Current Climate Change Not Part of Natural Cycle: New Evidence Unlike Any Seen During Previous Warming Episodes Found in Arctic

The possibility that climate change might simply be a natural variation like others that have occurred throughout geologic time is dimming, according to new findings that reveal that sediments retrieved by University at Buffalo geologists from a remote Arctic lake are unlike any seen during previous warming episodes. The team was able to pinpoint dramatic changes that began occurring in unprecedented ways after the midpoint of the twentieth century.

"The sediments from the mid-20th century were not all that different from previous warming intervals," said Jason P. Briner, PhD, assistant professor of geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "But after that things really changed. And the change is unprecedented."

The sediments are considered unique because they contain rare paleoclimate information about the past 200,000 years, providing a far longer record than most other sediments in the glaciated portion of the Arctic, which only reveals clues to the past 10,000 years.

"Since much of the Arctic was covered by big ice sheets during the Ice Age, with the most recent glaciations ending around 10,000 years ago, the lake sediment cores people get there only cover the past 10,000 years," said Briner.

"What is unique about these sediment cores is that even though glaciers covered this lake, for various reasons they did not erode it," said Briner, who discovered the lake in the Canadian Arctic while working on his doctoral dissertation. "The result is that we have a really long sequence or archive of sediment that has survived arctic glaciations, and the data it contains is exceptional."

The Arctic team pooled their expertise to develop the most comprehensive picture to date of how warming variations throughout the past 200,000 years have altered the lake's ecology.

"There are periods of time reflected in this sediment core that demonstrate that the climate was as warm as today," said Briner, "but that was due to natural causes, having to do with well-understood patterns of the Earth's orbit around the sun. The whole ecosystem has now shifted and the ecosystem we see during just the last few decades is different from those seen during any of the past warm intervals."

The research reveals that sediments retrieved by University at Buffalo geologists from a remote Arctic lake are unlike those seen during previous warming episodes.: "The 20th century is the only period during the past 200 millennia in which aquatic indicators reflect increased warming, despite the declining effect of slow changes in the tilt of the Earth's axis which, under natural conditions, would lead to climatic cooling."

"The 20th century is the only period during the past 200 millennia in which aquatic indicators reflect increased warming, despite the declining effect of slow changes in the tilt of the Earth's axis which, under natural conditions, would lead to climatic cooling," added Yarrow Axford, a research associate at the University of Colorado, and the paper's lead author.

Casey Kazan

Adapted from materials provided by University at Buffalo.

Comments

[me]

a lame copy & paste at the end there?
or plain old - long words to cover no content?

[Dredd]

Aw, c'mon you guys, global climate stuff is what happens to the other people, not to we the chosen.

[Sergiodeathstar]

Strange, man releases hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 in a way thats never happened before, and the climate... is changing?

Who'd have thought. Maybe we should stop releasing it?

Get a bike.

[Acushla]

Every Planet is heating up, NOT just Planet Earth. Al Gore and others have their own agenda for not telling the truth. In the years before Little Ice Age took place summers were hottest on record.

[Art 7]

The sky is falling, the sky is falling...

[Art]

Did they check the lake for DDT?

“several types of mosquito-like midges that for many thousands of years thrived in cold climate surrounding the lake suddenly began declining at around 1950″ — Have they accounted for the use of DDT, then? Seems to me that DDT on Baffin Island could have been very popular among trappers and the military in the 50s. Possibly pertinent too:

DDT and its breakdown products are transported from warmer regions of the world to the Arctic by the phenomenon of global distillation, where they then accumulate in the region’s food web

Thus there might be a human impact on this parameter, but of another kind.

Watts Up With That?

Further debunking,

Here

and

Here

[boo boo bear]

Global warming[Or is it global cooling this week?]is a scam being perpetrated on the public to bring about a global tax which will require a world government[UN?] to facililitate it. Welcome to the New World Order, comrades.

[Bruce]

there is also evidence that water covered parts of egypt....that would have been a very strange weather pattern.........the arctic was once tropical, but then froze very rapidly.

Drive by any city at night and witness huge empty office builings, all lit up like christmas trees. How many executives gave up their yacts, personal jet's, second homes, cruises around the world, etc. etc. and yet they want you to conserve energy and ride bicycles. They must be very worried!

Has anyone seen Al Gore's electric bill?

[Imaswimma]

I can't believe the stuff in this article passes for science...

[What Happen For The Next G ?]

Climate change make everyone suffer, stop global warming for better generation...really nice post.