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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ill McKibben ✔ @billmckibben
Arctic warmer than it’s been in, oh, 44,000 years http://www.livescience.com/40676-arctic-temperatures-record-high.html?cmpid=514645 …
How about : The arctic has final returned to it’s prior warm climate of 44,000 years ago when moss could actually grow! Isn’t nature wonderful?
7 degrees in the Arctic since 1991 and the warmists never picked up on it from satellite and other data? Nope. Not buying it.
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.
Are these people idiots, or do they just think that we are?
The fact that ice has receded to expose point X today tells you absolutely nothing about the maximum temp over the ice during the period it was covered.
Do what these idiots have not, and think about it: Set a twenty pound block of ice on the coffee table in your living room. Set your thermostat to 68F. The ice will begin to melt. After an hour, turn the thermostat up to 90F. The ice will melt faster. After an hour of that, turn the thermostat down to 50F. The ice will continue to melt. At some point, a coaster that you left on the coffee table under the block of ice will become exposed by the melting at 50F. Do you point to it and say “AHA! This proves that the temperature of the room is now warmer than it has ever been since the ice was placed on the table!”?
Only if you are a ‘climate scientist’.
Um, but if these plants were growing 120k years ago, this suggests that it was significantly warmer at that location back then.
How does one conclude that CO2 is the cause of warming today but not arrive at the same conclusion for the warming 120k years ago?
I also find claims like ‘unprecedented’ warming to be very strange coming from a professional geologist, especially since he knows how incomplete is the Pleistocene paleoclimate record.
Stupid. It’s not even as warm as it was less than 1000 yrs ago.
The Pompous Git says:
October 25, 2013 at 12:30 am
Gifford Miller (Professor, Department of Geological Sciences @University of Colorado at Boulder)
talks about the cooling starting 3,000 years ago. Some of us are old enough to remember this stuff…
============
The evidence is incontrovertible. Mr Spock traveled back from the future to rescue the whales, and took a few moments to record a warning to us all about the coming ice age :).
Much of the current AGW scare preys on the young and the lack of information about the global cooling scare 50 years ago. It speaks more to the failing of the educational system to explain the reasons that both the press and the government would want to generate alarm in the population.
Fear over over communism, fear over nuclear war, fear over population, fear over pollution, fear over global cooling, fear over global warming. Without an external threat to worry about, the population will start looking closely at the government, asking why they are spending so much money and delivering so little.
To deflect criticism, governments generate fear in the population of external threats. The people stop worrying about the government and start worrying about “the enemy”. The government is secure.
Keep in mind that the “government” is not the party in power, it is the entrenched bureaucracy that lives on regardless of any change at the top. They advise the party in power, they interpret policy, and they implement according to their interpretation.
The press and enviros are running from the actual conclusions of the study. Here is the key part of the press release:
“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.”
So Baffin Island is now just beginning to get as warm as it was toward the end of the previous, warmer interglacial period. I don’t see a great issue here.
But the way it is being played is that it might have gotten this warm about 50,000 years ago. That would be in the middle of the least big ice age. If that claim were true — that Baffin island had mosses growing when Canada was covered by an ice cap 2 miles thick– yes, that would really be news.
So what U Colo has done is to enable people like Bill McKibben to make claims about mosses growing in the Arctic in the middle of the last ice age, even though later in the press release they say that the likely story is that Baffin Island is now about as warm as it was at the end of a long period of warmth during the Eemian, the last interglacial.
It seems to me that this work is a piece of good but unremarkable science. Yes, plants grew in the high Arctic during the Eemian, which was warmer than today’s interglacial, the Holocene.
“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.”
Ah yes, the good ol’ logical fallacy of “we don’t know what else it could be, so it must be x”, or the Ad ignorantiam argument.
The same researchers have done summer time reconstructions on Baffin and found earlier periods that were warmer than the present century. See Figure 12 in this paper. Obviously even within this group the story isn’t quite so simple.
https://notendur.hi.is/~oi/AG-326%202006%20readings/Anthropocene/Moore_JOPL2001.pdf
So were the Eskimo’s driving SUV’s when the moss grew in the first place? How did the Arctic get so warm in the past without fossil fuel CO2?
We are told over and over again that elevated CO2 from fossil fuels is what drives warming, but for this moss to grow in the past without elevated CO2 says that something else causes warming.
If anything , this paper is evidence that something other than CO2 must cause warming.
The Viking settlements in Greenland* are a real problem for Miller et al. It was almost certainly warmer in Greenland during the MWP. Viking artifacts are still buried in the permafrost. The basic logic is that anything buried in permafrost got there before the permafrost formed. ie. It was warmer then than it is now. In any event, it is unlikely that the Vikings were farming on permafrost**.
*NY Times story about Vikings in Greenland
Normal farming is impossible on permafrost
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.614/abstract;jsessionid=47C3C7F2D22E519076C76C352603D5F7.f03t01?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false
Another group that suggests warmer SST around Baffin 3000-6000 years ago.
Louis Hooffstetter says:
October 25, 2013 at 6:12 am
—————————————————
As Louis said, there is no data presented of C14 ages older than 5,000 years in the supplemental which contains all 145 samples they say they used.
We need to find an on-line version of this paper to see if they really found moss older than this date or just provided us with another climate model simulation / made-up climate history story.
Passing thoughts and memories.
http://phys.org/news102864888.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070705-oldest-dna.html
fred berple: “Without an external threat to worry about, the population will start looking closely at the government, asking why they are spending so much money and delivering so little.”
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken
bruce cobb: “Ah yes, the good ol’ logical fallacy of “we don’t know what else it could be, so it must be x”, or the Ad ignorantiam argument.”
In fairness, that’s the grant of legitimacy about the bulk of notions in science over the last century. We assume hypothesis x. We cannot test it, so it cannot be refuted. Therefore, it is true. If you should have the unmitigated gall to mention such things the response is: “But it’s what scientists believe.” “There’s a consensus.” “The science is settled.” “It’s a necessary hypothesis.”
There’s something of a distinct social problem involved. Acknowledging it put’s the institution of Science in credibility jeopardy, and destroys whole fields and branches of True Fact acquired ad Ignorantiam. Not acknowledging it means that the fields are kept. But even the discussion that we *should* permit Science to be the playground of the Ignoranti, also puts the institution in credibility jeopardy.
So shut up and eat your lichen. The Baffin boffins worked terribly hard bringing their ignorance to you.
It can’t be.
The modern Inuit are just that, modern in age. They moved eastward only a few thousand years ago, when the Arctic ocean opened up. They came upon the last of the Dorset people who are now extinct.
There is a lot of other data to show that temperatures have been warmer in the last few thousand years than now up there. The only way this study could be published is for both the writers and editor-reviewers to live inside a ping-pong ball of academia and refuse, not just be ignorant of, work others, especially anthropological, have done in the Arctic.
Ice sheet retreat is revealing a lot of buried forests and tundra that are post-end of glaciation, revealing both a warmth and a renewal of glaciation. These type reports just don’t make sense.
Incompetence in the line of not doing due diligence and cross-checking outside your specific study are grounds for termination with cause in private practice. We need the same level of accountability and censure in the academic, tax-payer supported world. A chill on research? Certainly when there is a public repercussion – the business of not crying fire in a crowded theatre is not an infringement of free speech, so when you make big statements that create policy positions in government, you should be accountable for ensuring that you have really, really checked out the veracity of your words (though a George Bush vis-a-vis WMD didn’t think so).
We’ve given a free ride to the liberal eco-green. “Raising consciousness” has been their excuse for not getting it right. Misdirection, misinformation and plain manipulation is what they have really been up to, all to push their ideological agenda that is not defensible by reason or pragmatism.
So I assume fresh moss is growing there now?
There is growing evidence that Vikings had a trading post positioned on Baffin Island centuries ago:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121019-viking-outpost-second-new-canada-science-sutherland/
Given that Vikings travelled in oversized rowboats with a sail, I am betting it was pretty darn warm during the Medieval Warming Period to have established any kind of outpost so far north on Baffin Island. Perhaps the Vikings of old knew more about “unprecedented” warming that we do.
Exceeding both the MWP and the early Holocene spike? They are stark raving mad. NFW. Full stop.
Steven Mosher says:
October 25, 2013 at 7:59 am
????????
Whilst I have witnessed plenty of examples of tautology of logic, this is the first example of an experimental tautology. It’s a tautology because while it purports to show that today’s Arctic is of unprecedented warmth, the experiment would yield the same result no matter what period in history it was performed.
Consider that the ice sheets have been receding since the end of the last ice age. It must be true, that at any point in the last several thousand years, it would be possible to find mosses that have recently become exposed from receding ice. When this would have been possible in Baffin island, it is difficult to say.
Nevertheless, let us suppose that some medieval scientist were to go to Baffin island with a hypothetical Carbon dating machine. He could walk the perimeter of the ice and pick samples of moss and subject them to the same analysis. The result would show – surprise, surprise – that this particular moss has remained covered in ice for at least 50k years. Ergo, today is warmer than any time in 50k years.
If that is not a tautology, I don’t know what is.
The article is paywalled, but the abstract is available at:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013GL057188/abstract
This sounds like another study where they knew the results they wanted and created a process to get those results. A few critical questions from an objective senior scientist should have stopped this study before it went beyond this preliminary proposal phase.