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It's amazing how people who deny climate changes have no good answer to why ancient glaciers keep melting. But this melting allows for great archeology.

lallysingh 12y ago
Do folks who think that the world is only 6000 years old have anything for human-made artifacts 9000 years old?
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  Satan put them there to trick us.
  - lostlogin 12y ago
    I thought you were right and did some searching. It seems you are wrong though. It turns out that the method of dating is flawed and old stuff like fossils have just been dated wrong and are less than 6000 years old. It's so depressing flicking though these sites. http://www.cgg.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Library.sr/CT/BQA/k/200/How-Does-Bible-Explain-Fossil-Ages-Over-6000-Years-Genesis-12.htm http://www.cgg.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Library.sr/CT/BQA/k/... http://www.missiontoamerica.org/genesis/six-thousand-years.html http://www.missiontoamerica.org/genesis/six-thousand-years.h...
- learc83 12y ago
  They would say that our methods for dating are wrong. (I don't believe the earth is 6k years old in case you're wondering.)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- KMag 12y ago
  It's probably incorrect to assume there's a single group with a single explanation on the subject. There are groups that will argue that dating methods assume that we know initial conditions and assume that certain parameters are constants when they may just be drifting more slowly that we can notice over the 100 years or so that we've been able to measure them. On the other hand, one of my fraternity brothers got religious his senior year, moved into a kosher living space, finished his Physics degree from MIT, and then went to a yeshiva in Israel. Last I heard, he was a rabbi in the Boston suburbs. I think he believed the Universe is billions of years old, but he did tell me that there are some rabbis that will tell you that when God created the first trees that first week, if you drilled into trees, you would find hundreds of rings as if they had been hundreds of years old, and likewise for isotope distributions in rocks, etc. This is much harder to argue against because it makes not falsifiable claims, but fortunately, it's also much less dangerous... it doesn't deny science's ability to forecast the future or contradict our best understanding of how the world currently works.
steven2012 12y ago
Doesn't this suggest that those areas were previously habitable as recently as 1200 years ago? If so, what was the climate when those artifacts were left there and how long was that area habitable? And what caused the climate to change from habitable to frozen?
- pavanred 12y ago
  Well, the finds range from 9000 years to 1200 years old, so that not only suggests these areas might have been previously habitable as recently as 1200 years but also that these areas were habitable for almost 10,000 years before becoming uninhabitable. Could it suggest a cyclic pattern? And, perhaps we are acting as catalysts to climate change with our greenhouse gas emissions?
  - Dewie 12y ago
    > Could it suggest a cyclic pattern? We already know that we are currently in an ice age that goes through cycles of glacial periods (such as the colloquially named "last ice age") where a lot of North America, Europe and Siberia are covered in ice sheets; and warmer interglacial periods, such as this one, where the poles are covered by ice sheets (and also Greenland and various glaciers, and at high altitudes). Outside of ice ages (which is more common for Earth, when considering its whole history), the poles aren't covered by ice sheets. > And, perhaps we are acting as catalysts to climate change with our greenhouse gas emissions? Perhaps. And if so, whether that is for the better or for the worse in the grand scheme of things is yet to be seen; geologists say that we are "due" for another glacial period, based on previous glacial and interglacial periods. But human emission of CO2 could keep things from spiraling towards a cool down, which might delay the next glacial period for a long time. Or perhaps glacial periods are mostly caused by cosmological forces, which are out of our control; there doesn't seem to be any clear answers.
    - Intermernet 12y ago
      There's also a theory that a period of non-standard warming at the beginning of a glaciation period will possibly cause a faster eventual cooling, and possibly a more severe glaciation, especially in Europe. Mostly due to altered ocean currents such as the "Great Ocean Conveyor". Pretty sure this has been modelled, but it's still being debated. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05mar_arctic/ http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation#Effects_on_global_climate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation#Effect...
mathattack 12y ago
There are always unintended side benefits. A few degrees of warming and our friends in Washington will be producing better wine than Napa.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  They already do plenty of good wine in Walla Walla. Washington has a mild climate, more so on the west side of the Cascades.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    They do. And within a few years it will arrive amongst the world's best. Yet wine land is much cheaper there (and in Oregon) than Napa.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      There are also tons of vineyards in the Columbia River Gorge. Even the Seattle area has a few (namely in Woodenville).
  - poulsbohemian 12y ago
    The winemakers of Walla Walla thank you for your patronage. We don't have much of a tech industry here, but if anyone wants to join me in creating the "Silicon Vineyard" then c'mon over. Honestly though, while we have a lot of good wine, we also have a lot of swill.
    - mathattack 12y ago
      Bordeaux has a lot of swill too. Rising temperatures in WA will raise all the ships. Everyone's wine should improve. Do you have a need for financial technology castaways in helping build Silicon Vineyard? :-)
      - poulsbohemian 12y ago
refurb 12y ago
I guess their answer would be, if there are archeological items under the ice that is receding, there must have been a time period a long time ago where the glacier didn't exist. Since the industrial revolution is only from the past 200 years, something else must have caused the glaciers to recede and advance. Maybe it's the same thing happening today?
- KMag 12y ago
  Most certainly the same thing that made ice cover advance and retreat in the past is still happening today. That thing that makes the ice advance and recede is called weather, and on a large aggregate scale is called climate. Climate is a complex multi-variable non-linear oscillator. We've been pushing one of these variables in a single direction at increasing rates for the past couple hundred years. Are you trying to imply that climate has a single variable driver and because climate change happened before the industrial revolution, that current climate change can't be hugely impacted by human activities? This would be a conclusion from a false premise (that climate is driven by a single variable).
kjs3 12y ago
They have plenty of answer, and they'll be more than happy to share them to you. They're wrong answers, but that won't stop them for a minute.
Dewie 12y ago
Are there really a sizable amount of people who deny climate change itself? Or do they just deny/question humanity's role in it? Denying climate change in the face of conclusive data probably wouldn't have any legs to stand on. What is causing it is harder to prove/deny, though.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > Are there really a sizable amount of people who deny climate change itself? Yes, there are many people who deny the existance of any climate change, not just anthropomorphic climate change. There are a couple here on HN - searching for arctic ice will possibly turn up a few posts. Your last sentence ignores he reality of belief: homeopathy is nonsense yet people are convinced it works and they apy mone for it. Alien probing; biblical literalism; 911 truthers; Obama is not American; the Queen of England is a lizard; there are many weird stupid beliefs that have little to do with truth or evidence.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I think its amazing that only 5,000 years ago it was much warmer than it is now, as this area not only supported grazing herbivores but a human hunting population which was eating them. That is important for a couple of reasons, mostly that from a geologic perspective not a whole lot is different from 5K years ago and today. What that reinforces in me is that regardless of cause, climate change happens, or conversely even when human carbon footprint on the planet was nearly zero, the planet was warmer than it is today. And that suggests to me that human impact is irrelevant to the challenge of surviving in a changing climate. Sadly that puts me in the 'climate control denier' category, that is the group of people who believe that humans cannot control what the climate does (good or bad). That said, I'm all in favor of balancing our energy economy, I'd much rather be spending ergs much more efficiently than we do today. The more efficient our energy use the more flexibly we can react to changes in climate and we are able to create a higher standard of comfort for more people.
- Dewie 12y ago
  > Sadly that puts me in the 'climate control denier' category, that is the group of people who believe that humans cannot control what the climate does (good or bad). How are you able to reach that conclusion? Clearly, the climate on Earth has changed a lot, most of it without our help, and on a magnitude much greater than we have supposedly been able to for the last couple of hundred years. But that doesn't mean that climate change can't be influenced by human activities. It doesn't mean that releasing a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere can't affect the climate of the planet to a large degree.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    I understand the science of impact. We can take a winter day and make it feel like summer by burning the forest down next to us. I also understand both the models and the limits of our understanding of them. We can take the current model of the climate and change the CO2 levels in it and sometimes reflect what we actually see when those CO2 levels change. We take the anomalies and we try to update the model. Ok so far so good. The models don't tell us why the planet was warm and then it was in an ice age, they don't tell us why it stopped being in an ice age in the first place, they don't tell us anything how our actions (or inaction) could cause the climate to change in a way that we wish it to change. We can speculate on those things, we can track down times in the geologic record where Yellowstone erupted and put dust high up in the atmosphere, we can look at iridium layers in the rocks and try to understand when large asteroids hit the planet and wrought havoc. And perhaps the biggest thing that is missing from the model is how the planet 'resets' itself. We have had warm periods and cold periods and fluxed in between them, but the model doesn't tell us how, the data tells us this happened, but the current model applied to ice cores from a million years ago gives a different answer than the data seems to indicate was true. What all of that adds up to is that "its complicated" and we're inside a system for which we don't have a deep understanding of the variables and we have a scientific infrastructure which is actively discouraging the asking of certain questions or testing various hypothesis which are politically uncomfortable. That makes me think we aren't doing as much as we can to understand the actual system, and our lack of understanding leads to an inability to predict what it will do, or how it will respond to what we do or don't do. We are no more free to ask heretical questions about how climate works than Galileo was free to investigate whether or not the Earth was the center of the universe. As we cannot summon the will to do the research we need to do in order to accurately answer the question of how the system works, I do not believe we will reach a point where we might understand what would be needed to move that system to a pre-determined point from some other known point.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
You should realize how poor this argument is. First, many glaciers are still in retreat from the last major ice age. There is a kind of momentum to glacier retreat and glacier advance, and that momentum plays out over centuries. Second, in some cases there are other factors at play. For example, soot from coal/hydrocarbon combustion settling on glaciers and ice sheets reduces albedo and increases melt rates. Third, and most importantly, glacial advance/retreat is not just a global phenomen but also a local one. Just as weather is not climate so too individual glacial change is not climate. One glacier retreating does not prove the climate is getting warmer any more than one glacier advancing (of which there are many) would prove the climate was getting colder. So you can't point to one example and say "ahah! incontrevertible PROOF!" any more than you can tell an anecdote in support of some medical theory and assume that you've proven anything either.
- MaysonL 12y ago
  And even more interestingly, if you(and GP and nearly everybody in this thread) had read the article, you'd possibly have noticed that it isn't talking about glaciers, it's talking about ice cover. "Unlike glaciers that move, slowly grinding down any artifacts trapped in them, the Yukon ice patches tend to remain stable. Or at least they did, until gradual warming over the past several decades began to shrink them and reveal treasures."
rdtsc 12y ago
There are 2 arguments usually. One was denying climate was changing. That was the narrative in large up until not too long ago. A lot of it was sponsored by conservative think tanks, propaganda etc. I remember in late 1990s and early 2000s. There was a lot how climate is not changing and it is all a liberal propaganda. Well then eventually after the temperatures kept rising and ice melting the narrative has shifted to "it is changing, ok, but it is not because of anything humans did". That is where the controversy is now. I am not involved enough to debate the last one one way or another intelligently, just making an observation of the two level of the argument.
- steven2012 12y ago
  Keep in mind that the temperatures rose from the 1970s to the end of the 1990s, but there has been no significant rise in global temperatures in the last 12-17 years. http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2013/aug/25/steve-goreham/global-warming-skeptic-says-global-surface-tempera/ http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2013/aug/2...

lallysingh 12y ago

Do folks who think that the world is only 6000 years old have anything for human-made artifacts 9000 years old?

thrownaway2424 12y ago
Satan put them there to trick us.
- lostlogin 12y ago
  I thought you were right and did some searching. It seems you are wrong though. It turns out that the method of dating is flawed and old stuff like fossils have just been dated wrong and are less than 6000 years old. It's so depressing flicking though these sites. http://www.cgg.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Library.sr/CT/BQA/k/200/How-Does-Bible-Explain-Fossil-Ages-Over-6000-Years-Genesis-12.htm http://www.cgg.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Library.sr/CT/BQA/k/... http://www.missiontoamerica.org/genesis/six-thousand-years.html http://www.missiontoamerica.org/genesis/six-thousand-years.h...
learc83 12y ago
They would say that our methods for dating are wrong. (I don't believe the earth is 6k years old in case you're wondering.)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
KMag 12y ago
It's probably incorrect to assume there's a single group with a single explanation on the subject. There are groups that will argue that dating methods assume that we know initial conditions and assume that certain parameters are constants when they may just be drifting more slowly that we can notice over the 100 years or so that we've been able to measure them. On the other hand, one of my fraternity brothers got religious his senior year, moved into a kosher living space, finished his Physics degree from MIT, and then went to a yeshiva in Israel. Last I heard, he was a rabbi in the Boston suburbs. I think he believed the Universe is billions of years old, but he did tell me that there are some rabbis that will tell you that when God created the first trees that first week, if you drilled into trees, you would find hundreds of rings as if they had been hundreds of years old, and likewise for isotope distributions in rocks, etc. This is much harder to argue against because it makes not falsifiable claims, but fortunately, it's also much less dangerous... it doesn't deny science's ability to forecast the future or contradict our best understanding of how the world currently works.

steven2012 12y ago

Doesn't this suggest that those areas were previously habitable as recently as 1200 years ago? If so, what was the climate when those artifacts were left there and how long was that area habitable? And what caused the climate to change from habitable to frozen?

pavanred 12y ago
Well, the finds range from 9000 years to 1200 years old, so that not only suggests these areas might have been previously habitable as recently as 1200 years but also that these areas were habitable for almost 10,000 years before becoming uninhabitable. Could it suggest a cyclic pattern? And, perhaps we are acting as catalysts to climate change with our greenhouse gas emissions?
- Dewie 12y ago
  > Could it suggest a cyclic pattern? We already know that we are currently in an ice age that goes through cycles of glacial periods (such as the colloquially named "last ice age") where a lot of North America, Europe and Siberia are covered in ice sheets; and warmer interglacial periods, such as this one, where the poles are covered by ice sheets (and also Greenland and various glaciers, and at high altitudes). Outside of ice ages (which is more common for Earth, when considering its whole history), the poles aren't covered by ice sheets. > And, perhaps we are acting as catalysts to climate change with our greenhouse gas emissions? Perhaps. And if so, whether that is for the better or for the worse in the grand scheme of things is yet to be seen; geologists say that we are "due" for another glacial period, based on previous glacial and interglacial periods. But human emission of CO2 could keep things from spiraling towards a cool down, which might delay the next glacial period for a long time. Or perhaps glacial periods are mostly caused by cosmological forces, which are out of our control; there doesn't seem to be any clear answers.
  - Intermernet 12y ago
    There's also a theory that a period of non-standard warming at the beginning of a glaciation period will possibly cause a faster eventual cooling, and possibly a more severe glaciation, especially in Europe. Mostly due to altered ocean currents such as the "Great Ocean Conveyor". Pretty sure this has been modelled, but it's still being debated. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05mar_arctic/ http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation#Effects_on_global_climate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation#Effect...

mathattack 12y ago

There are always unintended side benefits. A few degrees of warming and our friends in Washington will be producing better wine than Napa.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
They already do plenty of good wine in Walla Walla. Washington has a mild climate, more so on the west side of the Cascades.
- mathattack 12y ago
  They do. And within a few years it will arrive amongst the world's best. Yet wine land is much cheaper there (and in Oregon) than Napa.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    There are also tons of vineyards in the Columbia River Gorge. Even the Seattle area has a few (namely in Woodenville).
- poulsbohemian 12y ago
  The winemakers of Walla Walla thank you for your patronage. We don't have much of a tech industry here, but if anyone wants to join me in creating the "Silicon Vineyard" then c'mon over. Honestly though, while we have a lot of good wine, we also have a lot of swill.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    Bordeaux has a lot of swill too. Rising temperatures in WA will raise all the ships. Everyone's wine should improve. Do you have a need for financial technology castaways in helping build Silicon Vineyard? :-)
    - poulsbohemian 12y ago

refurb 12y ago

I guess their answer would be, if there are archeological items under the ice that is receding, there must have been a time period a long time ago where the glacier didn't exist. Since the industrial revolution is only from the past 200 years, something else must have caused the glaciers to recede and advance. Maybe it's the same thing happening today?

KMag 12y ago
Most certainly the same thing that made ice cover advance and retreat in the past is still happening today. That thing that makes the ice advance and recede is called weather, and on a large aggregate scale is called climate. Climate is a complex multi-variable non-linear oscillator. We've been pushing one of these variables in a single direction at increasing rates for the past couple hundred years. Are you trying to imply that climate has a single variable driver and because climate change happened before the industrial revolution, that current climate change can't be hugely impacted by human activities? This would be a conclusion from a false premise (that climate is driven by a single variable).

kjs3 12y ago

They have plenty of answer, and they'll be more than happy to share them to you. They're wrong answers, but that won't stop them for a minute.

Dewie 12y ago

Are there really a sizable amount of people who deny climate change itself? Or do they just deny/question humanity's role in it? Denying climate change in the face of conclusive data probably wouldn't have any legs to stand on. What is causing it is harder to prove/deny, though.

DanBC 12y ago
> Are there really a sizable amount of people who deny climate change itself? Yes, there are many people who deny the existance of any climate change, not just anthropomorphic climate change. There are a couple here on HN - searching for arctic ice will possibly turn up a few posts. Your last sentence ignores he reality of belief: homeopathy is nonsense yet people are convinced it works and they apy mone for it. Alien probing; biblical literalism; 911 truthers; Obama is not American; the Queen of England is a lizard; there are many weird stupid beliefs that have little to do with truth or evidence.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

I think its amazing that only 5,000 years ago it was much warmer than it is now, as this area not only supported grazing herbivores but a human hunting population which was eating them. That is important for a couple of reasons, mostly that from a geologic perspective not a whole lot is different from 5K years ago and today. What that reinforces in me is that regardless of cause, climate change happens, or conversely even when human carbon footprint on the planet was nearly zero, the planet was warmer than it is today. And that suggests to me that human impact is irrelevant to the challenge of surviving in a changing climate. Sadly that puts me in the 'climate control denier' category, that is the group of people who believe that humans cannot control what the climate does (good or bad). That said, I'm all in favor of balancing our energy economy, I'd much rather be spending ergs much more efficiently than we do today. The more efficient our energy use the more flexibly we can react to changes in climate and we are able to create a higher standard of comfort for more people.

Dewie 12y ago
> Sadly that puts me in the 'climate control denier' category, that is the group of people who believe that humans cannot control what the climate does (good or bad). How are you able to reach that conclusion? Clearly, the climate on Earth has changed a lot, most of it without our help, and on a magnitude much greater than we have supposedly been able to for the last couple of hundred years. But that doesn't mean that climate change can't be influenced by human activities. It doesn't mean that releasing a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere can't affect the climate of the planet to a large degree.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I understand the science of impact. We can take a winter day and make it feel like summer by burning the forest down next to us. I also understand both the models and the limits of our understanding of them. We can take the current model of the climate and change the CO2 levels in it and sometimes reflect what we actually see when those CO2 levels change. We take the anomalies and we try to update the model. Ok so far so good. The models don't tell us why the planet was warm and then it was in an ice age, they don't tell us why it stopped being in an ice age in the first place, they don't tell us anything how our actions (or inaction) could cause the climate to change in a way that we wish it to change. We can speculate on those things, we can track down times in the geologic record where Yellowstone erupted and put dust high up in the atmosphere, we can look at iridium layers in the rocks and try to understand when large asteroids hit the planet and wrought havoc. And perhaps the biggest thing that is missing from the model is how the planet 'resets' itself. We have had warm periods and cold periods and fluxed in between them, but the model doesn't tell us how, the data tells us this happened, but the current model applied to ice cores from a million years ago gives a different answer than the data seems to indicate was true. What all of that adds up to is that "its complicated" and we're inside a system for which we don't have a deep understanding of the variables and we have a scientific infrastructure which is actively discouraging the asking of certain questions or testing various hypothesis which are politically uncomfortable. That makes me think we aren't doing as much as we can to understand the actual system, and our lack of understanding leads to an inability to predict what it will do, or how it will respond to what we do or don't do. We are no more free to ask heretical questions about how climate works than Galileo was free to investigate whether or not the Earth was the center of the universe. As we cannot summon the will to do the research we need to do in order to accurately answer the question of how the system works, I do not believe we will reach a point where we might understand what would be needed to move that system to a pre-determined point from some other known point.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

You should realize how poor this argument is. First, many glaciers are still in retreat from the last major ice age. There is a kind of momentum to glacier retreat and glacier advance, and that momentum plays out over centuries. Second, in some cases there are other factors at play. For example, soot from coal/hydrocarbon combustion settling on glaciers and ice sheets reduces albedo and increases melt rates. Third, and most importantly, glacial advance/retreat is not just a global phenomen but also a local one. Just as weather is not climate so too individual glacial change is not climate. One glacier retreating does not prove the climate is getting warmer any more than one glacier advancing (of which there are many) would prove the climate was getting colder. So you can't point to one example and say "ahah! incontrevertible PROOF!" any more than you can tell an anecdote in support of some medical theory and assume that you've proven anything either.

MaysonL 12y ago
And even more interestingly, if you(and GP and nearly everybody in this thread) had read the article, you'd possibly have noticed that it isn't talking about glaciers, it's talking about ice cover. "Unlike glaciers that move, slowly grinding down any artifacts trapped in them, the Yukon ice patches tend to remain stable. Or at least they did, until gradual warming over the past several decades began to shrink them and reveal treasures."

rdtsc 12y ago

There are 2 arguments usually. One was denying climate was changing. That was the narrative in large up until not too long ago. A lot of it was sponsored by conservative think tanks, propaganda etc. I remember in late 1990s and early 2000s. There was a lot how climate is not changing and it is all a liberal propaganda. Well then eventually after the temperatures kept rising and ice melting the narrative has shifted to "it is changing, ok, but it is not because of anything humans did". That is where the controversy is now. I am not involved enough to debate the last one one way or another intelligently, just making an observation of the two level of the argument.

steven2012 12y ago
Keep in mind that the temperatures rose from the 1970s to the end of the 1990s, but there has been no significant rise in global temperatures in the last 12-17 years. http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2013/aug/25/steve-goreham/global-warming-skeptic-says-global-surface-tempera/ http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2013/aug/2...