Mammoth Junk Science

Many news outlets have reported today that humans hunted and killed off the large methane-emitting mammoths 13,000 years ago, thus causing global cooling. This report has been published in Nature by some University of New Mexico scientists. Again man, armed with nothing but spears and arrows, may have been the culprit in significant climate change. Read here for example. Here, the Telegraph reports:

But by 11,500 years ago, around 80% of these big mammals had vanished forever.

Their disappearance, accounting for more than 114 lost species, came within 1,000 years of the arrival of humans in the New World.

So the mammoth killing ended at about 11,500 years ago? Wouldn’t that mean that it should have gotten colder from then on as a result? Let’s take a look at the temperatures over the last 20,000 year or so.

This graphic is taken from: oceanworld.tamu.edu.

At about 11,500 years ago the Ice Age ended! With all those big inefficient herbivores disappearing and the millions of tons of methane along with it, wouldn’t the hypothesis suggest that the Ice Age would have deepened, and not ended? Using AGW logic, less methane means more cooling, which leads to more ice, which then leads to more albedo, more cooling, more ice…you know an irreversible tipping point into a permanent ice age. But the opposite happened!

To me this stinks of more junk science by a journal desperate to rescue a science that’s quickly going the way of the mammoths: to extinction. This will be debunked in a matter of days.

Update: The following graphic from Jeff Masters Weather Underground shows the temperature for the last 100,000 years. Note all the spikes during the period. Why are the Younger Dryas caused by man and all the other dips not? Clearly the graphic shows that climate is always changing, often wildly. Belching mammoths were not the drivers.

3 responses to “Mammoth Junk Science”

  1. Ed Caryl

    That article is so Bass Acwards I can’t believe the authors wrote it or Nature published it. There has been great argument over whether the Younger Dryas caused the Mammoth extinction, an asteroid or comet strike was the culprit, or humans. Or which came first. But this paper is so bad, wrong is too tame a word. Makes me embarrassed to live in New Mexico.

  2. JimBrock

    I would think that UNM is embarrassed.

  3. Derek

    The true nature of climate will see off nature,
    so to speak.

    Journals of nature’s “standard” that will not publish skeptical papers of the present climate science paradigm,
    show exactly what the nature of nature really is.
    Politics, not scientific investigation to improve our knowledge and understanding.

    There is only one action, do not subscribe to such “science” or such a “journal”.

    If “everyone” only subscribed to E&E for instance,
    would science be better off. ?
    Or, would science be better off if “everyone” only subscribed to nature.

    I don’t think I need to answer that question,
    do I…

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