Global Warming In The Recent Past

The following article presents convincing, scientific evidence that the climate in the Northern Hemisphere and the Arctic was warmer than today, as little as 6,000 years ago. Whatever caused this warming was obviously not man's burning of fossil fuels and the emission of carbon dioxide. CO2, as we all know is being blamed for "global warming" and catastrophic climate change.

It makes no sense that the natural forces (solar energy) which controlled climate in the past are not at work in the same way today. The fear of global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions is unfounded. Another thought, how did the polar bears, and other species, survive this past warming? Do the global warming alarmists pay any attention to facts and real world observations? It seems clear they do not.

Obviously, sea level was higher 6,000 years ago, there was far less sea ice in the Arctic, and humans lived in areas that became uninhabitable to them because of cooling, not warming. Climate scientists must address the causes of the climate changes of the recent past before spreading fear about carbon dioxide emissions. It has warmed and cooled many times, long before humans could possibly have had any impact. Blaming our current climate change on carbon dioxide emissions simply makes no sense, nor does it explain verifiable, real world observations as reported in the following article.

Peter

Less ice in the Arctic Ocean 6000-7000 years ago
Written by: Gudmund Løvø 20. October 2008 (source)

Recent mapping of a number of raised beach ridges on the north coast of Greenland suggests that the ice cover in the Arctic Ocean was greatly reduced some 6000-7000 years ago. The Arctic Ocean may have been periodically ice free.

BEACH RIDGE: The scientists believe that this beach ridge in North Greenland formed by wave activity about 6000-7000 years ago. This implies that there was more open sea in this region than there is today. (Click the picture for a larger image) Photo: Astrid Lyså, NGU

PACK-ICE RIDGE: Pack-ice ridges form when drift ice is pressed onto the seashore piling up shore sediments that lie in its path. (Click for a larger image) Photo: Eiliv Larsen, NGU”The climate in the northern regions has never been milder since the last Ice Age than it was about 6000-7000 years ago. We still don’t know whether the Arctic Ocean was completely ice free, but there was more open water in the area north of Greenland than there is today,” says Astrid Lyså, a geologist and researcher at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU).

Shore features
Together with her NGU colleague, ICE COVER: Today, at the mouth of Independence Fjord in North Greenland, drift ice forms a continuous cover from the land. (Click for a larger image) Photo: Eiliv Larsen, NGUEiliv Larsen, she has worked on the north coast of Greenland with a group of scientists from the University of Copenhagen, mapping sea-level changes and studying a number of shore features. She has also collected samples of driftwood that originated from Siberia or Alaska and had these dated, and has collected shells and microfossils from shore sediments.

”The architecture of a sandy shore depends partly on whether wave activity or pack ice has influenced SETTLEMENT: Astrid Lyså in August 2007 in the ruined settlement left by the Independence I Culture in North Greenland. The first immigrants to these inhospitable regions succumbed to the elements nearly 4000 years ago, when the climate became colder again. (Click for a larger image) Photo: Eiliv Larsen, NGUits formation. Beach ridges, which are generally distinct, very long, broad features running parallel to the shoreline, form when there is wave activity and occasional storms. This requires periodically open water,” Astrid Lyså tells me.
Pack-ice ridges which form when drift ice is pressed onto the seashore piling up shore sediments that lie in its path, have a completely different character. They are generally shorter, narrower and more irregular in shape.

Open sea
”The beach ridges which we have had dated to about 6000-7000 years ago were shaped by wave activity,” says Astrid Lyså. They are located at the mouth of Independence Fjord in North Greenland, on an open, flat plain facing directly onto the Arctic Ocean. Today, drift ice forms a continuous cover from the land here.Astrid Lyså says that such old beach formations require that the sea all the way to the North Pole was periodically ice free for a long time.
”This stands in sharp contrast to the present-day situation where only ridges piled up by pack ice are being formed,” she says.

However, the scientists are very careful about drawing parallels with the present-day trend in the Arctic Ocean where the cover of sea ice seems to be decreasing.
“Changes that took place 6000-7000 years ago were controlled by other climatic forces than those which seem to dominate today,” Astrid Lyså believes.

Inuit immigration
The mapping at 82 degrees North took place in summer 2007 as part of the LongTerm project, a sub-project of the major International Polar Year project, SciencePub. The scientists also studied ruined settlements dating from the first Inuit immigration to these desolate coasts.

The first people from Alaska and Canada, called the Independence I Culture, travelled north-east as far as they could go on land as long ago as 4000-4500 years ago. The scientists have found out that drift ice had formed on the sea again in this period, which was essential for the Inuit in connection with their hunting. No beach ridges have been formed since then.

”Seals and driftwood were absolutely vital if they were to survive. They needed seals for food and clothing, and driftwood for fuel when the temperature crept towards minus 50 degrees. For us, it is inconceivable and extremely impressive,” says Eiliv Larsen, the NGU scientist and geologist.

Jim Hansen Wins Award....

NASA's Jim Hansen is tempting fate by continually venturing out onto thinner, and thinner ice. The charade he has been putting on about man-caused global warming is falling apart around him. Read the following article by Cliff Ollier of The University of Western Australia about how glaciers really behave and you'll understand just how misleading Jim Hansen has been.
Peter

The Biggest Whopper of 2007
Julie Walsh, CEIJanuary 2, 2008
Among the candidates for the biggest cock-and-bull story in 2007 must be NASA’s James Hansen with his work of creative genius on Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets and his wannabes, who subsequently copied his imaginative tour de force.
Even the facts are no match for James Hansen and his incredible modeling machine! Though Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice rests in deep bowls, Hansen declares them inclined planes. Then despite ice cores that show little to no movement for the past 400,000 years (including the warm periods), he shamelessly states that these gigantic ice sheets are slip, slidin’ away and the world will be flooded.
The idea of “meltwater lakes on the surface finding their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers. It might conceivably work on valley glaciers but it tells us nothing of the ‘collapse’ of ice sheets,” according to Cliff Ollier, School of Earth and Geographical Science at the University of Western Australia, “Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.”
Alarmists have to be thrilled with the successfulness of Hansen’s 2007 con—without this lie there is no catastrophic flooding, and all they are left with is the IPCC’s non-eventful one-foot-in-a-century sea level rise.
I wonder if Hansen’s modeler can also make Everlasting Gobstoppers!

Greenland, Melting Glaciers and Sen. Barbara Boxer

The following is an article about a trip to Greenland and its melting glaciers by Sen. Barbara Boxer and nine members of her committee. She is chairman (woman) of the Environment and Public Works Committee. She believes man is causing global warming and the melting of the glaciers by burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

She is trying to gather support for legislation she is proposing to reduce these carbon dioxide emissions, and presumably control global warming with all of it's alleged undesirable effects. This is what it is all about. Is the science of man-caused global warming valid? Is legislation to control it capable of working? What is the "cap-and-trade" system for controlling carbon dioxide emissions? Is it simply a hidden tax, or a cost which will simply be passed on to consumers already burdened by higher energy costs.

These are the important questions we must be asking ourselves. I wish the authors of this article had included some scientific articles to support the statements being made. We'll have to find them ourselves.
Peter


Greenland Trip Stokes Boxer's Global Warming Fire
By Nathan Burchfiel CNSNews.com Staff Writer July 31, 2007(CNSNews.com) -

A fact-finding trip to Greenland has renewed Sen. Barbara Boxer's desire to pass legislation aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, according to the senator who has been promising such legislation since early in her term as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.Boxer, a California Democrat, took nine members of her committee to Greenland July 27-29 to tour glaciers, ice shelves and fishing villages in the arctic nation which is home to 10 percent of the planet's ice. "It's one thing to hear about the Greenland ice sheet; it's another thing to see it," she told a news conference Monday. "It's one thing to read about the impacts of global warming on the native people there; it's another thing to have them look you in the eye and tell you."

Boxer said icebergs "are heading to the Atlantic Ocean at a speed twice as fast as in 1985; melting at a rate that will lead to sea-level rises with disastrous consequences unless we act to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide that have already caused the temperature in Greenland to rise four degrees since 1988."She said increased temperatures are driving polar bears into villages where they are killed because they pose a risk to humans. She also said fishermen in the region are being forced to adapt to changes in fish habits as a result of the warming.

Boxer said the trip reminded her that "I have a responsibility to move now to lessen the impacts of severe global warming." Several bills have been drafted that would address carbon emissions through cap-and-trade systems. Boxer has promised since April that she will move legislation through her committee as soon as a bill exists that could pass the narrowly divided Senate. Most recently, she pledged to use the momentum created by former Vice President Al Gore's Live Earth concerts to push for action on climate change.

In June, Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.) announced plans for a bipartisan bill to establish an economy-wide cap-and-trade program. Their bill is expected to be unveiled before the August recess begins next week, and Boxer expressed her interest in addressing the bill when Congress returns in September. Even though no cap-and-trade legislation has passed in the seven months since Democrats took control of Congress, Boxer said Monday that she is pleased with her progress. Pursuing a bill in her committee is "all about the votes," and Warner's support for global warming legislation "was our breakthrough," she said.

Not everyone who went on the trip was convinced that what senators were looking at was the result of man-made global warming. In a blog posting on the Environment and Public Works Committee website Monday, Marc Morano, a spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), pointed to several studies that question human contribution to global warming. Inhofe did not travel to Greenland with his committee colleagues, but Morano, a former reporter for Cybercast News Service, went as his representative.

"Recent research has found that Greenland has been warming since the 1880s, but since 1955, temperature averages at Greenland stations have been colder than the period between 1881-1955," Morano wrote. A 2006 study carried out by Denmark's Aarhus University found that Greenland's glaciers have been melting for the past century, since before man-made carbon emissions were a factor, he noted. A 2006 Los Alamos National Laboratory study found the rate of warming in Greenland was higher in the 1920s than the 1990s.

Other studies Morano cited found that while low elevation ice sheets are thinning, higher elevation interior ice sheets are thickening. A 2003 Harvard University study found that the Earth was warmer during the Medieval Warm Period (800-1300 AD) than it is today. "These studies suggest that the biggest perceived threat to Greenland's glaciers may be contained in unproven computer models predicting a future catastrophic melt," Morano wrote, noting that U.N. scientist Jim Renwick has acknowledged that "half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically well [in forecasting what will happen]."

Boxer acknowledged Morano's presence on the trip, noting that he frequently challenged scientists with those and other studies, and said his objections were "really very illuminating." But she said she was confident that all senators ended the trip accepting that man-made global warming is responsible for Greenland's changes. Morano said he couldn't speak for the senators' views on the subject but told Cybercast News Service, "what all the senators and I saw was nothing more than natural climate variability and normal summer melt of Greenland's glaciers." "The senators were shown nothing alarming," he said. "They were shown Greenland during the summer during a melt ... that was still not as warm as the Greenland of the 1920s and 30s, according to the peer-reviewed research."