Using radiocarbon dating, new research in Geophysical Research Letters has calculated the age of relic moss samples that have been exposed by modern Arctic warming. Results claim that temperatures in the Arctic are warmer than during any sustained period since the mosses were originally buried. Video follows.
Geophysical Research Letters Press Release:
Arctic Warmth Unprecedented in 44,000 Years, Reveals Samples of Ancient Moss
When the temperature rises on Baffin Island, in the Canadian high Arctic, ancient Polytrichum mosses, trapped beneath the ice for thousands of years, are exposed. Using radiocarbon dating, new research in Geophysical Research Letters has calculated the age of relic moss samples that have been exposed by modern Arctic warming. Since the moss samples would have been destroyed by erosion had they been previously exposed, the authors suggest that the temperatures in the Arctic now must be warmer than during any sustained period since the mosses were originally buried.
The authors collected 365 samples of recently exposed biological material from 110 different locations, cutting a 1000 kilometer long transect across Baffin Island, with samples representing a range of altitudes. From their samples the authors obtained 145 viable measurements through radiocarbon dating. They found that most of their samples date from the past 5000 years, when a period of strong cooling overtook the Arctic. However, the authors also found even older samples which were buried from 24,000 to 44,000 years ago.
The records suggest that in general, the eastern Canadian Arctic is warmer now than in any century in the past 5000 years, and in some places, modern temperatures are unprecedented in at least the past 44,000 years. The observations, the authors suggest, show that modern Arctic warming far exceeds the bounds of historical natural variability.
“The great time these plants have been entombed in ice, and their current exposure, is the first direct evidence that present summer warmth in the Eastern Canadian Arctic now exceeds the peak warmth there in the Early Holocene era”, said Gifford Miller, from the University of Colorado. “Our findings add additional evidence to the growing consensus that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases have now resulted in unprecedented recent summer warmth that is well outside the range of that attributable to natural climate variability.”
Video: Disappearing Ice Caps – Giff Miller on Baffin Island
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I hope he is correct, but I doubt it.
N. Hemisphere is on a threshold of significant cooling, so higher the starting temperatures in the Arctic area at the onset of the anticipated cooling, the better for the millions who are even now suffering the ‘fuel poverty’.
Admad
He’s more fundamentally wrong than that. When something melts it gives you no temperature record of the conditions under which it melted. The melting of glaciers is a continuous process acting over 100s or even thousands of years. The dates they are quoting would suggest at best that the last time there was no glacier was 44,000 years ago – that it is not a temperature record. The temperature may have changed up and down after the glacier reached its maximum thickness. In short, the temperature could have been higher in the past but it didn’t last long enough to melt all the ice, what ice was left continued to melt as long as the temperature stayed above 0 more often than it didn’t. You cannot say whether it wasn’t warmer in the past based on this “evidence”. The guy is a moron if he doesn’t get that. The reviewers are morons.
Isn’t this the same study that was thoroughly discredited in October?
One Paleoclimatologist, Jim Bouldin was utterly scathing, noting:
We have four sites clustered together at one end of the 1000km sampling transect that give very anomalous results relative to the 135 samples collected all along that transect. So why in the world are they focusing on those four sites, to the exclusion of the much more geographically extensive 135? How can the authors just blow past this fact without discussing why in any way? Reviewers, HELLO??
and concludes:
The authors conclude with this statement, which really pretty much gives away their bias:
“These findings add additional evidence to the growing consensus that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases have now resulted in unprecedented recent summer warmth that is well outside the range of that attributable to natural climate variability.”
No it does not thank you very much. The study doesn’t even address natural variability. And I thought the consensus was supposedly already pretty much full grown…that’s what I’ve been hearing anyway. And lastly, an area of a few square miles on Baffin Island upon which the thesis rests, does not deserve the general phrase “Arctic Canada” used in the title.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/new-arctic-study-ignores-inconvenient-facts-3/
44,000 years….isn’t that smack in the middle of a full glacial period?
Baffin island had trees during the peak of the Eemian (last interglacial). Until we’ve exceeded that metric it’s within natural variability.
Helge asked: “Aren’t someone forgetting the ice age? The last Ice age started 110.000 years ago, ended for 10.000 years ago. During that period mosses should have been covered. So why mention 44.000 years at all?”
The ice ages are still with us. We are enjoying the warmth of an inter-glacial. Not only that we are still enjoying the prosperity of the Modern Warm Period.
100,000-Years and All That
The dominant period of the last million years or so of the Quaternary ice ages has been about 100,000 years or so (obliquity). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation
But the astronomical theory provides for secondary cycles, nominally 40,000 years (variation in axis tilt) and 20,000 years (precession) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
The 44,000 year age of the organic material found corresponds with the last interstadial called the Mid-Wisconsin interstadial a brief “warm” period. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadial
Scott A. Elias stated in 1999, “A Mid-Wisconsin interstadial warming dating from 43.5–39 ka was rapid and intense. At the peak of the warming event, about 42 ka, TMAX values were only 1–2°C lower than modern.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1417(199905)14:3%3C255::AID-JQS443%3E3.0.CO;2-X/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false.
That mosses were exposed from this interstadial is not indicative of much. The maximum temperature was not much below the present. Besides, the interstadial lasted only 4,000 years, not long enough for the Arctic coasts to rebound to their present elevation.
During the last 12,0000-year the north coast of Norway has risen 120 meters (400 feet).
Alternative hypothesis
These mosses were buried by the last advance of the ice sheet coeval with the end of the Mid-Wisconsin Interstadial. The weight of the ice reached its maximum depressing a land surface that remained lower than the present elevation. The fact that the mosses were buried would account for the lack of erosion of these mosses. Isostatic uplift would explain why well preserved mosses are being exposed now.. Mineral and organic material buried under the surface were not subject to erosion.
Summary: About 44,000 years ago the Arctic coast rose a little and was ice-free part of the year and warm enough for the mosses to grow. Then the glacier resumed its advance and covered the mosses and depressed them below the present elevation. Around 5,000 years ago the land was substantially warmer than at present, but the older mosses were still buried because isostatic rebound had some way to go. Now, 5,000 years later isostatic rebound has exposed the older mosses.
Two uncertainties in this hypothesis: 1) Amount of depresson and isostatic rebound in the Arctic
2) Elevations and depths of the specimens and the GPS coordinates of the sites
Conclusion: The timing is critically important to the claims being made.
cd says:
January 22, 2014 at 2:56 am
Thank you for clarifying my over-simplistic view. Appreciated.
So it was naturally this warm both 5000 years and 44000 years ago in the middle of a glacial cycle. So present range is quite natural. Thanks for that…
Paul Homewood says:
January 22, 2014 at 3:09 am
“Isn’t this the same study that was thoroughly discredited in October?
One Paleoclimatologist, Jim Bouldin was utterly scathing, noting:
We have four sites clustered together at one end of the 1000km sampling transect that give very anomalous results relative to the 135 samples collected all along that transect. So why in the world are they focusing on those four sites, to the exclusion of the much more geographically extensive 135? How can the authors just blow past this fact without discussing why in any way? Reviewers, HELLO?? ”
It looks like “moss picking” is a new form of “cherry picking”.
I thought we were in an ice age 10,000 years ago?
Something about this study seems very contrived and manipulative.
So it was precedented in 44,001 years
And the reasons are
1. took a few thousand years to melt glaciation in the neighbourhood
2. AMO positive half cycle
3. Black carbon with 5.0 W/m2 forcing
Wikipedia says forcing on ice 1.0W/m2 and 3 times warming of equivalent forcing of CO2 -> 3.0 W/m2
Add 1.0W/m2 (IPCC) from black soot in the atmosphere times 2, because almost all soot is in the northern hemisphere -> 2.0W/m2
The “climate forcing due to snow/ice albedo change is of the order of 1.0 W/m2 at middle- and high-latitude land areas in the Northern Hemisphere and over the Arctic Ocean.”[73] The “soot effect on snow albedo may be responsible for a quarter of observed global warming.”[74] “Soot deposition increases surface melt on ice masses, and the meltwater spurs multiple radiative and dynamical feedback processes that accelerate ice disintegration,” according to NASA scientists Dr. James Hansen and Dr. Larissa Nazarenko.[75] As a result of this feedback process, “BC on snow warms the planet about three times more than an equal forcing of CO2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_carbon
The above finding is pretty scary and unprecedented. Forty-four thousand years! Wow! How did Baffin Island stay so frozen up during the last 11,000 years. It stayed locked cold during the Holocene Hypsithermal (Note the reference to a “millenium or more” below).
Did they do test samples for soot around the mosses?
In more northerly Ellesmere Island I find exposed plant life that was last entombed by ice in the Little Ice Age. Some were successfully regenerated.
I’m wondering whether Miller isn’t collecting moss exposed by soot or some other localized mechanism.
Miller was previously covered by WUWT and Judith Curry’s site with plenty of disputin’ and plenty of comments.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/24/claim-last-100-years-may-be-warmest-in-120000-years-in-the-arctic-but-not-so-fast/
http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/29/unprecedented-arctic-warming-part-ii/
Notice that even if this goofball were correct in his main claims, nothing he did or thinks that he found, in any conceivable way shows any connection to AGW claims. And exactly what does he think “normal variability” is and why does he believe that the planet is not simply returning to more warmer temps, as has happened in the past. We have pretty strong evidence that the Earth was significantly warmer than today in the fairly recent past and contradicting that evidence requires a whole lot more ( and more plausible) evidence than he has presented here. He is also way out on a limb with his claim that Arctic temps are proxies for the entire planet. His claims go light years further than what he has actually shown, and are transparently more political than scientific.
Tom in Florida says:
January 22, 2014 at 5:49 am
Paul Homewood says:
January 22, 2014 at 3:09 am
“Isn’t this the same study that was thoroughly discredited in October?
One Paleoclimatologist, Jim Bouldin was utterly scathing, noting:
We have four sites clustered together at one end of the 1000km sampling transect that give very anomalous results relative to the 135 samples collected all along that transect. So why in the world are they focusing on those four sites, to the exclusion of the much more geographically extensive 135? How can the authors just blow past this fact without discussing why in any way? Reviewers, HELLO?? ”
It looks like “moss picking” is a new form of “cherry picking”.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The fact that this is the University of Colorado explains much. The quote of Jim Bouldin explains the rest.
One can only imagine what it was like on Baffin Island during the Medieval time.
Yet Baffin stayed crispy cold.
This tells me that recent Arctic warming has caused widespread melting of 500 year old ice, and in a many places some 1000 and 1,500 year old ice, but in one place in the far southeast, where the ice got really sooty, some 44,000 year old ice melted. Is that about right?
And finally here are some tree lines during the Holocene. Those tree lines are now tundra.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/24/claim-last-100-years-may-be-warmest-in-120000-years-in-the-arctic-but-not-so-fast/#comment-1457628
Go to 6:20
So this guy is following up on his claim and publishing a new ground breaking paper about the mid Wisconsin Glaciation warm period that was warmer than today and mosses grew on Baffin Island?
Helge Andersson says:
January 22, 2014 at 1:20 am
“Aren’t someone forgetting the ice age? The last Ice age started 110.000 years ago, ended for 10.000 years ago. During that period mosses should have been covered. So why mention 44.000 years at all?”
You are correct and it is very telling that Dr. Boulder didn’t say something about this. I believe the reason for his 44k is it is near the limits of usefulness of radiocarbon dating – a real caveman’s remark. I won’t add to the impressive list of logical things wrong that many commenters before here have mentioned regarding temperatures and melting thicknesses of ice – if it was twice as hot as now for a period of 50 years, but the ground was already covered in thick ice, we wouldn’t know about this temperature.