Sudden Ends, Glaciers and the Shackles of Uniformitarianism
Posted on
July 31, 2014 by
Louis Hissink
Seems the usual suspects, of the climate kind, have discovered the last glacial terminated rather suddenly some 15,000 years ago,
source, (H/T Friends of Science, FoS). That’s the Pleistocene ice age, I suppose, and FoS notes that there is vigourous discussion on the topic at
Tallbloke’s blog involving the Milankovic cycle.
The problem is how to have past climate catastrophes without actually having to have one, since the paradigm of geological uniformitarianism excludes all catastrophes except the future one by humans causing a climate armageddon from 3.75% of the total atmospheric CO2 (15 ppmv) due to the burning of “fossil fuels”, (H/T FoS, again). Sort of a schizophrenic state of mind, no? That is, denying past catastrophes but expecting future ones.
And then the missing heat remains elusive with FoS invoking the Scarlet Pimpernel to describe climate science’s problem with less heat coming out of the climate system than going in. Except for those of us who accept Gerry Pollack’s recently discovered explanation for the anomalously high specific heat of water compared to its ice and vapour phases.
The reason is that only 50% of the incoming heat raises its temperature, the other 50% goes into electric charge separation and molecular order, (and you can go find the data quite easily by Googling the topic; heaven knows I’ve mentioned it here enough times). So the missing heat is, at least for some of us, rather easy to explain. But it does require some thinking outside the box, something which the religiously minded seem incapable of. (Religious minds see what they believe and are thus unaffected, perhaps even impervious to, contradictory empiricism).
But its the discovery of a tipping point, the sudden termination of the last ice age by rapid warming, that seems to have caused a conundrum. Except they have it back to front. The suddenness was the start of the ice age, not its termination so much. Note that mass species extinctions also accompany ice ages but because of the anomalous stretching of geological time by Charles Lyell, documented in his Principles of Geology, a geochronological disconnect was achieved making it very difficult to understand how an event in the past profoundly affected the climate and biosphere hundreds to perhaps millions of years later. Direct causality is hardly implied from this interpretation of the data and as TallBloke wonders, could the Milankovic cycle be used to explain it.
Ahhh, they wear the shackles of geological uniformitarianism and yet knoweth it not.
It’s the start of the ice ages that are anomalous. And the cause? Imagine a warm,wet world, pictorially represented by, say, Constable rural scenes, with animals going thither and yonder, (just use some Lyellian literary rhetoric if it’s too hard to imagine), and then suddenly, whack, the earth is directly hit by a coronal mass ejection! A super Carrington event perhaps. The earth system is suddenly overwhelmed by an influx of high energy protons.
Animal species based on carbon and water, (we humans are basically 97% water), in which water is present in the Pollack EZ water phase, are suddenly and instantly frozen and killed. Enormous accumulations of ice occur at the poles, the ingress route of the protons. And as quickly as it appeared, so will it disappear, with a sudden increase in temperature as the ice-machine stops its activity, and with future researchers being left with a gratuitous dilemma as the earth returns to its previous physical state, or tries to, since things have irrevocably changed. (It might be pointed out that a prolonged super Carrington event might also realign the earth’s axis of rotation to some other inclination, but I won’t go into this scenario here).
The real problem is not so much climate denialism per se, as the rejection of primary human observations by the modern fabrication of history, both the immediate and past. All of earth’s human cultures and civilisations memorialise past climate catastrophes in their myths and legends, yet we modern, progressives deny these histories in total and interpret them in grand Lyellian fashion as ‘literary’ devices.
Yet if the key to the past is the present, but the present is fabricated, then how then to understand the past? The solution to the problem is to understand what Charles Lyell and his predecessor, James Hutton, achieved with their ‘geologic theories’; but that’s for another longer post. You might start by studying George Grinnell’s 1975 paper on the establishment of the London Geological Society in 1807 – when its founding members never included any geologist.
Update: If a super Carrington event could realign the earth’s axis of spin etc, then areas that were once arctic might now be found in temperature latitudes, and those in temperate ones, arctic, or antarctic. These would be rather serious instances of climate change, no?
Nice little article Petros. The Dynamo theory of earths magnetic field was replaced by the Homopolar motor model some time ago but no one paid any attention.
4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.
None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.
The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician’s assertion.← Understanding the Greenhouse effect Semmelweis Clean Hands Award → No Smoking Hotspot
