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Joe Joyce asked in EnvironmentGlobal Warming · 8 years ago

How solid is the recently reported University of Colorado at Boulder study?

From materials provided by CU at Boulder:

"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"

The university team headed by Miller carbon dated dead mosses that had been exposed by melting ice and used ice core data from nearby Greenland to determine the ages of 145 plants found in the highlands of Baffin Island.

"[T]he 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.”

See more at: http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2013/10/23/c...

Update:

Kano, did you read the very short article? I quote: "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."

Update 2:

Elizabeth, actually, we get a climate scientist or two here, and there are other scientists who also participate here. Please note I am NOT talking about people who claim they are scientists, but answer questions here with a farrago of politics, innuendo, and outright lies. Sometimes I get a truly excellent answer, for example here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201206... I am also fascinated by the general level of understanding of science evidenced by those who argue here.

7 Answers

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  • 8 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    Good question. In order to devote more time to asking and discussing such questions it is recommended to block hard-core anti-science liars, at least after they recycle long-since debunked fossil fuel industry myths or garbled incoherent fragments thereof, for the 50th or 60th time here after having that clearly pointed out to them.

    The study looks solid enough.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophysical_Research_...

    http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=c-HAvMsAA...

    It behooves society to invest in learning more about the warmer climates of many tens of thousands or millions of years ago, because something like that is what we are leaving as our legacy to dozens of future generations.

  • Anonymous
    8 years ago

    How solid the study is depends on whether other studies confirm the findings of this study.

    If the temperatures in the Eastern Canadian Arctic are indeed already beyond natural variability, land 70 metres above sea level might be a good investment, if you could find such land in an area where the climate refuges won't be heavily armed.

  • Mike
    Lv 7
    8 years ago

    How solid is the study? Well Miller's methodologies do not suffer from obvious flaws like those seen in papers by Michael Mann and the rest of the hockey teams. No cherry-picking of favorable data, bad statistics, upside-down graphs to reach a predetermined conclusion, and the like.

  • 8 years ago

    Scientists do science and reach conclusions. The public who didn't do the science reach the opposite conclusion. I go with the scientists.

    How 'solid' is their research? Let the scientific community do their job. They'll examine the paper. They'll look at the methodology. They'll repeat the experiments or see whether the conclusions are consistent.

    Why ask us? We didn't do the research nor are we qualified enough to place the 'validity' of those results into the overall knowledge within the field. Looking on YA for verification of how good the research is ... well, that's not very sensible in my opinion. The skeptics will just say it's wrong. The alarmists will just say its right. Which is why science is done by scientists and not the court of public opinion.

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  • 8 years ago

    I have very little respect for the Buffaloes. Most of their work is bogus. They were once touted as the epitome of measuring the sea level. That work was a waste of money and proven nothing more than propaganda.

    It shows that you should be more selective of who you gather information from. In science, there is no room for contamination of ideas. We may disagree on theory, that is one thing, but to deliberately contaminate data, just like James Hansen and East Anglia did is criminal and their work should be shunned by all intelligent scientists.

  • Anonymous
    8 years ago

    Hey Joe? How much of an idiot do you want to be on a 1C (OK! 25,000 years) rise over 10,000 years? Do you really feel that? Does natural causation ever fit in?

    What was the global average temp 10,000 years ago?

    Just askin!

    Let's try 5 million ago?

    4.5 billion years might be a rough estimate on actual science on how old the Planet really is. It just might be accurate.

  • Kano
    Lv 7
    8 years ago

    I can't see how it could be, the lichens need warmth to grow, so it must have been warm then, anyway carbon dating only works back 40.000yrs

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