This is interesting. While there’s much noise from alarmists that we are on an “Arctic death spiral” the team for this paper’s press release today found evidence that ice levels were about 50% lower 5,000 years ago. The paper references changes to wind systems which can slow down the rate of melting (something we’ve seen on the short term, even NASA points this out for recent historic ice retreats). They also suggest that a tipping point under current scenarios is unlikely saying that even with a reduction to less than 50% of the current amount of sea ice the ice will not reach a point of no return (i.e. a tipping point). From the University of Copenhagen:
Large variations in Arctic sea ice
For the last 10,000 years, summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has been far from constant. For several thousand years, there was much less sea ice in The Arctic Ocean – probably less than half of current amounts. This is indicated by new findings by the Danish National Research Foundation for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen. The results of the study will be published in the journal Science.
Sea ice comes and goes without leaving a record. For this reason, our knowledge about its variations and extent was limited before we had satellite surveillance or observations from airplanes and ships. But now researchers at the Danish National Research Foundation for Geogenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark (University of Copenhagen) have developed a method by which it is possible to measure the variations in the ice several millennia back in time.
The results are based on material gathered along the coast of northern Greenland, which scientists expect will be the final place summer ice will survive, if global temperatures continue to rise.
This means that the results from northern Greenland also indicate what the conditions are like in the ocean.
Less ice than today
Team leader Svend Funder, and two other team members and co-authors of the Science article, Eske Willerslev and Kurt Kjær, are all associated with the Danish Research Foundation at the University of Copenhagen.
Regarding the research results, Funder says, “Our studies show that there have been large fluctuations in the amount of summer sea ice during the last 10,000 years. During the so-called Holocene Climate Optimum, from approximately 8000 to 5000 years ago, when the temperatures were somewhat warmer than today, there was significantly less sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, probably less than 50% of the summer 2007 coverage, which was absolutely lowest on record. Our studies also show that when the ice disappears in one area, it may accumulate in another. We have discovered this by comparing our results with observations from northern Canada. While the amount of sea ice decreased in northern Greenland, it increased in Canada. This is probably due to changes in the prevailing wind systems. This factor has not been sufficiently taken into account when forecasting the imminent disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.”
Driftwood unlocks mystery
In order to reach their surprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the team organised several expeditions to Peary Land in northern Greenland. Named after American Polar explorer Robert E. Peary, the region is an inhospitable and rarely visited area, where summer blizzards are not uncommon.
” Our key to the mystery of the extent of sea ice during earlier epochs lies in the driftwood we found along the coast. One might think that it had floated across sea, but such a journey takes several years, and driftwood would not be able to stay afloat for that long. The driftwood is from the outset embedded in sea ice, and reaches the north Greenland coast along with it. The amount of driftwood therefore indicates how much multiyear sea ice there was in the ocean back then. And this is precisely the type of ice that is in danger of disappearing today,” Funder says.
After the expeditions had been completed, the team needed to study the wood they had collected: wood types had to be determined and it had to be carbon-14 dated. The driftwood originated near the great rivers of present-day North America and Siberia. The wood types were almost entirely spruce, which is widespread in the Boreal forest of North America, and larch, which is dominates the Siberian taiga. The different wood types therefore are evidence of changing travel routes and altered current and wind conditions in the ocean.
Beach ridges and wave breaking
The team also examined the beach ridges along the coast. Today, perennial ice prevents any sort of beach from forming along the coasts of northern Greenland. But this had not always been the case. Behind the present shore long rows of beach ridges show that at one time waves could break onto the beach unhindered by sea ice. The beach ridges were mapped for 500 kilometres along the coast, and carbon-14 dating has shown that during the warm period from about 8000 until 4000 years ago, there was more open water and less coastal ice than today.
Point of no return
“Our studies show that there are great natural variations in the amount of Arctic sea ice. The bad news is that there is a clear connection between temperature and the amount of sea ice. And there is no doubt that continued global warming will lead to a reduction in the amount of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The good news is that even with a reduction to less than 50% of the current amount of sea ice the ice will not reach a point of no return: a level where the ice no longer can regenerate itself even if the climate was to return to cooler temperatures. Finally, our studies show that the changes to a large degree are caused by the effect that temperature has on the prevailing wind systems. This has not been sufficiently taken into account when forecasting the imminent disappearance of the ice, as often portrayed in the media,” Funder says.
Research could also benefit polar bears
In addition to giving us a better understanding of what the climate in northern Greenland was like thousands of years ago, it could also reveal how polar bears fared in warmer climate. The team plans to use DNA in fossil polar bear bones to study polar bear population levels during the Holocene Climate Optimum.
The team’s findings are to be published in the journal Science.
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The US has heavily subsidized wind and solar. Credit rating downgraded this week. Of course, it’s not all due to the insane subsidies of ‘green’ power, which wouldn’t exist commercially without a big government crutch. But it’s the exact same statist mindset behind all the financial chicanery.
Actually, I’m very fond of America. I studied music in LA, it was an amazing two years. What I love the most about Americans is their go for it attitude. Americans can really get things done, but it will take innovation for you to get off your addiction to foreign oil. I do worry about America, it stands for so much, but has so many problems at present. Your biggest problem is how you borrow from China, which prop up your economy, allowing ordinary Americans to purchase Chinese goods. So the money flows back into China, and yet you Americans still have to pay it back. The Chinese are really taking the Mickey. To make matters worse this money is spent on consumerism, instead of investing in your educational establishments. Bright young people, studying Hi-Tech, Quantum Mechanics, Nuclear Power, is where innovation will come from. Knowledge is the new currency. I hope America gets its act back together soon.
Inda sez:
“…it will take innovation for you to get off your addiction to foreign oil.”
Actually, all it would take is political will. America has more oil reserves than all of Saudi Arabia, but the enviro-tyrants stridently oppose any attempt to make use of all that available oil. Allowing drilling would result in world oil prices dropping precipitously. But the enviro-cult wants very high oil prices to justify their wildly expensive, totally inefficient windmills. Fossil fuels are the gold standard of energy efficiency, and they are far more “green” than any alternative, when all costs and subsidies are accounted for.
And saying, “…allowing ordinary Americans to purchase Chinese goods” sounds a bit Totalitarian to me. I am an ordinary American, and I will buy whatever I feel like buying, with my own money. I just bought a made-in-China granite counter top for $89. Fifteen years ago I bought an almost identical one for over $400. What government has the intrinsic right to tell me how I can spend the money I earn? And no one is forcing China to buy U.S. debt. They’re doing it for their own self-serving reasons.
Those who presume to be wiser than “ordinary” folks are always the same ones who want to forcibly micro-manage everyone’s life for them. No, thanks. We’ve already had too many Kim Jong-ils, Hitlers, Pol Pots, Maos and Uncle Joes over the past century. Their Totalitarian mindset is always the same. And yes, Hitler was a Leftist. The victors simply re-wrote history.
Smokey : America has more oil reserves than all of Saudi Arabia
Now that we have (once again) established that Smokey is living in a make-belief world, what remains is the mysterious entity called “Inda House” who claims to be European and vegan, and seems not to mind that the Smokey entity does not answer his questions.
Inda House, where do you live where you get a “guaranteed 60 cents per kW/h feed in tariff” and “The government paid half because I’ve recently had my house insulated, also paid for by the government” ?
And since everyone seems to be talking off-topic here, what do the WUWT moderators do [snip ~ try to keep touch ~ ctm]
“You see, climate, unlike weather isn’t a random walk”
The paleo record resembles a drunk walking down a hallway. Most of the time the drunk leans against one wall or the other for stability (22C or 11C), but on occasion moves over to the other wall for no apparent reason. Between the walls the drunk is unstable. As you reduce the time scale the pattern is maintained, suggesting a fractal distribution.
Climate science assumed that climate is more predictable than weather, that the Law of Large Numbers operates on climate. However, that is only an assumption and likely a naive one at that. Time series rarely obey the LLN. The Law of Large numbers relies on a constant mean and deviation, which is unlikely to be true in the case of climate.
A coin toss averages out over time because the coin is constant. The coin doesn’t change, thus the more times you throw the coin, the more likely the number of heads and tails are to even out. However, the planet is not constant. Over time the earth changes, life changes, the distribution of the land mass changes, the tidal and radiation influences on the earth from the cosmos changes.
So in effect climate is a coin toss in which the coin is constantly changing. Sometimes it favors heads, sometimes it favors tails, and there is no way to know in advance which is favored due to the overall complexity of the system. For all intents and purposes climate follows the Uncertainty Principle. We can know how much temperature will change, but not when, or we can know when it will change, but not by how much. But we cannot know how much it will change and when it will change at the same time.
“For example I just had a $18000 Solar PV installation fitted. The government paid half because I’ve recently had my house insulated, also paid for by the government.”
Indeed, but to give you this money the government borrowed it in your name from the banks and unless the government can grow the economy at a rate equal or greater than the interest rates, this money will remain a mill stone around your neck for the rest of your life. Every year the taxes you pay that could have gone to build roads, bridges, educate your children, provide for your old age, that money will instead flow to the banks. In 20 years time (or less), when your PV installation is on its last legs and must be replaced, the debt will still remain. Where will you get the money to replace the PV installation?
““CO2 is harmful if it causes global warming…”
Not if you live in a place where the temperature is too cold to support human life without fire or its equivalent. Which coincidentally happens to be the entire surface of the earth outside the tropics.
An unprotected human will die of exposure if the temperature drops much below 27C for any length of time. The current global average temperature is 14.5C and the paleo record over the past 600 million years shows that the average temperature rarely exceeds 22C even with CO2 levels well above anything that could be reached by burning all known fossil fuel reserves on earth..
ferd;
Very nice three-fer. Thanks.
But humans are tougher than you state. The natives of the Tierra del Fuego lived virtually without fuel, furs, or fibres for clothing and warmth, scavenging a little driftwood for their cliff fires. (Hence the name.) They are cold-adapted, and survive naked in freezing temperatures. Ask a Norwegian what the temp is when he changes out of his short sleeves!
Smokey said: America has more oil reserves than all of Saudi Arabia
Rob says:
“Now that we have (once again) established that Smokey is living in a make-belief world…”
Rob, get up to speed on the real world:
Thanx for your baseless opinion, Rob. Run along now to Skeptical Pseudo-Science for some new talking points, that’s a good boy.☺
Smokey America has more oil reserves than all of Saudi Arabia, but the enviro-tyrants stridently oppose any attempt to make use of all that available oil.
Where the ‘oppose’ argument refers to this picture :
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_orkXxp0bhEA/Rj_L7EFXTKI/AAAAAAAAAH0/ZqfsVI-gt5Y/s400/nozone.jpg
which shows “no” (drilling?) zones in Alaska, California, and the Eastern seaboard.
Smokey then presents a list of ‘resources’, which are mostly insignificant compared to Saudi Arabia’s resources, except for the first three :
– 1.8 to 6 Trillion barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Oil-Shale Reserves (DOE)
– 986 Billion barrels of oil are estimated using Coal-to-liquids (CTL) conversion of U.S. Coal Reserves (DOE)
– 173 to 315 Billion (1.7-2.5 Trillion potential) barrels of oil are estimated in the Oil Sands of Alberta, Canada (Alberta Department of Energy)
Now note that each of these three are NON-traditional reserves (none of them are ‘oil’ yet), NONE of which are in the “no” drilling zones identified by Smokey and ALL of these resources have presented major technical and economical difficulties for exploration in significant quantity.
So rather than trumpeting America’s superior “oil” resources which turn out to be “not yet oil” resources, and pointing at “no” zones that do not include your “not yet oil” resources, and blaming “enviro-tyrants” instead of the oil/gas industry’s failure to exploit these resources, why don’t you get off your butt and actually create technology that turns these stuff into ‘oil’, so that I can then burn it up in my truck ?
Because until we do so, or until we start switching to plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles, America is still addicted to foreign oil.
Meanwhile, I hope you don’t mind that I am on the waiting list for an American made plug-in hybrid, which will run on 100% American made electricity, at 1/4 the price of that foreign oil.
And while we are at it, I wonder where your vegan friend “Inda House” went who does not mind that you don’t answer his questions, thanks you for providing links that you did not present, and claimed that he gets “guaranteed 60 cents per kW/h feed in tariff” and “The government paid half because I’ve recently had my house insulated, also paid for by the government”…
Rob has stopped making sense, but for those who wonder why the U.S. – with much greater oil reserves than Saudi Arabia – produces so little oil, the reason is a government controlled by enviro dictators, who are about as anti-American as North Korea.
It is the government, not demonized oil companies, that is solely to blame for our high energy prices. It is simple supply and demand: artificially restrict the supply, and prices skyrocket. The government, controlled by anti-American enviros, is the reason for $3 – $4 gas and escalating electricity rates.
I’m amused by Rob’s holier-than-thou belief that his new electric buggy will save him money. It won’t. He’s not factoring in all his costs, nor Obama’s promise that “electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket.” And I can assure Rob that whatever CO2 savings he achieves with his expensive new toy will be emitted by my 271 HP carbon belching hot rod, doubled and squared. Rob doesn’t understand that CO2 is harmless and beneficial, and that more CO2 is better for the biosphere. Like much of the public, Rob has been brainwashed by eco-propaganda to the point that he can no longer think rationally. Cognitive dissonance has set in.
The fact is that the government, led by President Urkel, demonizes oil companies in order to take the spotlight off of the plain fact that the government is completely to blame for high gas and electricity prices. There is plenty of oil available. Oil companies want to develop those resources. But the government says NO. Anyone with common sense can see who is causing the problems.
Inda House says:
August 7, 2011 at 1:49 pm
The funny thing is, it’s the countries in Europe that have invested heavily in renewable energy, which haven’t lost their AAA credit ratings.
Inda, even if true, that’s at least two non-sequiters, which further hurts your cred. S&P downgraded U.S. Gov’t debt because of the failure of Obama and the Democrats in the U.S. Senate to even take up the House-passed CCB bill – they rapidly voted to not take it up because of massive public support of both CCB, 63%, and a Balanced Budget Amendment alone at ~75%, nor have they taken up the Ryan Budget or indeed any budget for well over two years, except for voting down Obama’s 97-0 – which might have led to at least the enactment of some parts of it, or to the existence of the right parts, specifically involving some form of “balancing the budget”, and specifically without increasing taxes, a.k.a. “revenues”. I heard S&P’s Beers, on Fox, specifically not bite on “increased revenues” as necessary to the U.S. keeping its triple A rating, and Eric Bolling of Fox also reported that, according to his off-camera talk with “the S&P official”, an adequate implimentation of a “Balanced Budget” bill would have prevented the downgrade.
Regardless, the downgrade had nothing to do with investments in “renewable energy”, which have been proven in Europe to be a further massive waste of gov’t money and don’t work in any significant way no matter whose money is used. So that any similar U.S.gov’t funding would only tend to make downgrades even more likely.
[Snip. Labeling others :deniers: violates site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
Inda House says:
August 6, 2011 at 8:16 am
Inda House says:
August 6, 2011 at 8:16 am
Re: “Arctic ‘tipping point’ may not be reached”
….But today’s melting of the arctic is not due to solar forcing, but a small anthropogenic CO2 forcing. However the change in albedo when the arctic melts will result in a forcing greater than our anthropogenic CO2 forcing. This is the point of no return – the tipping point which climatoligists are so worried about – because they know that once this point is reached, any reductions in CO2 emissions will not be able to overcome the albedo forcing.
Inda, all you’ve done is to repeat Climate Science’s basic “metaethic”, as the term is used in pre-Postmodern Philosophical considerations of “ethics” – thus the ‘thinking’ which stands behind, ‘justifies’, or will at least somehow lead to the real world of particular individual, societal, or in the case of CO2 = CAGW “science” the Governmental policy actions Climate Science wants us to take to allegedly prevent The Tipping Point Event.
And it’s also the “thinking” and tactic which underlies and largely constitutes Climate Science’s simplistic and unscientific method of proof itself!
But as actually shown in practice, essentially your and Climate Science’s verbiage above is really no more than just another one of those fairly common Apocalyptic “beliefs” we hear from Religions and Cults which turn out to be unhinged from the real world.
Thus “the physics” used in the GCM’s dictated that a “tipping point” was already reached as per the 2007 Arctic ice extent, but this did not pan out empirically.
Therefore, to next simply “wait until it does” while always claiming that “it will happen” as an allegedly rational or scientific method – or to make ad hoc excuses referring to items such the ‘bad data’ or the ‘hidden heat’ – instead of immediately trying to correct “the physics” which lead to the incorrect prediction[s], is not a feature of real scientific prediction or its method, anymore than always moving the unfulfilled date of a Religious or Cultist prescribed Apocalypse to “later” is.
Therefore, as we’ve seen over and over again in the practice of “Climate Science”, the “worried climatologists” you refer to, along with their “science”, have about the same credibility as that Camping[?] guy or anyone else holding onto a belief simply because they personally “never feel falsified”! Which amounts to Climate Science’s “CO2 = CAGW” being the same kind of fairly common Conspiracy Theory which contradicts the facts of the real world to the practical extent that it can never be disproven! And therefore the “belief” functions so that it doesn’t make any factual claim to begin with, and is therefore literal nonsense as compared to real world factual statements.
Hansen himself even ups the ante by entering into the de-realization of Climate Science’s CO2 =CAGW verbiage further by making the mutually contradictory claims, as to our actual experience in the real world, that while fossil fuel CO2 will produce “the destruction of Creation”, it will also prevent future glaciations! As you, too, seem to imply! The lost ice and snow albedo effect, otherwise preventing or inhibiting warming, will simply never return, right? That is, absent the intervention of some other major cooling ‘forcing’ – which you also deny as a real possibility when a Maunder Minimum has in fact recently been predicted as at least a scientifically credible possibility applying to the near future!
Inda, continuing on within the real world of known events, when have CO2 concentrations ever not followed atmospheric temperature elevations up or prevented their decline – just as is also the case concerning our current warm period coming out of the LIA, which now also involves at least two signifcant divergences of CO2 and temperatures – at the very onset of the warming and its current stasis?
And when have there ever been any demonstrable or likely CO2 mediated “tipping points” ever, as there should have been according to “the physics” involving even relatively small CO2 concentrations and their “forcings” – just as you in fact argue?
Or if there have been some tipping points leading to warming in the past, given that they have never been known to rival the ill-effects of glaciations, why do you think that preventing them by forcing all of Humanity right back to the Stone Age is a rational plan?
[And why hasn’t water vapor, easily the most potent and available ghg, not produced its own equally drastic Tipping Point Events or forcing runaways?]
In other words, Inda, smack in the face of the problems with Climate Science’s “no return”, Apocalyptic Tipping Point Event concept and its record of a complete failure on the part of its CO2 = CAGW “physics” to have been successful in producing even one empirically correct prediction, the question is:
Why do you instead seem to advocate as a kind of Categorical Imperative that,
“We must all act so as to become either enslaved by CO2 strictures, or even possibly anti-evolutionarlily regressed to an earlier age of severe or even “catastrophic” undevelopment, including essentially that a lot of us must commit suicide forthwith, ‘before it’s too late!’, or else we’re all gonna die due to the dreaded [but never occurring, always future] Tipping Point Event!”?
No,Inda, all you’ve got going for you above is only another Apocalyptic Doomsday concoction of unhinged verbiage.