden were taken out. Clovis man was all circumstantial evidence. Consider that NA and Africa are somewhat the same size – but all the millions of hunters in Africa couldn’t take out all the animals there. So how did a few thousand do it in NA? It didn’t happen. It was a silly specious hypothesis, and only got traction because no one had a better one. Now there is competition, and the Overkill theorists are defending their turf.
Ah, you may say, but all of the evidence about the comet is also circumstantial. Yes. And so is the 65 Mya dinosaur killer. And so is all of the evidence about Australopithecus and homo erectus (you could put all the pre-sapiens fossils recovered in all of history into one small room), so a lot of extrapolating is going on, no matter what the theory is. And so was the “Clovis man did it” theory.
@Adam Gallon May 18, 2011 at 12:31 am:
Good points, Adam.
The thing is, a little over 100 years ago, rocks didn’t fall from the sky. 40 years ago, Barringer Crater was not accepted as a meteor crater. Gene Shoemaker changed that last bit. 10 years ago, there was no consensus on what the Tunguska event was. It seemed certain to the people 100 years ago that it must have been a meteor – after all, rocks DO come out of the sky; that is what science had by then accepted. But only rocks. Not comets. They just fly by. Right now, we are in the infancy of studying what has hit the Earth.
Right now, they accept that Tunguska was a comet, but since it exploded in the atmosphere, they only accept that – and no more:
Let’s face it, they don’t accept anything until it happens. That comes from Uniformitarianism and Gradualism:
And until it DOES happen in the present, they simply won’t accept it as real. In 1994, when Shoemaker-Levy/9 hit multiple times on Jupiter, the geologists and astronomers were proven wrong – comets DO hit planets. But they couldn’t bring themselves to admit comets DO hit Earth. Jupiter, that vacuum cleaner in the sky, sweeps all those pesky little comets right out of the sky, so Earth has a bodygaurd, according to them.
Don’t be fooled. Tunguska was only ONE comet. Every comet is going to be different. Loosely agglomerated, they won’t act uniformly like iron-nickel meteors do. What one does may never happen quite the same way again. But the astronomers don’t see it that way. What can happen is only what we have seen happen – at least on Earth.
Look around at some areas on Google Earth and you will see around the New Mexico/Texas/Mexico border some amazing sites. Look in South America at the Rio Cuarto long elliptical impacts. We have only just begun to find out what kind of things have impacted the Earth. The geologists claim that all those things happened in the remote past, millions of years ago. But impact sites are being dated to 12.9 kya almost as we speak. (see my list above) The geologists, on this subject, are wrong. Gene Shoemaker got us to get our heads out of the sand about meteors, but we haven’t even begun to accept that comets have hit the Earth a lot – and there is evidence that some of those happened in the human era. Some seem to have hit in the historical era, but with so little research having been done, who knows what we will find out when all is said and done? The only thing that is really true is that we will find many impacts. It is too early to tell anything certain – but with idiots like Holliday out there, stopping scientific progress, that certainty will be a long time into the future.
Are we at risk now? We should be looking into it. Are we? Not really. (I don’t want to be an alarmist. If we don’t know, we should find out, and I suggest we do it fairly aggressively. If we are at risk, we are the only generation in history with a possible capacity to deal with it. If we are truly not at risk, then we can breathe safely. But not looking into it would be monumentally stupid.)