What are we supposed to make of “experts” who do not confront the most important data in front of them?
That’s a problem these days. And it has been a huge issue on the CO2 theory of “anthropogenic global warming.” One problem I’ve had with this well-funded “climate science” is that its pushers cannot explain the biggest climate change in our most-relevant geological past: the cycles of Ice Ages. So I invited Ralph Ellis, co-author of the paper “Modulation of ice ages via precession and dust-albedo feedbacks,” to explain what others do not seem able or . . . willing. Here is our conversation, in video, with a few visual aids (“as they say in the ‘ed biz’”):
It turns out that Ralph Ellis is an inveterate challenger of accepted paradigms. So after the one-hour mark, our conversation moves to ancient Egypt and a curious possibility about the true identity of the ancient Israelites. And note: this possibility has been staring us in the face all along. It occurred to me, and if you knew who The Hyksos were, it probably occurred to you. But only Ralph Ellis has taken up the clue to see where the ancient path leads.
The audio version of this podcast can be found on a variety of podcatchers and at LocoFoco.net:
LocoFoco Netcast, “Ice Age and Exodus,” Season Two, Episode Three (January 4, 2021).
Provide feedback at LocoFoco.locals.com. Thanks for stopping by.
When I was a kid, my nightmares involved tilted houses with floors you had to climb up against the incline, roosters crowing at the window, and a yawning, chthonian Immensity that Jung would have loved to analyze.
One in five children are having nightmares about climate change, according to a British survey on Tuesday, as students globally stage protests over a lack of action to curb global warming. About 17 percent of children in Britain said worries about climate change were disturbing their sleep while 19 percent said these fears were giving them nightmares. The survey of 2,000 children aged eight to 16, conducted by pollster Savanta-ComRes for BBC Newsround, also found that two in five, or 41 percent, did not trust adults to tackle the climate crisis.
The Jakarta Post (Reuters), March 3, 2020
While I suspect that the brand X prophecy of CO2 increases leading to “climate catastrophe” is little more than a psy-op, the more I learn about the end of the last Ice Age, which humanity somehow survived — while most megafauna did not — indicates that we can indeed encounter great climatic terrors and that those terrors can haunt humanity for millennia.
Indeed, I suspect that the notion of an underground realm of the Dead as well as the terrors of “the Tribulations” and our civilization’s fixation on the very idea of a Millennium could all derive from the strange thousand-plus years of the Younger Dryas, through which humanity may have had to live in caves to survive:
I reference here the Human Origin Project, which does not appear to be academically acceptable, because the academics have, so far, proved remarkably reticent about incorporating newly discovered facts into the stories they tell.
The kiddies, these days, are told stories about a counterfactual present and imaginary future by adults who pose as their authorities. From these serioso story time moments many quivering true believers are made.
It is not necessarily a conspiracy theory to conjecture that one reason modern academics routinely evade discussion of the astounding destruction that occurred a mere twelve thousand years ago is that by denying the facts they can better parlay pseudo-science to make plausible weak-tea terrors like “man-made climate change.”
What is going on in our current climate is mere urination into the wind compared to the fire hose of the end of the Ice Age.
It may be the job of us heretics and apostates to throw a monkey wrench into the Great Global Warming Psy-op: tell your kids and their friends that their tax-funded teachers are almost certainly misinformed, and that they should be skeptical of adults (as well as, of course, children) telling tall tales to scare them into demanding political changes neither their teachers nor they, themselves, understand.
There are plenty of real terrors we must all confront.
Including that great, chthonian enormity of our future non-existence.
You see the most obvious typo: “by” when “buy” was meant.
Imagine a religion without beliefs, sans credo, but based upon mere suspicion.
Now consider environmentalism, the ideology in which what should be at best suspicions are held religiously as points of dogma.
Now, briefly to reïterate my long-standing position: anthropogenic global warming sure seems plausible. But that is mere suspicion. Beyond this suspicion, the “science” is all over the map. Sea levels have been rising steadily as measured on east and west coasts of North America since 1850 — long before the great releases of greenhouse gases from modern civilization. And if you look at reliable U.S. temperatures for the last 150 years, it is not at all evident that a general warming has occurred.
So, while there is room for suspicion regarding current and future climatic shifts of possible catastrophic proportions, there is not yet grounds for anything close to certainty.
Yet the dogma on the environmentalist left is clear.
How must we appraise this? Well, as always with religious people, it is by their fruits we shall know them. If they say our coasts are going to be under water in a few years — unless (of course) we act immediately in a massive and transformative way — then you would expect environmentalists to flock to the uplands. It sure is obvious that the “proper” transformative policies they demand are not being adopted.
Because environmentalists are not heading for the hills, I do not believe they really believe in their catastrophe scenarios. They are playing at belief.
Not as suspicion, but as fantasy.
I suspect they do this the better to hate on those who doubt. It is a proven “winning” religious strategy.
This is a joke, and a funny one. And especially bizarre since the image, when I placed it above, captioned itself as “Floating iceberg, Antarctica.” Polar bears live in the Arctic. Another level to the joke, I guess. I’m chuckling.
That being said . . . according to the charts I’ve seen there has been no appreciable decrease in the extent of the summer Arctic ice sheet, much less the winter’s.
The Arctic sea ice extent in recent times.
What is going on? Well, the much-publicized Arctic warming has mostly occurred in the winter. Remember the freezing point of water? Well, if it is less cold than before, but that warming is still below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, this amounts to bupkis in melting.
Still, hilarious doctored photo. Kudos to The Onion.
Unless, of course, this came from the CIA as part of a clever plan to make us just a little more crazy in precisely the way the Deep State wants.
I know this sounds nuts, but this is as I see it: James Hansen, formerly of NASA, has pushed global warming relentlessly for 30 years, with predictions that never come true — he and his acolyte Al Gore have repeatedly prophesied a summer Arctic absence of an ice sheet “in ten years,” kicking the catastrophe down the road another decade after their failure stares them in the face, hoping for a confirmation . . . some day.
Until a decade ago, I gave this pair a lot of leniency, simply because I could not believe any respectable public figure could be so far off the mark, which would suggest either witlessness or lying. Since I do not believe folks like Hansen and Gore are witless (Gore’s execrable Earth in the Balance notwithstanding), I have some trouble seeing anything other than a psy-op here.
Sea level rise has been ongoing . . . for a long time. And steadily. Why?
The standard story, in recent times, has been anthropogenic global warming (AGW): increasing levels of greenhouse gases produced by human civilization warms the planet and melts the polar glaciers, thus raising the sea level. A very common answer. But it hardly seems like the right answer.
Though I have never denied that this standard story seemed a plausible explanation for climate change, on the face of it, in this particular case there is an obvious and grave reason for doubt.
We are coming out of the Little Ice Age, which has been the most significant glaciation period in the Holocene epoch so far. Humanity almost certainly had little to do with either the onset or the ebb of that cooling event. The warming since then has constituted a long trend.
But remember something: continents tend to sink and those that are not offset by countervailing geological forces are indeed sinking. Some apparent sea level rise is not the result of “global warming.”
And, if you have been listening to Jim Hansen and Al Gore and the politicians of a few tropical island nations, the summer Arctic ice sheet was supposed to be gone already, and our lowest-lying beach property under water.*
Why do the prophets of doom keep having to postpone and re-date their doomsday scenarios? Well, could it be because their science is bad? Maybe, even, that their data have not been honestly presented?
To those who have been paying attention, it has become clear that AGW shills have perpetrated a number of data frauds in recent years. Their reporting on sea level increases sure looks to me like one of them. The trend line was on its way up before the dramatic increase in greenhouse gases by the introduction of widespread internal combustion engines, and so attributing later oceanic trends to a new and separate cause hardly seems honest.
And we witness this in other intellectual areas — especially regarding a great number of issues where partisans for the dirigiste state proclaim great success for their programs. What these advocates do is cite trends after the introduction of their favored nostrums, to “prove” how well they work, ignoring that the favorable trend lines they identify had been running in their direction before their programs were put in place. The classic case is workplace fatalities, which decreased after the introduction of OSHA. But of course workplace fatalities had been trending downwards for some time.
An even more startling case is poverty reduction, which leveled off after the introduction of LBJ’s War on Poverty. America would probably have seen greater alleviations of the conditions of America’s poor if the federal government had done nothing. And if you wonder why that would be the case, contemplate, at length, the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
Those of us who doubt the nature, extent and popularly identified causes of climate change get called “climate deniers,” of course. It is a typically idiotic charge. I have my usual response:
But, when it comes to climate trends, today’s “climate science consensus” seems to be suffering, itself, from denial. Today’s “hockey stick” pushers play down not only the Little Ice Age but also, more infamously yet, the Medieval Warming Period.
But it is worse than that. They ignore the even bigger picture, the events at the beginning of our own Holocene epoch: the end of the last Ice Age.
It was catastrophic. Sea levels rose hundreds of feet in very short periods of time. The piddling secular incline in sea levels in the last century or so is nothing compared to that deluge.
So I demand of AGW-obsessed climate scientists a great many explanations. Until they can explain how Ice Ages start and end, I cannot trust them about our recent climate trends.
They are, embarrassingly and monomaniacally focused on greenhouse gas emissions and the feedback effects of warming on oceans and their consequent, heat-induced emission of carbon dioxide. And, by the way, they never seem to explain how Ice Ages have not spiralled to total global freeze and warming periods have not spiralled to hothouse infernos. Their fondness for simple models that show positive feedback loops after a “tipping point” — that they almost invariably say would be “irreversible” — is bizarre. They seem immune to recognizing factors leading to homeostasis. Climate is determined by multipe causes, and the limited models of the AGW pseudo-consensus strike me as not merely notoriously bad predictors, but absurd on the face of it.
So, I have a lot of questions. Many, many questions. And these questions — only one set of which I ask here — seem rather obvious to me, but which I never encounter from the over-ballyhooed “climate consensus.” I guess I should ask Tony Heller of RealClimateScience.com (whose recent videos inspired some of my ruminations here), since he recognizes the complexity of climate processes and the importance of a geological perspective on climate — recognition of the Big Picture. (In full disclosure, I have been following popular climatology since The Coming Ice Age was a thing, and helped edit a magazine that published one of the first scholarly critiques of the then-new AGW craze, back in the 1980s.)
Sticking to recent trends allows many AGW advocates — usually and suspiciously pushing for ever-more intrusive government — to engage in cultic behavior. Anyone trying to win an argument about science who resorts to the “overwhelming consensus” canard loses his Science Card. Science is about public testing — conjectures and refutations — and, as Richard Feynman astutely suggested, distrusting “the experts.”
I would add one heuristic we non-scientists must keep in mind: the reasoned distrust of those whose public “checks and balances” — vanishingly small in an age when the peer review process has been shown to be in crisis — can be so easily swamped by grant checks and their own bank balances. And let us apply some caution here. Government funding can be as corrupting as corporate funding, and is likely more so, since much greater, and is far more prone to political capture and the prejudice elicited by the public-interest halo. Alas, that halo is ever-present, with most folks giving governments the presumption of efficacy, authority and good will. This prejudice is rank bigotry, of course, almost certainly the result of an evolutionary programming to favor in-group hierarchies.
In fine, I remain confident in saying that mainstream of climatology is now addicted not only to cultism but, specifically, to Ice Age Denialism.
twv
Trying to make sense of the world, one book at a time.
* Of course, there is a major caveat here: melting Arctic sea ice cannot cause a sea level rise. Melting glacial ice on the land masses of Greenland and Antarctica would be the almost sole sources of any future sea rise by melting.
Wirkman Comment 