Northern Greenland: less ice 6,000-7,000 years ago

If you look at the recent pictures, you will notice that the northern beaches of Greenland are surrounded by ice throughout the year.

However, Norwegian (Astrid Lyså and Eiliv Larsen) and Danish researchers recently investigated raised beach ridges on the north coast of the island and determined the origin of the shores. Because pack ice and wave activity influence their formation differently, they could see that there has been a lot of waves over there. Also, dating techniques showed that these beaches molded by open water were born 6,000-7,000 years ago.

Science Daily
It follows that in the middle of the hypsithermal, there was much less ice in the Arctic than today. In particular, the North Pole had to be periodically ice free for a long time.

Figure 1: Cold weather returned to the area 4,000 years ago and ruined the Independence 0 Culture. The stones are from a later Independence I Culture.

(Article continues below)

Now, you may ask what does it have to do with global warming. Had their findings been “convenient”, you would surely read a lot of links with the current climate, gloomy predictions, and concerned calls to deliberately cripple the industrial civilization.

However, because their findings go in the opposite direction, you read a completely different interpretation:

Well, they are apparently careful not to become deniers and to lick every single piece of buttocks that their crazy alarmist preachers – who effectively control everything that is consequential about climate science – expose.

Now, Astrid Lyså’s belief is very cute. Whenever the Christian fundamentalists say something about the special events that should have taken place 6,000 years ago, they are immediately (and arguably rightfully) dismissed are unscientific religious bigots.

But when a fully analogous interpretation of the observations is applied to similar phenomena that occurred 6,000 years ago by AGW believers, everything is fine, isn’t it? She can’t possibly be a religious crank, can she? Now, what is exactly “different” about the climatic factors today and 6,000 years ago? Could the madam please clarify what she means by her extraordinarily bizarre statement? Or are the readers of Science Daily supposed to buy this manifest nonsense without a glimpse of an argument?

From any geological perspective, 6,000 years is simply nothing; it is one part per million of Earth’s history. The Independence I Culture as well as the previous way of settlers experienced the same physical laws and the same holocene we experience today. Not only human beings were alive but many of them were already as white as most Europeans are today – their SLC24A5 was already mutated. So what’s exactly different?

Now, if you tell me that the only major difference is the industrial production of CO2 that was non-existent, it is easy to see that this difference is irrelevant. If it were important or even “dominant”, the Northern Greenland would have to be warmer than it was 6,000 years ago. But it is cooler.

Please: it is the same physical and climatic phenomena – just in a slightly different mixture and phase – that were deciding about the Arctic ice 6,000 years ago as those phenomena that decide about it today. Whoever thinks otherwise is a religious bigot, after all.

And that’s the memo.

Hat tip: Tom Weidig