African Wildcats Roamed Inside the Arctic Circle Just 9,000 Years Ago at Temperatures That Were 5°C Warmer Than Today

Astonishing finds by a group of Scandinavian scientists have placed a number of animal species living north of the Arctic Circle 9,000 years ago including African wildcats, dogs and frogs. The area in northern Norway is much further north than where these wild animals would survive today and indicates, yet again, that temperatures in what is known as the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM) were much warmer than today. And of course it makes a nonsense of climate alarmists’ claims that current temperatures are higher than periods going back thousands if not millions of years.

The scientists analysed the DNA bone fragments found in the sealed high-latitude Storsteinhola cave system. The DNA record stretches over a substantial period of climate warming, at a time when carbon dioxide levels were at dangerously low levels of around 260 parts per million, from around 13,000 to 5,000 years ago. Other scientists have also found proxy evidence that suggests temperatures may have risen around 5°C during this period to levels much higher than today. The science blog No Tricks Zone recently noted scientific findings that suggested the early Holocene was so warm that 10,000 years ago, boreal forests expanded northwards to Arctic regions in places that are today too cold to support anything but tundra.

The Scandinavian scientists identified species with expanded northern ranges “far outside their current geographic distribution”. The identification of African wildcats is said to be ”remarkable” and the researchers go out of their way to dismiss an explanation based on human presence. The sites show no evidence of human activity, and the introduction of domestic cats into Fennoscandia is said to date to the Late Roman Iron Age. The finding of wildcat remains is said to be the “highest latitude location for this species ever”.

No Tricks Zone has also commented on the findings of this paper, noting that wildcat species became extinct in northern Europe after the HTM ended, and “snow cover increased above the wildcat threshold of 20cm over a 100-day period”. Dogs (wolves), ducks, geese, prairie chickens, gulls, brown bear and several species of frogs also found the Arctic climate in northern Norway warm enough to reside there during the period. Amberjacks (Seriola) – a fish species only found in temperate to tropical Pacific and Atlantic waters (Gulf of Mexico, Brazil) today – also lived north of the Arctic circle during the early Holocene, notes the blog.

Findings such as this no longer have a place in mainstream media, since they detract from the political fearmongering driving Net Zero. As regular readers know, the Daily Sceptic often points out that the tragedy of politicised ‘settled’ science is that diverse opinions and large areas of inquiry and knowledge are out-of-bounds in both political and media discourse. But climate has always been driven by natural cyclical variation, whether it be long-term orbital changes, or any number of short-term movements. All of this must be put to one side these days to promote the idea that most if not all changes in the weather and climate are caused by humans burning hydrocarbons. Every bad weather event is cue for hysterical warnings of climate Armageddon. Whenever the Arctic or Antarctic sea grows, or coral accumulates in record amounts on the Great Barrier Reef, the scare is quietly dropped, until a propitious, if natural, melt or bleach takes place. Then the whole racket roars back into action again.

The Arctic sea ice has always waxed and waned, whether it be the massive lifting of the ice sheets in the early Holocene, or the more modest cyclical rises and falls seen today. There is always a risk of attracting an allegation of ‘cherry-picking’ from a silly Reuters ‘fact check’, but we can report on the current pattern. The latest April sea ice figures from the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) show that the current cyclical rise continues. The sea ice extent in April was only the 16th lowest extent recorded since modern satellite records began in 1979. In fact, the month had the highest sea ice extent for the month in 12 years.

The significant April recovery, replicated in the annual record, can be clearly seen with a large upturn since 2020. But on a moving average of four years, the recovery dates back at least 10 years. The year 1979 started the modern record and was a high point for Arctic sea ice extent, with much lower levels recorded back to the 1950s and beyond. The NSIDC continues to draw a linear line downwards from this point, a ‘cherry pick’ that seems to escape all known mainstream fact checkers

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, another wall of silence greets the news of the current Antarctic sea ice extent. The latest figures, not to be broadcast out loud, show that in April, the month of most rapid growth, the sea ice grew significantly above the average rate between 1981-2010.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor