Pohlia nutans moss. Photo by Hermann Schachner
By Jo Nova
Around 1,000AD, a little delicate moss (just like the one above), lived in a spot in Antarctica which is now locked in snow and ice all year round, and considered hyper arid and perennially frozen. No one expected to find nodding thread-moss (Pohlia Nutans) on Boulder Clay Glacier.
Researchers had to drill through 11 meters of ice to find it (or what’s left of it) and managed to date it to 1,050 years before present. This puts it smack in the centre of the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings were marauding England, showing that this part of Antarctica was warmer 1000 years ago than it is today, even though humans have poured forth 1.8 trillion tons of greenhouse gases.
At the same time as the mosses grew, there was a veritable population boom of penguins and elephant seals in the Ross Sea next door, right up until the brutal cold of the Little Ice Age wiped them out.
Pohlia nutans, needs liquid water and warmer summers. In order to grow, it has to find land that is ice free in summer has rain or melted water. Mosses can’t survive in this area now.
Thanks to Kenneth Richards at NoTricksZone for finding the study.
Boulder-Clay Glacier, Figure 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02259-4#Sec10
Spare a thought for the life of an Antarctic moss. They spend 9 or 10 months of the year buried in snow, hoping for a five or six weeks of warmth so they can grow a few millimeters. If they’re lucky they might catch some floating penguin poo dust for nutrients. If they’re not lucky the summers get cold for thousand years, and they’re buried in 11 meters of snow.
Apparently, some mosses have survived 5,000 years stuck under a glacier, and can still spring back to life, not just from spores but from dormant tissue itself.
It sort of suggests this sort of climatic mayhem has happened before?
Fully 120 proxies show the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon. Yet the climate industry depends on it not being true. Everything that shows the world was warmer shows that our coal plants and cars are irrelevant. That nature does it all by herself, and that thousands of IPCC experts have been selectively skewing their stories to get bigger grants, or are just too scared to say what they really thought lest they be called a “climate denier”.
That, and the media ignoring hundreds of stories like these.
Fig. S6. Details of the two moss species embedded in the ice core: A) Bryum pseudotriquetrum (13 mm long); B) Pohlia nutans (10 mm long). Note: the scale is in cm, but the pictures are enlarged respectively 5.4 and 7.8 times.
For more information:
- Medieval Warm Period found in 120 proxies. Plus Roman era was similar to early 20th Century.
- Climate helped drive Vikings from Greenland
- The Medieval Warm Period hit west Antarctica
- Antarctica was warmer one thousand years ago — and life was OK
REFERENCE
Forte, E., Azzaro, M., Cannone, N. et al. A warming pulse in the Antarctic continent changed the landscape during the Middle Ages. Commun Earth Environ 6, 281 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02259-4
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Some religions only recognize existence of history back to a certain date.
Climate Change is one of them.
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Some say 1750, others say 1950….
Either way CO2 warm forcing is negligible at the 430-ppm level.
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Hmm – negligible warming – but the Marvellous Mr. Miliband is doing REAL damage to the UK economy.
Auto
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Same here with ‘Don’t Ask Me A Question Albo’ and ‘Blackout Bowen’.
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Since all the Student Union government are at it why should Siliband miss out.
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The MWP in Fennoscandia, clearly CO2 has no part to play.
‘ … another paleoclimate study confirms that the Medieval Warm Period of a thousand-plus years ago was significantly warmer than it has been recently, in spite of a much-reduced atmospheric CO2 concentration of only 280 ppm at that earlier time.’ (CO2 Science)
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As I keep saying, the anti-science religion/ideology of the Left subscribes to an Aristotlean world view in which the world is static and never changing. Any slight deviation from what they imagine is this stable, static environment of earth is treated with panic and alarm. It’s sad that so many of those of the Left, political “leaders” , senior public serpents and even “university” “academics” and CSIRO “scientists” believe this.
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Civilisations have thrived during the naturally warm periods of the Minoan, Egyptian, Roman and Medieval eras. (That’s one of the reasons that the Left have destroyed the education system and this sort of thing is no longer taught.)
Plus, we are coming to the very end of a rare interglacial. As the world cools, it will be impossible for civilisation to survive without coal, gas and nuclear power stations (and real hydro where possible, not SH2).
The idea that the earth and universe is static is a very primitive one and articulated by Aristotle in “In the Heavens” 350BCE.
It is only in the last 100 years or so that the ideas of Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), a real climatologist, geologist, geophysicist, meteorologist and polar researcher came to be accepted that the earth is not static. Among other ideas he conceived of continental drift which led to plate tectonics.
However, as early as 1840 Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) hypothesised that much of North America was once buried under glacial ice up to 3km deep and that climate must change.
Milutin Milanković (1879-1958) also discovered natural cycles in the climate.
Warmists have to do a lot of catching up with modern thinking.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair, 1934”.
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Why, even the Good God Book states the very same: the earth is built upon solid foundations as the lights of heaven travel above our heads. Heck, even sometimes a very high priest commandethed the Big Day Light to stay its course … but only until the battle was won and then tarry no more, life must return to ‘the new normal’ and another land was conquered.
Polynesians have their myths and legends too, even of Maui the demigod who slowed the passage of Ra during the day as it moved too fast for the little people scurrying amongst the flax bushes, harakeke, which Maui wove into a net to trap the sun until he’d beaten some sense into it and it obeyed / served man’s requirements.
Most of these tales appear to have coalesced around 600 BC, whether it be whilst under the shackles of slavery by the rivers of Babylon – albeit within one of the Wonders of the World – or island-hopping across the vast Peaceful Ocean waterways: the biggest Wonder of them all.
A bright and shining Morning Star woke me about 4am, its illuminating glow rising out of the east, doubly bright as it reflected off the Peaceful Ocean. The ‘evening star’ hath now becomest the ‘morning star’ for our winter: some call it Venus, some Lucifer, some Kopu… it’s all cosmic debris to me.
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The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.
George Bernard Shaw
And –
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw
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Wegener put forward his theory of plate tectonics at the time of the First World War and it took until the end of the 1950s to become accepted.
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I’m sorry, David, but the Viking’s SUVs kept the temperature up during the MWP.
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It’s a well known geological fact that oceans have fallen by at least 4.2 metres over the last seven thousand years.
While that fall has been irregular; perhaps giving the Noah’s Ark event, the constant downward trend is undeniable.
The most recent two thousand years has seen a fall of 1.2 metres.
The ocean fall has a corollary: ice accumulation at the poles.
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On a recent visit to Kangaroo Island I found a notice board explaining how the island was formed.
Titled “Making the landscape”, it has graphics depicting changes from 550 million years ago to the present.
The last image and description states:
17,000 years ago
The sea retreats to the edge of the Continental Shelf during the last ice age. Humans cross to the island. About 7,000 years ago, the sea rises to its present position
No sign of the SUVs and coal-fired power station exist from that time
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The White Cliffs of Dover are chalk made from sea creatures. How did they get so high? It’s a Mystery. LOL.
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You can find fossilised seashells at 4 km altitude in the Andes mountain range.
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Two things, the full depth of the last ice age was twenty to twenty five thousand years ago: their 17,000 is a bit off.
Also, the oceans did not reach their current levels seven thousand years ago.
They peaked then. Perhaps they’re trying to hide the fact that the oceans have continued to fall during that time because it means that the earth is cooling and shows no immediate sign of warming up.
The mixing of data formats to create the hockey stick graph would be given a big fail in any sensible university statistics course.
Essentially the oceans are very stable.
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That’s OK for you to say, living on a chunk of granite & sandstone the size of the USA: some of us still reside on slabs of mud & grit squeezed-up from the depths with the occasional magmatic explosion to provide hot pools to soak in and boil the kumara…
From my viewpoint three (3) old beach terraces can be seen above today’s high-tide mark while at least another 3 lie under the ocean waves farther out, drowned during numerous inundations and/or floods, ie. climate change of the natural variety.
That something ‘changed’ in 1988 during a Con-gressional sideshow has nought to do with science but all to do with The $c!ence™️. Geology rocks! Hansen-Gore Theory flops.
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Warmist “researchers” love going to exotic adventure holiday locations for their “research” and plenty have gone to Antarctica (and remote tropical islands).
I wonder why so many missed this?
What do they do there?
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When will the annual global warming jamboree COP be held at one of the resorts in Antarctica I wonder? Might need to ship in some prostitutes though as they are in short supply.
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Moss as mentioned above is a plant but lichens are not plants but plant-like composite organisms of a combination of fungus and algae and others.
There has always been lichens in Antarctica even outside of the Medieval Warm Period responsible for the moss mentioned above.
I recall studying atlases as a child and remember how the tip of the Antarctic Peninsular sometimes was coloured with a slight greenish tinge which the legend coded as indicative of the presence of lichens.
Even the fully woke Australian Government website for the Antarctic Program admits this, and no mention of it being due to “climate change”.
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I’m sorry, are you saying the Roman warm period was real AND global? But, but, I thought I could trust Mikey Mann and his “research”. LMFAO.
Posted to my FB page, as always Jo. Many thanks.
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Thanks again Jo for posting this study, just a pity that the ignorant Labor, Greens and Teals loonies are driving us to extreme loss of energy plus a threat to national security over the rest of the century.
We should only invest in BASELOAD energy and stop destroying our land and sea environments as soon as possible.
So why has the Vic govt shot 750 Koalas and why are we deliberately destroying their environment over eastern Australia?
Toxic W & S are unreliable sources of energy and only last for 15 to 20 years at best.
Why don’t Aussies understand that only cheap, reliable BASELOAD energy security leads to national security and without it we are screwed?
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Again, the Co2 Coalition scientists tell us that the previous Eemian temps were 8 c higher than the Holocene.
This occurred from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago and even Wiki admits that studies now show SLs then were 6 to 9 metres higher than we experience today in 2025.
Of course Human population during the Eemian was probably under 10 million and co2 levels were about 280 ppm.
When will we wake up and think?
https://co2coalition.org/facts/the-last-interglacial-was-8c-14f-warmer-than-today/#:~:text=The%20results%20revealed%20that%20the%20Eemian%20interglacial%20warm,%2814.4%C2%B0F%29%20warmer%20than%20today.%20The%20implications%20are%20enormous.
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And what of the ‘recent’ discovery that grasses and bushes grew in central north Greenland about 400,000 years ago where now at least 1 kilometre thick of ice stands. CO2 about 300 p.p.m. (according to the Vostok graphs).
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The tighter the enemies of reason grasp the sand, the more slips through their fingers.
And so my question is how a counter-narrative study such as this ever got funded?
The answer is in the acknowledgments…
This work was supported by grants from the National Antarctic Research Program (PNRA 2013/AZ1.05; PNRA16_00194; PNRA18_00186-E). We gratefully acknowledge Schlumberger and Halliburton through their University of Trieste academic grants.
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Holocene temps are much lower today than the earlier Holocene and SLs are much lower in 2025 than 4,000 years ago or during the much warmer Holocene climate optimum.
Dr Ole Humlum provides a summary nearly every year and tide gauge SLs in 2023 are increasing by about 1.5 mm a year or about the same as the previous 20th century.
See page 36 of his 2023 report.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2024/04/Humlum-State-Climate-2023.pdf
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Academics and scientists aught to know,
About the M.W.P. a thousand years ago,
With much less CO2,
Being warmer, moss grew,
In Antarctic which had less ice and snow.
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Excellent, Rory 😃
it’ll be a big day when some young PhD (re)discovers Antarctica’s Dry Valleys where it hasn’t snowed nor iced for at least since EVAAAH!
By Jo’s map the moss is in the near vicinity of the long known about Dry Valleys, a veritable canary in the coal mine of consensus©️.
BTW it must be getting hotter as it snowed overnight down south with sub-zero temps: Just beLIEve.
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And with all those Volcanoes beneath parts of Antarctica, the ice and snow is melting. Who would have thought that?
Paging the UN, paging the UN……….
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And the MacDonald study found that Boreal forests grew up to the Arctic coastline during the early, warmer Holocene optimum and yet today in 2025 we only find tundra and ice.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0033589499921233
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She’s back!! Great article. Oh, I so wish I could open a MSM newspaper and read this article. Plus all the others written by Jo. For balance, maybe the Guardian could at least do a monthly contribution by Jo. Yes, I jest.
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All that Newspapers are good for is the same as always. Fish and Chip wrappers.
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I guess Health has a better idea – they’re not even good enough for that these days
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Sorry Ross, no space in the Daily Mail as it has 10 pages – yep TEN – on the death of the global fascist pope. And looks like little hope for any improvement as he has been as good as the DemoTwats and Dementia Joe have in installing Far Left judges by stuffing the voting cardinals with his own WEF-approved cardinals.
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So many people worldwide have the view of Australia as one of sun and sea. Many of them have no experience of surf and beaches. The results are just so sad . .
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Just an old film, set at the turn into the last century, where there is a really bad drought:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5TMtd2LDYs
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Consider also, that “Antarctica, aas a breakaway continent, may NOT alays have been where it currently is.
If bits of the western USA have a commongeochemistry with eastern Tasmania, it has been quite a “rock-show” for the last couple of huncred million years.Was the Medieval Warmperiod isolate to London? I doubt it. Who was keeping notes?
Inthe 19th century,ONE “minor” volcano od the end of Jave changed the “GLOBAL” weather for several years. SERIOUS volcanoes in the same region, altered global weather for centuries . Rippers like Tambora, altered the populations and even the existence of entire species inth a las millenium or severalThe entire dinosaur thing ended badly after hundreds of million years; all in an “blink” of a geological eye.
Antarctica is home to several active volcanoes, Mount Erebus of “Air New Zealand” fame is just the best known. There are LAKES, in vast vcaverns underground.Was the continent always in its current location? Probably not. Have the magnetic poles “moved? With monotonous regularity, every few Millennia.
We are but “passengers” on this green and blue rock; NOT the operating crew.Even if it all turns to crepe,in a furthe million years, there will be little or no evidence of our ever being here. The eco-nazis are deeply into a peculiar vanity.
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The basic tenet of the climate religion is that mankind can control the weather and thus the climate. Not only does this mean that man sits at the same table as the good Lord himself, which many would deem blasphemous, it also implies that man is at the centre of the creation. It is a pre-Copernican medieval mindset, pure and simple. So small wonder that bad weather must be attributed to witches and warlocks who need to be put to the stake.
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I am always amazed at the height of the solid iceblock which is Antarctica. And at Antarctica, two Australias at the height of two Kosciouskos.
You can display these heights with Google Earth. Draw a path, save the path and then right click on the path and you will get an amazing profile of up to 3500 metres easily. Like a snow cone.
All this ‘life’ is only at the very edge where the ice drops away to sea level. So I always answering people who want to know about the ‘ice caps’. The one at the North Pole is only 4 metres thick over 4000metres of water.
And life in Antarctica is only at the edges like Adelie bay. Plants. Penguins. Pioneers. It’s just so cold at 10-12,000 feet on the plateau. 1C per 120 metres. So winter at -50C on a nice day and summer at -25C. It’s not going anywhere soon despite the tiny summer warming. And winter is six months, which is a bit hard on plants anyway. Not too many vegetarians in Antarctica.
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And I think I finally have a way to explain to people why the melting of sea ice or ice blocks makes no difference to water levels.
Sea water turns into a block of ice but takes up no more room floating in the water.
I can explain it with simple forces. You have the weight of the water or ice down. And then you have the upward bouyancy which is the weight of the volume of displaced water. These exactly match because the iceblock does not sink.
So the volume of water displaced is a constant as the ice freezes or melts. Sea level does not change.
The reason the ice pokes out of the water is that ice is about 10% less dense than water, so 10% of the ice is out of the water. The volume of water displaced is constant.
So if the North Pole ‘ice cap’ melts and half melts every summer, there is no noticeable effect. (There is a slight correction for salt water density vs fresh water)
This is one of the essential scares of the Climate Change brigade. And it is worthless.
Their only hope is Greenland and that continues to refuse to melt. Except to again reveal Viking settlements from 1000AD.
And every year all the ice and snow across Siberia, Japan, Europe, US, Canada melts and the rivers run fast but the coastal cities do not drown. Given the average depth of water at 3.5Km, waters from the rivers generally do not make a noticeable difference. Though I wonder about the Baltic which is nearly closed. The water past Copenhagen must flow very fast. Like the Angara river, the only river out of gigantic Lake Baikal at Irkutsk, the largest lake in the world by volume, more than all the Great Lakes. When I saw the Angara river flowing, paper was doing tens of km per hour on the surface.
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Old King Coal has a necessary role
And a necessary role has he.
We call for power in the middle of the night
And we call when the wind’s not spree.
Continue this…
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There was a fiddle,
A Climate Change riddle
had them wanting the old King’s Head
But when he makes power,
It’s on at all hours
Intermittent at night are Dead
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