If our planet had been in existence for a year, rather than for around 4.5 billion years, then 2.4 million years would represent a little under 4 hours 45 minutes. Or, to put it in human terms, if our planet had existed for 70 years (a relatively short human lifespan across much of the developed world), then 2.4 million years would be represented by a little over four minutes. When you’re aged 70, something that happened around 4 minutes ago is very recent indeed.

Today the BBC drew my attention to a fascinating new study published in Nature with the title “A 2-million-year-old ecosystem in Greenland uncovered by environmental DNA”. (The BBC headlines with “Oldest DNA reveals two-million-year-old lost world”). The BBC article commences with:

The most ancient DNA ever sequenced reveals what the Arctic looked like two million years ago when it was warmer.

It certainly looked very different. And as for “warmer”, well – it was quite a bit warmer. 11 – 19C hotter, in fact. Compare and contrast with the apocalyptic claims about 1.5C, 2C, even 4C of warming from pre-industrial levels, and the regular claims that the mild and gentle warming we are now experiencing is “unprecedented”.

The Nature report of the study is well worth a read. The science is fascinating, though the seemingly inevitable obeisance to climate catastrophism seems overdone in the opening sentence:

Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene epochs 3.6 to 0.8 million years ago had climates resembling those forecasted under future warming.

Really? Even under the outlier that is RCP8.5 I don’t recall anyone asserting that we will witness “mean annual temperatures of 11–19 °C above contemporary values”, which is what is claimed for the period under study. The claim that this is what is forecast is footnoted, and the footnote links to IPCC Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013). I’m sure I’d have remembered if someone had claimed that AR5 warned us that temperatures were going to increase by 11 – 19C in the next century or so. It’s therefore disappointing to see this study commencing in this way. Still, leaving that tendentious claim to one side, the study is fascinating both for it’s amazing and innovative use of ancient environmental DNA (eDNA) (“Our findings open new areas of genetic research, demonstrating that it is possible to track the ecology and evolution of biological communities from two million years ago using ancient eDNA”); and for what it tells us about the climate of far northern Greenland, and the flora and fauna that thrived there 2.4 million years ago:

Here we report an ancient environmental DNA (eDNA) record describing the rich plant and animal assemblages of the Kap København Formation in North Greenland, dated to around two million years ago. The record shows an open boreal forest ecosystem with mixed vegetation of poplar, birch and thuja trees, as well as a variety of Arctic and boreal shrubs and herbs, many of which had not previously been detected at the site from macrofossil and pollen records. The DNA record confirms the presence of hare and mitochondrial DNA from animals including mastodons, reindeer, rodents and geese, all ancestral to their present-day and late Pleistocene relatives. The presence of marine species including horseshoe crab and green algae support a warmer climate than today. The reconstructed ecosystem has no modern analogue.

The history of life on our planet has been one of untold numbers of new plants and animals, and huge numbers of extinctions. Life on the planet today probably represents only the tiniest fraction of the lifeforms that have existed in the past. Change is inevitable. Angst about warmer temperatures diminishing areas where some species can live and (in the northern hemisphere) driving them further north should be balanced by the historical backwards and forwards movements of climate, of warm and cool periods, and of the ability of lifeforms to exist in different places or at all. In that context, this statement interested me:

Out of the 102 genera detected in the Kap København ancient eDNA assemblage, 39% no longer grow in Greenland but do occur in the North American boreal (for example, Picea and Populus) and northern deciduous and maritime forests (for example, Crataegus, Taxus, Thuja and Filipendula). Many of the plant genera in this diverse assemblage do not occur on permafrost substrates and require higher temperatures than those at any latitude on Greenland today.

Had humans been around at the time, and had they been subject to the same quasi-religious guilt complex that seems to motivate so many climate worriers, presumably we would have been bemoaning the cooling planet and the fact that the changing climate was denying plantlife its “natural” habitat close to the North Pole. As for animal life, forget polar bears being pin-ups for climate grief. No, it would be the mastodon (a predominantly forest-dwelling animal) that was grabbing all the attention, as its Arctic forest habitat disappeared in the teeth of increasing cold.

I commenced by making what some might think a strange analogy with the timescale of a human life. I did so deliberately. I am convinced that modern humans complaining of “climate change” destroying the planet do so because they think in human timescales. The reality is that the planet is bigger than any of us, climate has always changed and always will, and if this time round we humans are managing to change it for the first time in our planet’s history, that change is still minor compared to what has occurred in the past.