Given its 30th anniversary, and with commodities in the news – especially oil – I thought it was an apropos time (and TED an appropriate venue) to revisit the bet’s context, outcome, controversies and implications.

Without getting into it too deeply, here are some things worth knowing. Given the above graph of the five commodities’ prices in inflation-adjusted terms, it will surprise no-one that the bet’s payoff was highly dependent on its start date. Simon famously offered to bet comers on any timeline longer than a year, and on any commodity, but the bet itself was over a decade, from 1980-1990. If you started the bet any year during the 1980s Simon won eight of the ten decadal start years. During the 1990s things changed, however, with Simon the decadal winners in four start years and Ehrlich winning six – 60% of the time. And if we extend the bet into the current decade, taking Simon at his word that he was happy to bet on any period from a year on up (we don’t have enough data to do a full 21st century decade), then Ehrlich won every start-year bet in the 2000s. He looks like he’ll be a perfect Simon/Ehrlich ten-for-ten.

In light of the fact that the world population clock recently crossed the 7 billion mark, I thought I’d see if there was a more accurate measure of the increasing scarcity (or lack thereof) of these metals over time.

Rather than “cherry-picking”  particular decades, I took a look at the full historical price record (available from the USGS). The inflation adjusted prices of Chromium (Cr), Copper (Cu), Nickel (Ni), Tin (Sn) and Tungsten (W) exhibit no statistically meaningful inflation-adjusted price trend over the last 110 years…

Cu, Ni and W have slightly negative slopes; while Cr and Sn have slightly positive slopes… Only chromium’s (R^2 = 0.3187) and copper’s (R^2 = 0.1719) trend lines approach statistical significance.

While the inflation adjusted price of these metals is a good measure of affordability, it is not a complete measure.  The price is only relevant if it is measured against the financial resources available.  Relative to world real per capita GDP all five metals have become more affordable since 1969…

The GDP slope is positive and highly statistically significant (R^2 = 0.98). The GDP slope (81.354) is almost three times larger than the largest positive metal slope (Ni, 32.506).

More importantly, from a scarcity perspective, the production output of all five metals has been rising over time. Four are rising exponentially …

While the ratio of price to output has been declining exponentially…

If these metals were becoming more scarce, the price would be rising faster than the supply.

The USGS estimates that the current proved reserves of all five metals are sufficient to meet demand for the next 20 to 59 years.  For “fun” I estimated the crustal mass of all five metals and estimated how long it would take to literally run out at the current production rate…

Debunking the Population Bomb Dud

The human population hit the seven billion mark last fall…

Published online 19 October 2011 | Nature 478, 300 (2011) | doi:10.1038/478300a

News

Seven billion and counting

A look behind this month’s global population landmark reveals a world in transition.

Jeff Tollefson

What’s in a number? This month, the world’s attention turns to a big one: 7 billion, the latest milestone in humanity’s remarkable and worrying rise in population.

[...]

On one level, a figure of 7 billion is incredible for the sheer momentum it represents: a full doubling of the planet’s population since 1967, with current growth adding 200,000 people each day, and a nation larger than the size of France each year. But although the 6-billion mark was reached about 13 years ago according to revised figures, it will take nearly 14 years to hit 8 billion (see ‘Snapshots of growth’). The comparison shows that population growth is decelerating; it is likely to level off at about 10 billion before the end of the century.

Between now and then, the fastest growth will be in Africa, where fertility levels remain higher than anywhere else in the world. Population levels among industrialized countries, by contrast, will remain relatively constant. Although Asia will remain the most populous continent, decreasing fertility rates there will add to the overall ‘greying’ of the planet.

[...]

Nature

The Nature article included the following graphic, indicating that the word population will most likely level off at ~10 billion ca. 2070…

Is that a problem?   I don’t think so.  The human race handled the rise from 3.5 to 7 billion rather well.  The global per capita food supply has steadily increased since 1960…

Source: UN FAOSTAT

Per capita real GDP has risen at the same rate as the population…

Per capita food supply has also risen with the population…

And… Amazingly… Per capita food supply and per capita GDP are highly correlated…

The percentage of the world’s population suffering from undernourishment has steadily declined over the last 40 years, despite a rising population…

Very few nations have failed to reach the MDG 1 target of reducing the percentage of their population suffering from undernourishment by 50%…

The world isn’t running out of water either.   The UN FAO Aquastat data base showed that in the year 2000, the world’s total renewable water resource was 53,730 x 10^9 m3/yr. The total withdrawal was estimated to be 2,871 x 10^9 m3/yr. That’s a 5% utilization rate.

The far from perect human condition doesn’t negate the fact that clear progress has been made over the last half-century to reduce hunger, despite a growing population.

Almost all of the population growth over the next 60 years will be in Africa and Asia – the two largest land masses on Earth.

Assuming that the populations of Asia and Africa reach 5 billion and 3.6 billion respectively, their population densities will be 114 and 119 people per km^2.  The population densities of the rest of the world will remain about the same or decline. Asia’s density is currently 95 per km^2. The greatest stress will be on Africa, which is currently underutilizing its resources more than any other continent.

Water resources are underutilized in Africa across the board, yet conflicts between water uses are common

Africa has plenty of potentially arable land, plenty of water and plenty of resources. Africa just lacks the economic and political infrastructure to realize its own potential.

Current and potential arable land use in Africa. Out of the total land area in Africa, only a fraction is used for arable land. Using soil, land cover and climatic characteristics a FAO study has estimated the potential land area for rainfed crops, excluding built up areas and forests – neither of which would be available for agriculture. According to the study, the potential – if realised – would mean an increase ranging from 150 – 700% percent per region, with a total potential for the whole of Africa in 300 million hectares. Note that the actual arable land in 2003 is higher than the potential in a few countries, like Egypt, due to irrigation…

LINK

The “world” isn’t running out of anything.   Global proven oil reserves have doubled since 1980. 

Most  other commercial mineral resources have seen its proven reserves grow at least as fast as consumption has grown.

The world has plenty of food, water, space, mineral resources and the Earth’s environment is generally cleaner now than it was 35 years ago. Crop yields have continued to maintain an increasing upward trend for 40 years… And there is every reason to believe that crop yields will continue to improve (unless we really are on the verge of returning to Little Ice Age climate conditions).

But it will get worse in the future!!!

The “bear” is always just out of sight in the woods. For centuries, Malthusians have trotted out one invisible bogeyman after another (Malthusians pre-date Malthus by at least a few thousand years). The disaster is just over the horizon, just around the corner or lurking in the woods.

The Earth is finite; but humans have barely tapped its resources… We will still barely be tapping the Earth’s resources when we hit the 10 billion mark about 90 years down the road… And the Malthusians will still be warning us about the bear in the woods.

The only thing the world has a genuine shortage of is honest and competent people in gov’t. Almost all of our problems are due to political interference with market forces.

Erratum

The world isn’t running out of water either. The UN FAO Aquastat data base showed that in the year 2000, the world’s total renewable water resource was 53,730 x 10^9 m3/yr. The total withdrawal was estimated to be 2,871 x 10^9 m3/yr. That’s a 5% utilization rate.

After a more detailed review of the Aquastat data, I noticed that many nations did not list water withdrawal amounts. So I removed all of the incomplete nations and revised the calculations. The most complete year in the FAO Aquastat database was 2000. Resource and withdrawal data are available for 144 countries…

2000 Water resources: total renewable (actual) (10^9 m3/yr): 45,701

2000 Total water withdrawal (10^9 m3/yr): 2,846

2000 Utilization Rate: 6%

There are areas in the world, like the Middle East and North Africa, where water utilization approaches the renewable resource… However, the world has plenty of water to support 10 billion people.

As a group, the top ten water consumers withdrew 14% of their renewable water resources in 2000.

19 January 2012

Obama clean energy ad airing in Va.

A new ad from President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign that touts his energy and ethics record began airing in Virginia this week even as Republican blasted him over a decision to reject a permit for a proposed oil pipeline from Canada.

The 30-second spot (see below) makes a case that Obama’s policies have promoted clean energy jobs and reduced the nation’s dependence on foreign oil while enduring unfounded attacks funded by wealthy energy industry officials.

[...]

LINK

This campaign ad is nothing but a pack of lies.

Lie #1

Lie #1: “Secretive oil billionaires attacking President Obama”… The Koch brothers have been anything but secretive in their attacks on President Obama.

Lie #2

Lie #2: The ad implies that President Obama has created 2.7 million “clean energy industry” jobs.

The 2.7 million figure is purportedly cited from a Brookings report. The report said that there currently are 2.7 million jobs in America that “produce goods and services with an environmental benefit.”

The clean economy, which employs some 2.7 million workers, encompasses a signifi cant number of jobs in establishments spread across a diverse group of industries. (Page 4)

The report says that the “clean economy establishments added half a million jobs between 2003 and 2010.” So… Obama didn’t even “create” half a million “clean energy jobs.” He didn’t even create half a million clean economy jobs.    The Brookings report refers to “clean economy” not “clean energy” jobs. The vast majority of the “clean economy” jobs are not in energy… And almost all of those jobs were created before Obama took office.

More than 82% of the “clean economy” jobs listed in the report have nothing to do with energy production…

Waste Management & Treatment … 386,116 … 14%
Public Mass Transit … 350,547 … 13%
Conservation … 314,983 … 12%
Energy Saving Building Materials … 161,896 … 6%
Regulation & Compliance … 141,890 … 5%
Professional Environmental Services … 141,046 … 5%
Organic Food & Farming … 129,956 … 5%
Recycling & Reuse … 129,252 … 5%
Green Consumer Products … 77,264 … 3%
Green Building Materials … 76,577 … 3%
HVAC … 73,600 … 3%
Sustainable Forestry Products … 61,054 … 2%
Recycled Content Products … 59,712 … 2%
Green Architecture … 56,190 … 2%
Air & Water Purification … 24,930 … 1%
Green Chemical Products … 22,622 … 1%
Total … 2,207,635 … 82%

Lie #3

Lie #3: The ad implies that President Obama somehow played a role in the increase in US domestic oil production over the last few years… That is beyond ridiculous!  The plays and prospects from which the production growth was derived were worked up, leased, drilled and plumbed-up for production over the last decade or more. The effects of Obama’s disastrous anti-drilling policies won’t show up in production data for quite some time.

Obama’s anti-drilling policies began in 2009 and were ramped up in 2010. This is either the most amazingly arrogant lie to ever come out of this jackass’ mouth or an example of incredible ignorance of the oil & gas industry and energy in general.

The increase in US oil production has come from two main sources:

1) Shale plays like the Bakken.

The Bakken shale play has mostly been developed on private property. Very little of the shale plays have been developed on Federal lands – And the Obama administration has actively sought to further restrict development on Federal lands. Apart from the EPA, regulation and obstruction of these sorts of plays are mostly in the hands of State gov’ts.

2) Deepwater Gulf of Mexico discoveries.

The deepwater discoveries that have been brought on line over the last three years were discovered long before Obama took office… Many were discovered while Clinton was still in office. Construction and installation of the production facilities began long before Obama took office. On top of that, much of the increase in production was the result of the ongoing recovery from hurricanes Rita (2005), Katrina (2005) and Ike (2008).

Over the last two years, the Obama administration has almost paralyzed operations in the Gulf of Mexico with an unlawful permitorium and has aggressively tried to hamper the shale plays with fraudulent EPA attacks on fracking and unlawful efforts to make BLM lands unavailable…

This is all anyone ever needs to know about President Obama’s energy policy…

Addendum

The Institute for Energy Research has a good post on this subject… LINK

This morning, I arrived at work and found my office in total disarray – So the quake didn’t do any damage…

Figure 1. Dallas earthquake location and details (USGS)

Now… I have yet to hear any journalists, politicians or college professors link this quake to fracking… But I figure they will. So I’ll just preemptively shoot that bit of junk science down. Fracking can trigger extremely minor earthquakes. A 2.0 Md quake is in the realm of possibilities. However, there aren’t any active wells within a 5 km radius (Davis et al., 1995) of this particular quake.

Figure 2. Evil Barnett Shale Play and Dallas earthquake. (Texas Railroad Commission and USGS)

Now that I’ve preemptively debunked that bit of junk science, let’s go to Ohio.  Every morning I like to check the Real Clear Energy website.  It’s a nice compendium of energy news and also includes a fair bit of AGW nonsense.  So it’s often a good source for blogging material.  Well, yesterday, this bit of nonsense caught my eye…

Figure 3. Real Clear Energy

So, I clicked the link to the Scientific American article and this is what I saw…

Figure 4. Not very Scientific American

At least they had the scientific integrity to mention that the quake was likely triggered by the wastewater injection well and not actually triggered by the fracking.

The Oklahoma Geological Survey recently examined (Holland, 2011) the possible relationship between a swarm of micro-quakes and a fracking operation in Garvin County OK. They concluded that the fracking could have triggered the 1.0 to 2.8 Md temblors. However, the quakes were so insignificant that it was almost impossible to precisely locate the hypocenters. The quakes could have been within 5 km of a fracking operation, they could have been small enough to have been triggered by the fracking operation and they occurred right after one fracking operation. However, the area has frequent seismicity of similar magnitude and no other fracking operations in the field’s 60+ year history have been correlated with induced seismicity.

Figure 5. Southern Oklahoma Earthquakes from 1897-2010 (modified from Holland, 2011)

After a bit of modeling, Holland was able to place the hypocenters of the temblors along a fault, within 5 km of an active fracking operation.

Figure 6. A possibly fracking-related earthquake swarm (modified from Holland, 2011)

Holland’s conclusion was that there was a 50-50 chance that these micro-quakes were triggered by the fracking operation in the Picket Unit B Well 4-18.

Figure 7. Holland's conclusion (Holland, 2011)

One person reported feeling these quakes.  Md 1.0 to 2.8 quakes are Category I on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale…

Figure 8. Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale (USGS).

You have to get up to more than Md 3.5 before quakes deliver “vibrations similar to the passing of a truck.” The non-palpable seismicity that might result from fracking is less than that of a seismic crew shooting a survey. Fracking can’t cause larger quakes…

Oklahoma Earthquakes Stronger Than Fracking Tremors, Experts Say

By SETH BORENSTEIN and JONATHAN FAHEY 11/ 7/11

WASHINGTON — Thousands of times every day, drilling deep underground causes the earth to tremble. But don’t blame the surprise flurry of earthquakes in Oklahoma on man’s thirst for oil and gas, experts say.

The weekend quakes were far stronger than the puny tremors from drilling – especially the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing.

[...]

The magnitude-5.6 quake that rocked Oklahoma three miles underground had the power of 3,800 tons of TNT, which is nearly 2,000 times stronger than the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The typical energy released in tremors triggered by fracking, “is the equivalent to a gallon of milk falling off the kitchen counter,” said Stanford University geophysicist Mark Zoback.

In Oklahoma, home to 185,000 drilling wells and hundreds of injection wells, the question of man-made seismic activity comes up quickly. But so far, federal, state and academic experts say readings show that the Oklahoma quakes were natural, following the lines of a long-known fault.

“There’s a fault there,” said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Paul Earle. “You can have an earthquake that size anywhere east of the Rockies. You don’t need a huge fault to produce an earthquake that big. It’s uncommon, but not unexpected.”

[...]

In the past, earthquakes have been linked to energy exploration and production, including from injections of enormous amounts of drilling wastewater or injections of water for geothermal power, experts said. They point to recent earthquakes in the magnitude 3 and 4 range – not big enough to cause much damage, but big enough to be felt – in Arkansas, Texas, California, England, Germany and Switzerland. And back in the 1960s, two Denver quakes in the 5.0 range were traced to deep injection of wastewater.

[...]

Holland, who has documented some of the biggest shaking associated with fracking, compared a man-made earthquake to a mosquito bite. “It’s really quite inconsequential,” he said.

Hydraulic fracturing has been practiced for decades but it has grown rapidly in recent years as drillers have learned to combine it with horizontal drilling to tap enormous reserves of natural gas and oil in the United States.

About 5 million gallons of fluid is used to fracture a typical well. That’s typically not nearly enough weight and pressure to cause more than a tiny tremor.

Earlier this year, Holland wrote a report about a different flurry of Oklahoma quakes last January – the strongest a 2.8 magnitude – that seemed to occur with hydraulic fracturing. Holland said it was a 50-50 chance that the gas drilling technique caused the tremors

[...]

AP

So… Fracking can’t cause significant earthquakes and Seth Borenstein can actually write an article without parroting the alarmists.

References and Further Reading

Davis, S.D., P.A. Nyffenegger & C. Frolich.  The 9 April 1993 Earthquake in South-Central Texas: Was It Induced by Fluid Withdrawal? Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.  Vol. 85, No, 6.  pp. 1888-1895, December 1995.

Frolich, C. & E. Potter.  Dallas-Forth Worth earthquakes coincident with activity associated with natural gas production.  The Leading Edge.  Vol. 29, No. 3.  pp. 270-275, March 2010.

Holland, A. Examination of Possibly Induced Seismicity from Hydraulic Fracturing in the Eola Field, Garvin County, Oklahoma.  Oklahoma Geological Survey Open-File Report OF1-2011.  August 2011.

What warming?

HadCRUT3 variance adjusted global mean temperature anomaly, 12-month average. Source: Wood for Trees.

20 October 2011
Old American theory is ‘speared’

By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News

An ancient bone with a projectile point lodged within it appears to up-end – once and for all – a long-held idea of how the Americas were first populated.

The rib, from a tusked beast known as a mastodon, has been dated precisely to 13,800 years ago.

This places it before the so-called Clovis hunters, who many academics had argued were the North American continent’s original inhabitants.

News of the dating results is reported in Science magazine.

In truth, the “Clovis first” model, which holds to the idea that America’s original human population swept across a land-bridge from Siberia some 13,000 years ago, has looked untenable for some time.

A succession of archaeological finds right across the United States and northern Mexico have indicated there was human activity much earlier than this – perhaps as early as 15-16,000 years ago.

The mastodon rib, however, really leaves the once cherished model with nowhere to go.

[...]

The timing of humanity’s presence in North America is important because it plays into the debate over why so many great beasts from the end of the last Ice Age in that quarter of the globe went extinct.

Not just mastodons, but woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, camels, and teratorns (predatory birds with a nearly four-metre wingspan) – all disappeared in short order a little over 12,700 years ago.

A rapidly changing climate in North America is assumed to have played a key role – as is the sophisticated stone-tool weaponry used by the Clovis hunters. But the fact that there are also humans with effective bone and antler killing technologies present in North America deeper in time suggests the hunting pressure on these animals may have been even greater than previously thought.

“Humans clearly had a role in these extinctions and by the time the Clovis technology turns up at 13,000 years ago – that’s the end. They finished them off,” said Prof Waters.

“You know, the Clovis-first model has been dying for some time,” he finished. “But there’s nothing harder to change than a paradigm, than long-standing thinking. When Clovis-First was first proposed, it was a very elegant model but it’s time to move on, and most of the archaeological community is doing just that.”

First things first… This “discovery” does not alter the fact that the original human inhabitants of the Americas most likely migrated into North America from Siberia across the Bering land bridge.  It remains the only viable pathway.  Pushing their migration back in time a few thousand years into the Pleistocene just means that the first wave arrived before the Bølling /Allerød interstadials during the Oldest Dryas instead of during the Younger Dryas.

GISP2 ice core climate reconstruction of the Late Pleistocene through Holocene (after Alley, 2000)

The Real Clear Science link to this article was titled, “First Americans Not From Siberian Land-Bridge.”  The BBC reporter seemed to draw a similar erroneous conclusion… “In truth, the ‘Clovis first’ model, which holds to the idea that America’s original human population swept across a land-bridge from Siberia some 13,000 years ago, has looked untenable for some time.”  The paper in Science is behind a pay-wall; but the abstract doesn’t seem to cast any doubt on the Bering land bridge theory.  The significance of this discovery is that the Anthropocene may have begun much earlier than previously thought… At least several thousand years before mankind discovered capitalism…

Science 21 October 2011:
Vol. 334 no. 6054 pp. 351-353
DOI: 10.1126/science.1207663

•Report

Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington

 
Michael R. Waters1,*, Thomas W. Stafford Jr.2,5, H. Gregory McDonald3, Carl Gustafson4, Morten Rasmussen5, Enrico Cappellini5, Jesper V. Olsen6, Damian Szklarczyk6, Lars Juhl Jensen6, M. Thomas P. Gilbert5, Eske Willerslev5

Abstract
The tip of a projectile point made of mastodon bone is embedded in a rib of a single disarticulated mastodon at the Manis site in the state of Washington. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis show that the rib is associated with the other remains and dates to 13,800 years ago. Thus, osseous projectile points, common to the Beringian Upper Paleolithic and Clovis, were made and used during pre-Clovis times in North America. The Manis site, combined with evidence of mammoth hunting at sites in Wisconsin, provides evidence that people were hunting proboscideans at least two millennia before Clovis.

A previous post of mine, Run Away!!! The Anthropocene is Coming!!!, drew some criticism about my assertion ”that modern man migrated out of Africa and hunted the megafauna of Europe and North America into extinction.”  My comment was at least somewhat sarcastic… And yes, I do know that the human migration out of Africa began long before the Holocene, but, it is a simple fact that mastodons, stegodons and mammoths had “weathered” all of the prior Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles just fine.   The only major distinction between the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene and the previous glacial-interglacial transitions was the migration of humans out of Africa, across the world and the demise of most of the mega fauna that were in the path of that migration…

Mammoths, Stegodons and Mastodons loved the Pleistocene but never got acquainted with the Holocene.

While I may profusely ridicule the notion that mankind’s industrial activities over the last 200 years have given rise to a unit of geological time, distinct from the Holocene… I fully believe that mankind’s conquest of Earth since the late Pleistocene is the only thing that truly distinguishes the Holocene from previous Quaternary interglacials.

NASA’s Hansen made up to $750,000 on the side in 2010
October 12, 2011 by Don Surber

Government bureaucrat James Hansen pulled down up to $750,000 last year in speeches and prize money. The American Tradition Institute reported: “As it waits for the resolution of its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which seeks the outside employment permission records of global warming activist Dr. James Hansen, American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center has received the belatedly filed 2010 public financial disclosure of the renowned director of the NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.”

More than half the extra income came from the $550,600 (£372,000) or 50 million yen Blue Planet award from the Asahi Glass Foundation at the University of Tokyo on October 26, 2010.

[...]

LINK

$750k in outside income in 2010.

As the Director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen’s gubmint salary could be anywhere from $120k to $200k.

Hansen is also an “Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.” Columbia’s Earth Institute is a non-scientific, greentard, interdisciplinary program run by an Enviromarxist economist, Jeffrey Sachs. Columbia’s actual school of earth and atmospheric sciences is the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Adjunct professors at Columbia University earn anywhere from $25k to $186k per year.

So, three-time arrestee and premiere junk scientist James Hansen is almost certainly a million dollar bureaucrat.

Hansen’s major “accomplishments”…

He freely admits to modifying data to obtain desired results…

He directs an agency (NASA GISS) that manipulates temperature data in order to produce more apparent warming than even the Climategate CRU (HadCRUT3) do…

Back in 1988, he published a climate model that, when compared to his own temperature data, substantially disproves AGW…

Hansen’s results are far more deserving of this…

Than they are of this…

Fig. 1) Canadian Arctic station location map.

From Baffin Bay, west to the Yukon Territory, I found 12 GISS/GHCN stations with long, relatively continuous, record lengths with data through 2011…

Fig. 2) Canadian Arctic temperature reconstruction.

The most significant features are:

1. A strong warming trend from 1992-2010.
2. A general lack of data from 1910-1945, resulting in a very noisy early 20th century signal.
3. No data at all from 1911-1921.

Temperature Reconstruction

I performed a GISS station search centered on 71.4 N latitude, 23.5 W longitude and downloaded the 12 GISS/GHCN instrumental records with at least 60 years of continuous data up to 2011.  

Fig. 1) Station Location Map

Next I calculated a temperature anomaly relative to 1961-1990 for each of the 12 stations and then averaged them together to create a temperature reconstruction.  The climate in the Warming Island area is statistically indistinguishable from that of the 1930′s.

Fig. 2) Warming Island Area: Instrumental temperature reconstruction.

Then I took that reconstruction back to 1000 AD with the GISP2 ice core d18O data (Kobashi et al., 2010)…

Fig. 3) Warming Island Area: Instrumental reconstruction combined with GISP2 ice core reconstruction.

The Modern Warming is also statistically indistinguishable from the Medieval Warm Period in the Warming Island region.

Arctic Sea Ice Reconstruction

It occurred to me that there might just be a relationship between the temperature anomaly and the Arctic sea ice extent.  So I went to Wood for Trees and downloaded the historical  NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice Index.  Then I cross plotted an annual 13-month running average of the sea ice index against the average of the station anomalies and the GISP2 reconstruction (Kobashi et al., 2010) and found a pretty good correlation (R-squared = 0.67)…

Fig. 4) Warming Island Temperature Anomaly vs. NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice Index.

Using the equation “Sea Ice Index = (-0.5976 * Temp. Anom.)+12.374″ I calculated a Model Sea Ice Index.

The “Model Sea Ice Index” (white curve) is very similar to the measured sea ice index (cyan curve)…

Fig. 5) Arctic Sea Ice Extent Model: 1880 AD to present.

Using the same equation, I extrapolated the Model Sea Ice Index back to 1000 AD using the GISP2 temperature data from Kobashi et al., 2010…

Fig. 6) Arctic Sea Ice Extent Model: 1000 AD to present.

The model suggests that Arctic sea ice had been steadily expanding from ca. 1150 AD up until ca. 1800 AD and has been declining since ca. 1800 AD.

Next, I carried the model back to the Early Holocene using the Alley, 2000 GISP2 reconstruction…

Fig. 7) Arctic Sea Ice Extent Model: Holocene

This suggests that the sea ice contraction during the instrumental era (1979-2011) is not particularly remarkable.

Calibrating the Model

Realizing that my model has been extrapolated about 8,000 years away from real data, I decided to compare it to some real data. McKay et al., 2008 demonstrated that the modern Arctic sea ice cover is anomalously high and the Arctic summer sea surface temperature is anomalously low relative to the rest of the Holocene…

Modern sea-ice cover in the study area, expressed here as the number of months/year with >50% coverage, averages 10.6 ±1.2 months/year… Present day SST and SSS in August are 1.1 ± 2.4 8C and 28.5 ±1.3, respectively… In the Holocene record of core HLY0501-05, sea-ice cover has ranged between 5.5 and 9 months/year, summer SSS has varied between 22 and 30, and summer SST has ranged from 3 to 7.5 8C (Fig. 7).

McKay et al., 2008

Fig. 8) Chukchi Sea Ice Extent: Holocene.

My GISP2 (Alley, 2000) sea ice model is generally consistent with McKay et al., 2008…

Fig. 9) Comparison of Arctic sea ice extent model to Chukchi Sea ice cover.

 Conclusion

“Move along, there’s nothing to see here.”  The Arctic sea ice has “been there and done that” many times over the last 10,000 years without any anthropogenic assistance.

References 

Alley, R.B. 2000.  The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.

Kobashi, T., J.P. Severinghaus, J.-M. Barnola, K. Kawamura, T. Carter, and T. Nakaegawa.  2010. Persistent multi-decadal Greenland temperature fluctuation  through the last millennium. Climatic Change, Vol. 100, pp. 733-756. 

McKay, J.L., A. de Vernal, C. Hillaire-Marcel, C. Not, L. Polyak, and D. Darby.  2008. Holocene fluctuations in Arctic sea-ice cover: dinocyst-based reconstructions for the eastern Chukchi Sea. Can. J. Earth Sci. 45: 1377–1397

Michaels, P.  2008. “Warming Island”—Another Global Warming Myth Exposed. World Climate Report.

Seems pretty cut and dried… But, I had never heard of DW-World, so I looked for some sort of confirmation of this startling discovery. My first stop was Nature…

Nature Reports Climate Change Published online: 18 October 2007 | doi:10.1038/climate.2007.61

Atlantic invaders

The melting of Arctic sea ice is blurring the biological boundaries between Pacific and Atlantic.

It was in May 1999, during routine monitoring, that the tiny diatom was first found drifting in the ocean currents. Not an unusual observation on a plankton survey, only the species was in the wrong ocean. The north-west Atlantic was thick with phytoplankton of a Pacific species on its first visit for 800,000 years.

[...]

Reid’s explanation — based on analyses of sea ice coverage — is that Neodenticula seminae migrated from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic as a direct consequence of the Arctic’s diminishing ice cover. Melting of ice is now opening up the Northwest Passage between the Arctic and Pacific Oceans during summer and could result in a seasonal ice-free state in the region as the climate continues to warm.

[...]

Since its arrival, the diatom, commonly found in the most northerly reaches of the Pacific and the Bering Sea, has colonized the Labrador Sea between Greenland and Canada, as reported by Reid and colleagues in the September issue of Global Change Biology 2. “An [ice] gate was opened in 1998 which has probably been closed for thousands of years and then it closed again immediately afterwards,” he explains. “[The plankton] would have moved through the Bering Strait, through the [normally icy] Canadian archipelago and [south] into Baffin Bay.” The completely open seawater in the summer months of that year — blown by winds accelerating the general east-west current flow — would have provided ideal conditions for the phytoplankton to grow and proliferate, he argues.

[...]

But there is another potential explanation for how Neodenticula made the trans-Arctic trip into Atlantic waters: as a stow away in a ship’s ballast water on a route that took the Zebra Mussel and many other invasive species to world domination. Reid and colleagues are confident that this is not the case, though they cannot completely discount the route. They argue that few ships take the Northwest Passage and any ice breakers using the route are unlikely to risk exchanging their ballast water in transit or in the open waters of the Labrador Sea.

[...]

Neodenticula’s journey may also reveal new evidence for the unprecedented nature of today’s warming climate. Fossil records show the only other time the species appeared in the north Atlantic was between 1.2 million and 800,000 years ago, introduced during an interglacial period. “It died out probably because of severe cooling,” explains Reid, adding that oddly there is also no evidence of its presence in the north Atlantic during the Pliocene ‘trans-Arctic interchange’ of about 3.5 million years ago, when there was a huge extinction as Pacific species invaded the Atlantic. Martin Head, a palaeoclimate expert from Brock University in Canada, points out that it hasn’t appeared in the last 800,000 years despite plenty of interglacials during this time. The Eemian interglacial of about 130,000 years ago was thought to have been much warmer than today, for example. “It is telling us that something very unusual is happening during this [current] interglacial,” says Head. “The reason could be those interglacials were not as warm as now.”

Zoe Corbyn is a freelance science writer based in London, UK. Nature

The paper, Reid et al., 2007, is behind a paywall. The abstract says that the “the exceptional occurrence of extensive ice-free water to the North of Canada” enabled N. seminae to be “carried in a pulse of Pacific water in 1998/early 1999 via the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and/or Fram Strait;” arriving in the North Atlantic for the first time since the mid-Pleistocene. The incredible voyage of N. seminae was also hyped up in this “plenary paper” by Burkhill & Reid. The obvious Warmist conclusion was that “interglacials were not as warm as” the present day. This one little diatom obviously trumps all of the evidence that the last interglacial was significantly warmer than the current interglacial.

Three questions came to mind:

1. How strong is the evidence that the Arctic climate was significantly warmer during the last interglacial?
2. Could N. seminae have transited the Arctic in one melt season?
3. Did N. seminae really go extinct in the North Atlantic 800,000 years ago?

Evidence of Eemian/Sangamonian Warmth

The last interglacial stage (often referred to as Marine Isotope Stage 5, the Sangamonian or the Eemian) was considerably warmer than the current interglacial and sea level was 3-6 meters higher than modern time. The Sangamonian was particularly warmer in the Arctic. Oxygen isotope ratios from the NGRIP ice core indicate that the Arctic was significantly warmer at the peak of the last interglacial (~135,000 years ago). If N. seminae could be blown from the Bering Sea through the Chukchi Sea, the Beaufort Sea, the Canadian Archipelago and Baffin Bay, without leaving any evidence of its transit, during one warm summer, it would have done so many times over the last 800,000 years. It also appears that it was significantly warmer in the Arctic during the Holocene Climatic Optimum (~7,000 years ago) than modern times. The Arctic was routinely ice-free during summer for most of the Holocene up until about 1,000 years ago. McKay et al., 2008 demonstrated that the modern Arctic sea ice cover is anomalously high and the Arctic summer sea surface temperature is anomalously low relative to the rest of the Holocene…

Modern sea-ice cover in the study area, expressed here as the number of months/year with >50% coverage, averages 10.6 ±1.2 months/year… Present day SST and SSS in August are 1.1 ± 2.4 8C and 28.5 ±1.3, respectively… In the Holocene record of core HLY0501-05, sea-ice cover has ranged between 5.5 and 9 months/year, summer SSS has varied between 22 and 30, and summer SST has ranged from 3 to 7.5 8C (Fig. 7).

McKay et al., 2008

The evidence against the modern warming being anomalous in the context of the Quaternary Period appears to be overwhelming.

You Can’t Get There From Here

Could N. seminae have transited the Arctic in one melt season? The short answer is no.

If N. seminaerecently migrated into the Atlantic from through the Northwest Passage and Canadian Archipelago, there ought to be some evidence of their transit in the Beaufort Sea and Baffin Bay; but there isn’t…

There’s not much evidence of anything transiting the Northwest Passage and Canadian Archipelago.

Driftwoodtakes the long route from the Pacific to the Atlantic because it follows the prevailing circulation patterns. The transit time from the Bering Strait to the Labrador Sea is about 6 years.

Driftwood takes the long route and about 6 years to transit the Arctic.

It’s amazing that the authors and uncritical commenters in the Nature article simply discounted the possibility that maritime activity might just have carried N. seminae into the North Atlantic… While proposing a preposterous scenario in which N. seminae traveled on the winds and currents from the Bering Sea through the Chukchi Sea, the Beaufort Sea, the Canadian Archipelago and Baffin Bay into the Labrador Sea, without leaving any evidence of its transit, during one warm summer.

But there is another potential explanation for how Neodenticula made the trans-Arctic trip into Atlantic waters: as a stow away in a ship’s ballast water on a route that took the Zebra Mussel and many other invasive species to world domination. Reid and colleagues are confident that this is not the case, though they cannot completely discount the route. They argue that few ships take the Northwest Passage and any ice breakers using the route are unlikely to risk exchanging their ballast water in transit or in the open waters of the Labrador Sea.

“Reid and colleagues” must be unfamiliar with nuclear submarines… Not to mention bilge pumps.

In 1969, the modified oil tanker SS Manhattan made a Northwest Passage round-trip, accompanied by two icebreakers… 10,000 nautical miles in 90 days… ~100 miles per day. Most Arctic currents have a surface velocity of 1-2 miles per day. If N. seminae drifted on ice-free summer currents, it would have taken at least 6 summers to travel from the Bering Sea to the Labrador Sea, spending nine months in hibernation each year. Yet the Warmists are confident it made the trip in one summer and didn’t hitch a ride on a ship or other anthropogenic vessel.

“I’m not dead yet!”

Did N. seminae really go extinct in the North Atlantic 800,000 years ago?

N. seminae did not just appear in the North Atlantic during an interglacial and then disappear due to “severe cooling.” It spanned several full glacial cycles during the mid-Pleistocene transition.

N. seminae is an important mid-Pleistocene biostratigraphic marker in the North Atlantic. Enhanced N. seminaeproductivity is associated with a transition to “cool, low-saline, surface waters” in the mid-Pleistocene…

Raymo, M.E., Jansen, E., Blum, P., and Herbert, T.D. (Eds.), 1999 Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program, Scientific Results, Vol. 162 51

4. HIGH-RESOLUTION PLEISTOCENE DIATOM BIOSTRATIGRAPHY OF SITE 983 AND CORRELATIONS WITH ISOTOPE STRATIGRAPHY

Nalân Koç,2,3 David A. Hodell,4 Helga Kleiven,2 and Laurent Labeyrie5

ABSTRACT

High accumulation rates and the presence of well-preserved, abundant diatoms in Site 983 sediments from the Gardar Drift gave us the opportunity to refine the Pleistocene diatom biostratigraphic resolution of the high- latitude North Atlantic. Eight Pleistocene diatom datum events are identified and, for the first time, tied directly to the oxygen isotope record and paleomagnetic stratigraphy of Site 983. These datum events are (1) the last occurrence (LO) of Proboscia curvirostris at 0.3 Ma, (2) the LO of Thalassiosira jouseae at 0.3 Ma, (3) the LO of Nitzschia reinholdii at 0.6 Ma, (4) the LO of Nitzschia fossilis at 0.68 Ma, (5) the LO of Nitzschia seminae at 0.84 Ma, (6) the first occurrence (FO) of N. seminae at 1.25 Ma, (7) the FO of Proboscia curvirostris at 1.53 Ma, and (8) the FO of Pseudoeunotia doliolus at 1.89 Ma. Most of these datums are found to be synchronous between the middle and high latitudes of the North Atlantic and the North Pacific. On the basis of these datums, four high-latitude North Atlantic diatom zones are proposed for the Pleistocene. The record of diatom abundance and preservation at Site 983 gives evidence for the influence of fluctuating Pleistocene climatic conditions on diatom productivity in the high-latitude North Atlantic.

[...]

Presence of significant diatom production during glacial stages 18, 20, and 30 indicates open-marine conditions over Site 983 during these times. High diatom production during glacial stages 18 and 20 is also recorded from Site 919, which suggests that the North Atlantic was free of sea ice during these glacial periods (Koç and Flower, 1998). These glacial stages are within the first 100-k.y. cycles after the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. As indicated by the benthic oxygen isotope records, they were not as severe as the late Quaternary glacials (Mix et al., 1995). Neodenticula seminae is part of the modern diatom assemblage of the middle- and high-latitude North Pacific (Barron, 1981; Sancetta, 1982). Our results indicate that this species is limited to the interval 0.84–1.26 Ma in the North Atlantic. Baldauf (1986) had interpreted the occurrence of N. seminae in the North Atlantic as the presence of cool, low-saline, surface waters in the central North Atlantic during the early Quaternary. The interval of N. seminae in the North Atlantic straddles the transition from the dominance of 41-k.y. cycles in the climate records to the dominance of 100-k.y. cycles. It is, therefore, possible to interpret the first occurrence of N. seminae in the North Atlantic as a sign for cooling, which started at 1.26 Ma, leading to the establishment of the 100-k.y. cycles with severe glacial periods. The presence of N. seminae in the North Atlantic is, therefore, attributable to the unique conditions related to the Mid-Pleistocene Transition.

[...]

LINK

Now here’s the million dollar question. If N. seminae first evolved ~1.2 million years ago in the North Atlantic and then became locally extinct 800,000 years ago… Where was N. seminae from 800,000 years ago up until 250,000 years ago?

Did it re-evolve in the North Pacific 250,000 years ago? Was it truly extinct? Or was its productivity so low that it wasn’t noted in the fossil record?

The answers are no, no and yes.

N. seminae has been present in the North Pacific since at least the beginning of the Pleistocene (~2.6 MYA). The N. seminae biostratigraphic zone starts with the last occurrence of P. curvirostiris. So, it did not reappear in the North Pacific 250,000 years ago.

Shimada & Tanimura, 2005 noted that “N. seminae has been reported in subtropical gyres in the Indian Ocean and the North Atlantic, its occurrences there seem to be quite sporadic and episodic. Semina (1981) reported fewer than 100 specimens/L from low latitudes in the North Atlantic, in contrast with up to 3.3×10^7 specimens/L in surface seawaters from the subarctic North Pacific Ocean and its surrounding seas.”

I’m not 100% certain… But, I think that N. seminae was named after G. I. Semina… The researcher who noted N. seminae’s presence in the Indian Ocean and North Atlantic back in 1981.

Conclusions

• Neodenticula seminae did not go extinct in the North Atlantic 800,000 years ago.
• Neodenticula seminae could not have transited the Arctic in one melt season.

]]> http://debunkhouse.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/the-incredible-voyage-of-neodenticula-seminae/feed/ 0 debunkhouse http://debunkhouse.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/warming-island-reveals-the-ignorance-of-the-guardian/ http://debunkhouse.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/warming-island-reveals-the-ignorance-of-the-guardian/#comments Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:34:47 +0000 David Middleton http://debunkhouse.wordpress.com/?p=931 ]]>

New atlas shows extent of climate change

The world’s newest island makes it on to the map as the Arctic Uunartoq Qeqertaq, or Warming Island, is officially recognised

• John Vidal, environment editor
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 September 2011

Uunartoq Qeqertaq is not a new island.  Pat Michaels debunked this particular Warmista myth back in 2008…

March 31, 2008

Uunartoq Qeqertaq was already an island back in 1957…

Figure 5. The map from the Preface of Hofer’s Arctic Riviera, zooming in to show the existence of “Warming Island” and its characteristic three-fingered shape (source: Arctic Riviera).