From the University of Colorado at Boulder, comes this study about radiocarbon dating some dead moss clumps exposed from under ice/snow at 4 locations on Baffin Island that somehow proves “unprecedented” warmth for the entire Arctic for the last 120,000 years. See below for my take on it.
CU-Boulder study shows unprecedented warmth in Arctic
The heat is on, at least in the Arctic.
Average summer temperatures in the Eastern Canadian Arctic during the last 100 years are higher now than during any century in the past 44,000 years and perhaps as long ago as 120,000 years, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.
The study is the first direct evidence the present warmth in the Eastern Canadian Arctic exceeds the peak warmth there in the Early Holocene, when the amount of the sun’s energy reaching the Northern Hemisphere in summer was roughly 9 percent greater than today, said CU-Boulder geological sciences Professor Gifford Miller, study leader. The Holocene is a geological epoch that began after Earth’s last glacial period ended roughly 11,700 years ago and which continues today.
Miller and his colleagues used dead moss clumps emerging from receding ice caps on Baffin Island as tiny clocks. At four different ice caps, radiocarbon dates show the mosses had not been exposed to the elements since at least 44,000 to 51,000 years ago.
Since radiocarbon dating is only accurate to about 50,000 years and because Earth’s geological record shows it was in a glaciation stage prior to that time, the indications are that Canadian Arctic temperatures today have not been matched or exceeded for roughly 120,000 years, Miller said.
“The key piece here is just how unprecedented the warming of Arctic Canada is,” said Miller, also a fellow at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
A paper on the subject appeared online Oct. 21 in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal published by the American Geophysical Union. Co-authors include CU-Boulder Senior Research Associate Scott Lehman, former CU-Boulder doctoral student and now Prescott College Professor Kurt Refsnider, University of California Irvine researcher John Southon and University of Wisconsin, Madison Research Associate Yafang Zhong. The National Science Foundation provided the primary funding for the study.
Miller and his colleagues compiled the age distribution of 145 radiocarbon-dated plants in the highlands of Baffin Island that were exposed by ice recession during the year they were collected by the researchers. All samples collected were within 1 meter of the ice caps, which are generally receding by 2 to 3 meters a year. “The oldest radiocarbon dates were a total shock to me,” said Miller.
Located just east of Greenland, (um, no, to the west – Anthony) the 196,000-square-mile Baffin Island is the fifth largest island in the world. Most of it lies above the Arctic Circle. Many of the ice caps on the highlands of Baffin Island rest on relatively flat terrain, usually frozen to their beds. “Where the ice is cold and thin, it doesn’t flow, so the ancient landscape on which they formed is preserved pretty much intact,” said Miller.
To reconstruct the past climate of Baffin Island beyond the limit of radiocarbon dating, Miller and his team used data from ice cores previously retrieved by international teams from the nearby Greenland Ice Sheet.
The ice cores showed that the youngest time interval from which summer temperatures in the Arctic were plausibly as warm as today is about 120,000 years ago, near the end of the last interglacial period. “We suggest this is the most likely age of these samples,” said Miller.
The new study also showed summer temperatures cooled in the Canadian Arctic by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit from roughly 5,000 years ago to about 100 years ago – a period that included the Little Ice Age from 1275 to about 1900.
“Although the Arctic has been warming since about 1900, the most significant warming in the Baffin Island region didn’t really start until the 1970s,” said Miller. “And it is really in the past 20 years that the warming signal from that region has been just stunning. All of Baffin Island is melting, and we expect all of the ice caps to eventually disappear, even if there is no additional warming.”
Temperatures across the Arctic have been rising substantially in recent decades as a result of the buildup of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. Studies by CU-Boulder researchers in Greenland indicate temperatures on the ice sheet have climbed 7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1991.
A 2012 study by Miller and colleagues using radiocarbon-dated mosses that emerged from under the Baffin Island ice caps and sediment cores from Iceland suggested that the trigger for the Little Ice Age was likely a combination of exploding tropical volcanoes – which ejected tiny aerosols that reflected sunlight back into space – and a decrease in solar radiation.
-CU-
Contact:
Gifford Miller, 303-492-6962, cell 303-990-2071
===============================================================
I don’t dispute validity of radio-carbon14 dating techniques, but I think there is a logic failure in the claim being made.
The claim is that these plants haven’t been exposed for thousands of years, as dated by the C14 isotope.
At four different ice caps, radiocarbon dates show the mosses had not been exposed to the elements since at least 44,000 to 51,000 years ago.
That might be true, but then again they are long dead, so there wouldn’t be any uptake of new C14 if they were exposed to the open air in the past. There’s no claim that the mosses are now suddenly alive and growing again. So, if they had been “exposed to the elements” since then, they would not have an new C14 in them unless they came back to life and conducted photosynthesis.
Since plant material in the Arctic doesn’t decay like it does elsewhere due to low temperature and low humidity, it could very well remain intact while exposed for quite some time. All I think they can claim is that the plants haven’t been alive for 44,000 to 120,000 years. I don’t think they can’t prove with C14 dating that they have not been exposed then reburied under ice/snow since then. Ice is a funny thing, it can melt due to warmer temperatures or it can sublimate at below freezing temperatures if there’s not enough sustaining precipitation, as we know from Mount Kilimanjaro. What I’d really like to see is what the receding ice edge looks like. Sublimation leaves a signature that is quite different from melting.
Studies by CU-Boulder researchers in Greenland indicate temperatures on the ice sheet have climbed 7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1991.
Greenland is not Baffin island. You can’t just say that a temperature change in one place automatically means a similar temperature change in another place. Similarly, Baffin island isn’t the entire “Arctic”, yet it is portrayed in the press release as if this one proxy indicator of four sampled sites represents the entire Arctic temperature experience back 120,000 years. It’s Yamal all over again.
Recall our series of stories about “midges” used for proxy temperature reconstruction on Baffin island: Baffin Island Midge Study – debunked for a 3rd time – nearby weather station shows no warming.
This weather station on Baffin Island [Clyde Meteorological station] shows no summer temperature increase in the last 50 years. Summer matters most because that’s the melt season.
So what’s going on with the receding ice edge on Baffin island; is it melting or sublimating? Inquiring minds want to know. From the one photo they provided, it is hard to tell:
Of course the uncritical MSM is already trumpeting this story without question, with the usual bent that the posited current warmth is a bad thing.
What really bugs me (besides the fact the press release can’t even bother to mention the title of the study) is that they use of the word “unprecedented” in the title of the press release. Obviously this isn’t true, because it had to be warm enough, long enough, back then to give these mosses a chance to get a foothold and grow. If the warmth today was “unprecedented” they’d find nothing in the way of previous life forms under the receding ice. – Anthony
UPDATE: 10/25/13 11AM PDT
I lamented the lack of photographs to show me what sort of ice loss signature there was. The press release at AGU had such a photo in it which I show below, click for a much larger version.
![Fig.1.Sputnik[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/fig-1-sputnik1.jpg?quality=83)
Note the albedo difference from the ice cap on the left side versus the right side. The right side is almost pure white, and there are no stream channels. The left side has lots of stream channels and is a dirty brown. Notice also that the ice in surrounding depressions is whiter that the ice cap, which is actually a small hill, though I don’t know what height it is above surrounding terrain.
What this looks like to me is that the windward side of the Sputnik icecap hill is on the left and it is picking up all sorts of debris and particulates (such as carbon soot) on the leeward side there is less deposition, and the ice is cleaner.
As we’ve noted before on WUWT, carbon soot is a big problem in the Arctic.
I’d really like to know why the authors have not mentioned what is obvious to the eye as an alternate possibility for the icecap decline.
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50 minutes ago Baffin Island was -11°C. How long do the hot temperatures last each year?
It always amazes me how these places are always melting when the temperature is below freezing for much of the year.
to my way of thinking,when the north pole sea surface ,air and land temperature starts rising we are actually witnessing the planet getting rid of a lot of heat. current low solar activity sure is not going to replace it.
phil says : However, Table_S1.xlsx in the Supporting Information only shows 135 samples. Furthermore, the “C14 Age” of the samples range from 225 to 4,285 years in the spreadsheet.
What gives??
indeed,what gives ?
Just another rent-seeker that in previous decades might have been honest has now caved to the bank-account-padding Religion of Doom. Pathetic.
We find ancient stumps and Man made tools under retreating glaciers and they have to turn it upside down and say our warming is unprecedented. But when it comes to Vikings and Greenland they shtum real quick. Liars. They must be held to account for their fraud.
[“shtum real quick” ?? Mod]
Studying prehistoric dead moss and making wild claims–unsubstantiated by the moss itself–is as entertaining as Farley Mowat’s humorous observations on the work of field biologists and their wacky conclusions in “Never Cry Wolf”. Let’s call them the Moss Whisperers.
Along with several other statements in the press release that defy reason, this one caught my eye:
“Temperatures across the Arctic have been rising substantially in recent decades as a result of the buildup of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. Studies by CU-Boulder researchers in Greenland indicate temperatures on the ice sheet have climbed 7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1991.”
Holy cow, 7 degrees! Quick, tell the IPCC! We have irrefutable evidence of warming caused by human CO2 emissions! Oh wait, 7 F (3.9 C) is way outside the range of IPCC’s computer-generated global climate model “scenarios” for 2013, which is around 1.3 C. Huh. What’s up with that? Could it be the warming was due to something other than “as a result of the buildup of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere” as the article stated? Nah. It’s just gotta be the CO2, the whole CO2 and nothing but the CO2.
Or are the Greenland ice cap temperature studies by CU-Boulder researchers wrong? Maybe the Greenland ice cap didn’t warm by 7 degrees. Oh wait, it did, sort of. There are very few weather stations in Greenland so it’s impossible to know what the temperature was over the whole ice sheet. Take any temperature reconstruction with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, using NOAA’s reconstruction, you can see a brief and sharp warming trend from 1991 to 2003. After 2003 it cools again. Incidentally, the 1919-1932 warming trend was significantly greater than the recent one and world population (and CO2 emissions) in 1932 was less than 1/3 of what it is today. Interestingly, the seasonal trends since 2003 all sharply decline except for the December-February trend, which is the main reason the annual trend hasn’t shown more drastic cooling. What’s going on in the winter? If you had to choose between unprecedented seasonal human CO2 emissions or shifting jet stream patterns, which makes more sense?
Meaningless (but really funny) moss studies aside, the 20th century temperature record measured with real instruments (not moss) suggests pretty clearly that any recent warming in Greenland has nothing to do with CO2 or human activity and is driven by natural forces.
Hold on. There was an industrial civilization 120,000 years ago that warmed the planet so much that it led to its early collapse and all of it happened because they did not give their money to their doom sayers? Appalling.
Paul Pierett says:
October 25, 2013 at 12:41 am
“If so we can credit the great surge in sunspot activity from 1934 to 1965 and from 1975 to Dec. 2007. It gave us our strongest hurricane seasons known to us at the beginning of this century.”
And hurricane activity will resume once solar activity resumes. Why? Because low solar activity encourages meridional atmospheric flows, both over land and over northern oceans. This results in cold air moving southward over land and warm ocean water moving northward, in a sort of yin-yang dance which acts to preserve the overall heat balance of the earth. The warmer water moving northward reduces the temperature driving force for hurricane formation and also results in some sea surface cooling around the equator. The cold air moving southward, conversely, causes cold continental winters, and some warming of the arctic, which could explain the observations reported here. This effect would be diminished or absent in the antarctic where there are no major sub-antarctic land masses to channel the effect. Just some thoughts.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sfc_daily.php?plot=ssa&inv=0&t=cur
I am always suspicious when I hear researchers taking C-14 dating out to the max limit of useful measurement – 50K years. C-14 is about 1 part per trillion (1E-12) of the carbon in our atmosphere. Therefore if a plant takes up one gram of carbon, only one trillionth is C-14. C-14 has a specific activity of 4.46 Ci/gm (pardon me but I think in the old Curie system). Therefore 1 gm of Carbon has 4.46 E -12 Curies (4.46 pCi) of C-14 which equals 0.165 disintegrations per second. After ten half-lives (~50,000years) of the C-14 there will be 1.05 E-14 Curies which equals .00039 disintegrations per second or 1.4 disintegrations per hour. To get decent counting statistics it is typical to shoot for 5000 counts, so we are looking at 21 weeks to count the quantity of C-14 in one gram of carbon. That takes more patience than I have when counting radioactive material. It requires extremely low (radiation) background counting equipment and a heck of a lot of care not to introduce other confounding factors.
Typically C-14 counting is done via liquid scintillation counting. Typically with C-14 dating of plant material, the material is ashed (burnt). The resultant ash may be chemically treated to remove impurities and leave only the carbon, but it is nigh on impossible to separate the C-12/C-13 from the C-14. Therefore the C-12/13/14 mix goes in the liquid scintillation vials. I do not know how many grams of carbon are used in the C-14 dating process but the more that is used, the greater the problem of “quenching” (there are a couple different types of LS quenching but in this case it is from blocking of the resultant light during beta particle interaction). This is just one of the confounding possible errors that can cause counting errors.
Far too many universities do not stress in radioactive material training how radioactive material cross contamination can screw up an experiment in a heartbeat. Because they may not buy and use radioactive materials, too many just doing carbon dating do not get proper training, so I always have doubts of their results. In three universities I worked at, cross contamination was rampant, especially with shared equipment, until proper training was initiated.
PS: There about 16,000 grams of carbon in the “standard” man. A simple calculation from the data above will give you the number of disintegrations per second in your body just from C-14. Then there are lots of other radionuclides in your body such as K-40 and uranium.
They claim the moss was growing 44000 years ago? To me it is a surprise that the area was free from ice at that time. Does it mean it was warmer 44000 years ago?
OT: There’s a monster comment war going on in on of Bloomberg’s threads. There are a lot of warmist “fat targets” there that need to be shot down.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-23/mystery-of-the-missing-global-warming.html
“This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
Greenhouse warming by compulsion. I imagine Miller, in tears, like a certain UN official, wringing his hands and pleading. No other image suits the statement, therefore it has to be.
I thought “unprecedented” meant never known or never happened before. So, how can something be unprecedented with it happened either 44,000 years ago or 120,000 years ago or some time in the past? If the mosses got there, seems there was precedent for ice melt.
I cannot for the life of me understand why these Calamstrologists came to their wild, specualtive ideas. I am sure they looked into the science literature and decided to ignore ti anyway. Multiple lines of evidence just on this thread shows these clowns are wrong.
They must have been thinking of Boffin Island.
About the only thing one can conclude from this study is that Professor Gifford Miller is not a rolling stone!
Whats all this about C14 dating being unreliable under 5750 years (give or take 40 years)?
Wasn’t C14 dating used to prove that the so-called Turin Shroud was 12th/13th century at the earliest and clearly nowhere near old enough to have had contact with Jesus?
Yet it is clear that Greenland was warmer in the very recent past.
Just like the faux Swedish study, this story is more about deception than information.
This is yet another deceptive study inspired by the need for AGW promoters to “communicate” (sell) AGW better.
In the Alps about 5300 years ago, the glaciers receded to the point where Ötzi ‘the iceman’ became entombed in ice. The global warming alarmists dismissed the retreat of the glaciers as just an anomaly caused by the weather, but finding Ötzi was because of the climate warming. Now the ice on Baffin Island melts to the point of revealing moss that grew back in the Eemian interglacial, and this immediately attributed to global warming. Might the ice melt be an anomaly caused by the weather similar the one that buried Ötzi?
This just means this is the longest interglacial that the glacier/moss has seen in the last 44,000 years.
Many of the world’s glaciers have been slowly melting since the ice age ended. Many of them are too far south to remain as glaciers as this interglacial gets longer and longer.
Maybe the moss grew in the Eemian interglacial since that one was much warmer than this one. They were buried under ice for 100,000 years and only now starting to emerge since the glacier has been slowly melting for the last 10,000 years.
If the interglacial lasts for another 10,000 years, the southern quarter of Greenland will melt out as well. It is too far south and has too much summer sunshine to have ice-sheets in inter-glacial temperatures.
One needs to have this perspective to understand the situation.
Isostatic rebound accounts for retreating ice margins on Baffin Island over the last 12,000 years and at present.
The paper’s conclusion is nonsense due to the lag time between warming and ice melt. Consider for example that the moss grew 100 thousand years ago during the last interglacial. Then for 90 thousand years it was buried under ice. Then for the past 10 thousand years conditions in the arctic were warmer than today and the ice started melting. Now today, after 10 thousand years of melting, the ice is finally gone and the moss is again exposed.
The only conclusion that is possible conditions in the arctic today are similar to conditions when the moss grew. However, there was no human produced CO2 when the moss grew, yet there was no ice in the arctic at the location where the moss grew. Thus, there is no evidence that CO2 of AGW is the cause of the ice melting in the Arctic.
How do they know the temperature of the study area on Baffin Island 120,000 years ago? In the photo of the good professor, I see no trees in the area nor enough ice to core and measure trapped bubbles.
Thank you Phil: October 25, 2013 at 12:04 !!
The abstract states: Here we use 145 radiocarbon dates on rooted tundra plants revealed by receding cold-based ice caps in the Eastern Canadian Arctic to show that 5000 years of regional summertime cooling has been reversed, with average summer temperatures of the last ~100 years now higher than during any century in more than 44,000 years,…
However, Table_S1.xlsx in the Supporting Information only shows 135 samples with ages ranging from 225 to 4,285 years.
So 135 samples are less than 5,000 years old, and the remaining 10 (presumably the samples between 44,000 to 51,000 years old) are missing.
THIS STUDY IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT!!
No one should be surprised as UC-Boulder is from the same institution that houses Kevin Trenberth and Mark Serreze,
The Pompous Git says:
October 24, 2013 at 11:42 pm
And once more, here’s Hubert Lamb’s northern forest limits map comparing 2000 BC with the present:
http://www.sturmsoft.com/climate/forest_grassland_limits.png
================
Excellent map, showing that climate changes naturally. Which should be no surprise considering that 20 thousand years ago most of the cities of the “western” world were buried under a mile of ice, and are headed for the same future without AGW.
The only conclusion one can draw about AGW is that it is currently the only thing that stands between our civilization and the next ice age. Should we be unable to halt the next ice age, most of the great cities of the western world will be destroyed as surely as if they were destroyed by nuclear weapons. The only thing in question is how much time we have before this occurs.
The logic seems flawed to me, as well.
For an analogy, think of the snow that is last to melt in the spring, on the north slope of a hill. Around here, in New Hampshire, north-slope snow may still be there in May, when things are already starting to grow on south slopes. That north-slope snow will have lasted through all the early warm spells, and even through a hot spell or two when temperatures touch eighty Fahrenheit. However the week the north-slope snow finally vanishes may be raw and cold, with a “snow-eater” fog and temperatures around fifty.
Using the logic of the aforementioned paper, that week with temperatures around fifty is “unprecedented heat,” while the warm and hot spells that came before, (analogous to climate optimums,) somehow don’t matter or even count.
The Baffin Island icecap is a remnant of the icecap that reached to New York City in the last Ice Age. It has likely been shrinking ever since. My guess would be that moss was more likely 120,000 years old than 44,000 years old, and likely dates from before the last Ice Age even began.
It is getting harder and harder to ignore the past climate optimums and “erase the MWP,” in order to pump up the hype about it being warmer now than ever before. Papers like this one are getting harder to find. However Bill McKibben found this right away, and pounced on it like a vulture onto a corpse:
https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/393452725268017153
Anthony Watts wrote: “Since plant material in the Arctic doesn’t decay like it does elsewhere due to low temperature and low humidity,”
The photo shows temperatures above freezing. The clouds appear as typical for moderate or moderately high relative humidity. In my experience, plant material decays under such conditions. If there were a few or several months of such conditions accumulated over the past 44,000 years, I think the moss would have at least largely decayed.