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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Steven Mosher says:
October 25, 2013 at 1:37 pm
Historically, you are wrong. Dozens of theories have been falsified & more hypotheses. Also major parts of big theories which survive in part.
Just in the past 50 years major theories like the immobility of continents, nonexistence of catastrophic ice age floods & the steady state theory of the universe have been falsified.
Or maybe since WWII. Call it 70 years, although less in the cases I cited.
Another Geo’s Take says:
October 25, 2013 at 1:45 pm
Adaptation would be better. Whether the ice sheets return in 500, 5000 or 50,000 years, humans will be able to adapt. People fleeing Canada, Scandinavia & Siberia may well live in floating cities in tropical oceans, powered by temperature variations at different depths. Also, deserts will become fertile under the new climate regime, even without fusion to desalinate seawater (from which the fuel would also come).
MarkB said October 25, 2013 at 10:54 am:
Thank you for correcting this error on my part. I made an assumption I should not have made, because I have not been able to access the paper itself.
Steven Mosher says:
October 25, 2013 at 1:37 pm
“now if you spend time around here people will thrown feynman or popper at you.
If the observations conflict with the theory, then the theory is falsified.
well, not so quickly.
when the theory conflicts with the observations you have choices. historically scientists rarely throw out an entire theory. ask yourself why”
Climate theory, as presented by the IPCC, has no confirmations, no true predictions, to its name.
I am not saying that all of it is false. Arrhenius’ equations look good in the laboratory, though no one has a formulation of how they play out in the atmosphere.
milodonharlani says:
October 25, 2013 at 12:49 pm
Exactly! And there are a huge number of American academics riding on the “global warming/whatever” bandwagon who would never have endorsed such reporting and reasoning before the bandwagon came along. I take it that they experience a degree of cognitive dissonance that induces bliss.
Steven Mosher says:
October 25, 2013 at 1:37 pm
“when the theory conflicts with the observations you have choices. historically scientists rarely throw out an entire theory. ask yourself why”
If you’re trying to get funding, the theory is required. And I’m not being sarcastic.
Yet another CAGW study wherein their conclusions are unsupported by their data. Leaps of illogic are required.
milodonharlani said @ur momisugly October 25, 2013 at 1:49 pm
More correctly, continental immobility and uniformitarianism were observation statements, not theories.
Theo Goodwin says:
October 25, 2013 at 2:08 pm
IMO there are formulations as to how the GHG effect plays out in the atmosphere. At low concentrations, well below 100 ppm, CO2 does have a net heating effect on our planet. But the effect is logarithmic, so that another 100 ppm has relatively little additional effect, a third & fourth such increase less & even less, & a fifth practically none, barely measurable, if at all. Let alone tenth, 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th, 60th & 70th coats, as in prior geological periods.
I’ll mention again Dr. Lenzen’s analogy of painting a wall white. The first coat has a major effect on appearance, but each additional coat doesn’t make the wall look much more white.
‘When Newton’s or Einstein’s gravitational theory is applied on galactic and cosmological scales, various anomalies are found: most famously, the orbital speed of stars far from the centre of a galaxy is roughly constant, where the theory predicts that it should fall off with radius r as 1/√r ”
That’s not what happened. Nobody observing the orbital anomaly of galaxies said that gravitational theory is wrong. Quite the opposite. They started from the premise that it is correct, and then proceeded to deduce that there must be more matter spread throughout a galaxy than previously thought.
I may have been too quick to apologize. Am I correct in understanding that they based their conclusion on 10 samples out of 145 (~7%)? Wouldn’t it be appropriate to conclude that their conclusion is based on the outliers? It would seem that this is a self-falsifying paper as about 93% of their data does not support their conclusion, or am I making a mistake in my logic?
I mean, if one’s hypothesis is that White Men Can’t Jump and one chooses 145 White Men at random, of which 135 can jump to varying degrees (some quite well – corresponding to the samples with a “C14 age” of just a few hundred years) and 10 are truly pathetic, on what basis can one conclude that the hypothesis is demonstrated? The logic escapes me.
The Pompous Git says:
October 25, 2013 at 2:15 pm
IMO adherence to the theory of extreme uniformitarianism in the face of accumulating evidence against it was an example of faith in a secular religion creating resistance to scientific fact. Geologists of the middle of the last century found modern catastrophism distasteful because it smacked to them too much of Biblical floods, so were reluctant to adopt the emerging synthesis of the two. In fact, many never did, but simply died off.
Also IMO continental immobility counts as at least an hypothesis, although as a ruling tenet of geology until well into the second half of the last century, it does qualify as a theory. I feel that it was falsified in the same way as the theory of species immutability was in the 19th century, ie by a convincing explanation for the mobility (sea floor spreading) & mutability (natural selection) previously lacking, making it no longer possible to maintain opposition to “continental drift”, now known as plate tectonics, & the “transmutation of species”, now known as evolution.
Every century since the 17th (if not before) shows examples of major, long-prevalent & dominant scientific theories being abandoned, when predictions derived from them were falsified. A few will spring to everyone’s mind, probably even Steven M. Mosher’s, such as the phases of Venus falsifying the Ptolemaic system, the phlogiston theory by oxygen, the four “elements” by the atomic theory, spontaneous generation by Pasteur’s experiment, the humor & miasma theories of disease by his (& others’) germ theory & the inheritance of acquired characteristics by natural selection & modern genetics (although revived in the USSR), among others.
PS: Observations by Wegener, du Toit & others had long showed that the continents must have moved, but prevailing geological theory refused to accept the evidence for lack of an explanation. It was hard to abandon orthodoxy.
I am reminded also of Lord Kelvin’s too low (by a factor of 50 or more) calculation of the age of the earth, based upon thermodynamics, an hypothesis overthrown by the discovery of radiation.
Mosher: “historically scientists rarely throw out an entire theory. ask yourself why”
Prestige, funding, introductory pedagogy, costly text books, religion, politics, activism, ideology, trolling… I don’t think I missed any did I? Try doing some of your own work and add to the list.
“If the observations conflict with the theory, then the theory is falsified.”
Yes, precisely. There’s a lovely quote from Einstein about the matter. But for the ‘waitaminute’ caveat there’s a better one from him: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Your misguided crusade can’t seen to disentangle that if the observation disagrees with the experiment it doesn’t necessitate that the observation disagrees with the theory. In the converse, just because it dribbled off your chin, doesn’t make it testable. Since you seem to have a real struggle with this, let me give you a poignant example:
Proposition A: You exhaling is warming the planet
Proposition B: If you keep exhaling Ethiopians will starve.
Proposition C: We modeled your exhaling in an inclusive model of a high-degree polynomial that has fake numbers to stand in for all the other planetary things we have absolutely no clue about.
Proposition D: The model pulled a Buzz Lightyear. Reality did not.
1) Which of those have been falsified by D?
2) Is B even testable in principle?
3) Does C and D together have any necessary relation to A?
4) If D did not exist, would A, B, and C be true?
Answer sheet:
1) C
2) No. Not until you can cross the rubicon at D.
3) No. A is one of a multitude of hypothetical nonsense that are disproved as a *set*
4) Only if you’re in a cult.
@ur momisugly milodonharlani
If we take NAS definition that “a scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation” then I would ask what did “continental immobility” explain? I certainly agree that 19th C geology was anti-Biblical Flood, but what does “nonexistence of catastrophic ice age floods” explain? Nit-picky I know, but it doesn’t help understanding much when assumptions, observations, theory and law are conflated as so often happens in these discussions.
milodon: “Also IMO continental immobility counts as at least an hypothesis, although as a ruling tenet of geology until well into the second half of the last century, it does qualify as a theory.”
Worth noting that there’s no actual difference between a hypothesis and a theory in lay usage. In technical usage in the Sciences a hypothesis is a ‘what if’ that hasn’t been tested or has been tested and failed. A theory is a hypothesis that has been tested and has so far failed to fail. And a law is some variation in degree of ‘because, damnit.’ Either because what the theory posits provably exists, and it’s contradictory would be pervasive, obvious, and lead to absurd results everywhere that we cannot find. Or because it is a required axiomatic consideration for a hypothesis/theory.
Jquip says:
October 25, 2013 at 3:21 pm
I go along with that distinction. A theory may consist of a body of hypotheses the prediction of which have not yet been found false.
The Pompous Git says:
October 25, 2013 at 3:13 pm
I could have expressed myself better. Establishment geology didn’t accept the hypothesis of continental drift, despite all the evidence in its favor, including just looking at the map of the world as known from the 16th century. Its counter hypothesis was that the continents do not move. This might be considered an observation, although it was not a valid one.
Long before the 20th century, it was known that continental land masses do move up & down, as in earthquakes. And the biological & geological connections pointed out by Wegener were indeed valid observations. So IMO, that continents don’t move was the prevailing theory or hypothesis of geology until the discovery of sea floor spreading falsified it by providing a mechanism that couldn’t be explained away.
Similarly the prevailing geological hypothesis was that massive catastrophic floods didn’t occur, despite all the actual observations showing this belief to be false. The advent of aerial photography helped convince younger geologists that Bretz, et al, were right about the Missoula Floods, falsifying objections by their orthodox elders & confirming the catastrophists. This made the profession more amenable to consider later catastrophic explanations for observed events, such as an extraterrestrial cause for the K/T mass extinction.
Maybe a semantic distinction without a difference.
milodonharlani says:
October 25, 2013 at 3:29 pm
predictions
I think the reason scientific theories are not discarded when there are extraordinary exceptions to the theory is because the scientific experts use the excuse that they do not have a better theory.
If you don’t like it complain about Kuhn and his “paradigm shifts.” Popper warned against this in
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Framework-Defence-Rationality/dp/0415135559/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382741167&sr=8-1&keywords=the+myth+of+the+framework
milodonharlani says:
October 25, 2013 at 2:20 pm
I meant no formulation that allows prediction of effects on water vapor or cloud behavior.
Theo Goodwin says:
October 25, 2013 at 3:51 pm
The IPeCaC’s formulation regarding water vapor & cloud formation has been repeatedly shown false, yet it remains the cornerstone of their CACA hypothesis. Without their false assumptions, no initial C is possible, for starters, due to too low a climate sensitivity to doubling CO2 concentration from AD 1850 to 2100, or whenever.
@ur momisugly milodonharlani
Samuel Warren Carey was an Australian geologist who was an early advocate of the theory of continental drift. His work on plate tectonics reconstructions led him to develop the Expanding Earth hypothesis. I did my geology in the school he founded at UTas. While plate tectonics is taught there these days as part of the formal curriculum, a lunchtime lecture on expanding earth was organised by the lecturer for those interested in alternatives. Both theories (explanations for observations) would appear to have severe problems.
Zeke says:
October 25, 2013 at 3:47 pm
That’s the flip side of CACA’s anti-scientific excuse, “What else could it be?” if not CO2.