... during most of that period ... temperatures were up to 12C higher than at present, and Mother Earth paid no mind to the fact that she lacked polar ice caps or suitable habitats for yet un-evolved polar bears.
... during what has been designated as the Mesozoic Age, the planet was busy with another great task, namely, salting away the vast deposits of coal, oil and gas that power the modern economy and allow billions of people to have a living standard enjoyed only by kings just a few centuries ago.
... In a world largely bereft of ice and snow, the oceans were at vastly higher levels and flooded much of the landmass, which, in turn, was verdant with plant and animal life owing to warmer temperatures and abundant rainfall.
... Mother Nature was harvesting massive amounts of solar energy in the form of carbon-based plant and animal life, which, over the eons of growth and decay, resulted in the build-up of vast sedimentary basins.
As the tectonic plates shifted (i.e., the single continent of Pangaea broke up into its modern continental plates) and the climates oscillated,
these sedimentary deposits were buried under shallow oceans and, with the passage of time, heat and pressure, were converted into the hydrocarbon deposits that dot the first 50,000 feet (at least) of the earth’s crust.
In the case of coal, the most favorable conditions for its formation occurred 360 million to 290 million years ago during the Carboniferous (“coal-bearing”) Period.
However, lesser amounts continued to form in some parts of the Earth during subsequent times, in particular, the Permian (290 million to 250 million years ago) and throughout the Mesozoic Era (250 million to 66 million years ago).
Likewise, the formation of petroleum deposits began in warm shallow oceans, where dead organic matter fell to the ocean floors.
These zooplankton (animals) and phytoplankton (plants) mixed with inorganic material that entered the oceans by rivers.
It was these sediments on the ocean floors that then formed oil sands while buried during eons of heat and pressure.
That is to say, the energy embodied in petroleum initially came from the sunlight, which had become trapped in chemical form in dead plankton.
... it is solidly estimated by industry experts that today’s petroleum deposits were roughly formed as follows:
About 70% during the Mesozoic age (252 to 66 million years ago) which was marked by a tropical climate, with large amounts of plankton in the oceans;
20% was formed in the dryer, colder Cenozoic age (last 65 million years);
10% were formed in the earlier warmer Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago).
... it was climate itself that produced those economically valuable deposits.
... the Cretaceous Period from 145 million to 66 million years ago, which was especially prolific for oil formation, was a period with a relatively warm climate, resulting in high open sea levels and numerous shallow inland seas.
These oceans and seas were populated with now-extinct marine reptiles, ammonites and rudists, while dinosaurs continued to dominate on land.
... the climate warmed sharply during the Cretaceous, rising by about 8 degrees C, and eventually reached a level 10 degrees C warmer than today’s on the eve of the asteroid-driven Great Extinction Event of 66 million years ago.
.. at that point, there were no ice caps at either pole, and Pangaea was still coming apart at the seams–so there was no circulating ocean conveyor system in the infant Atlantic.
Yet during the Cretaceous, CO2 levels actually went down while temperatures were rising sharply.
That’s the very opposite of the Climate Alarmists’ core claim that it is rising CO2 concentrations which are currently forcing global temperatures higher.
... we are not talking about a marginal reduction in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Levels actually dropped sharply from about 2,000 ppm to 900 ppm during that 80 million year stretch.
This was all good for hydrocarbon formation and today’s endowment of nature’s stored work, but it was also something more.
... it was yet another proof that planetary climate dynamics are far more complicated ... than the simple-minded doom loops now being used to model future climate states from the current far lower temperature and CO2 levels.
... during the periods since the Great Extinction Event 66 million years ago, ... CO2 levels continued to drop to the 300–400 ppm of modern times, and temperatures dropped another 10 degrees Celsius.
... the geologic history ... contradicts the entire “warming” and CO2 concentration hysteria and made present energy consumption levels and efficiencies possible.
That is to say, the big, warm and wet one (the Mesozoic) got us here.
... we are hard-pressed ... to see any time in the last 66 million years in which the global temperatures weren’t a lot higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius above current levels
—even during much of the ... “Pleistocene Ice Age” of the past 2.6 million years.
... there have been on the order of 20 distinct “ice ages” and interglacial warming periods during the Pleistocene,
the latest of which ended about 18,000 years ago ...
Of course, the climb away from retreating glaciers in Michigan, New England, northern Europe, etc. to warmer, more hospitable climes has not been continuously smooth, but rather a syncopated sequence of advances and retreats.
Thus, it is believed that the world got steadily warmer until about 13,000 years ago, which progress was then interrupted by the Younger Dryas,
when the climate became much drier and colder and caused the polar ice caps to re-expand and ocean levels to drop by upwards of 100 feet as more of the earth’s fixed quantity of water was reabsorbed back into the ice packs.
After about 2,000 years of retreat, however, and with no help from the humans who had repaired to cave living during the Younger Dryas, the climate system swiftly regained its warming mojo.
About 8,000 years ago, during the subsequent run-up to what the science calls the Holocene Optimum, global temperatures rose by upwards of 3 degrees Celsius on average and up to 10 degrees Celsius in the higher latitudes.
... One peer-reviewed study showed that in parts of Greenland, temperatures rose 10°C (18°F) in a single decade.
Overall, scientists believe that half of the rebound from the “ice age” conditions of the Younger Dryas may have occurred in barely 15 years.
Ice sheets melted, sea levels rose, forests expanded, trees replaced grass and grass replaced desert ...
In contrast to today’s climate models, Mother Nature clearly did not go off the rails in some kind of linear doomsday loop of ever-increasing temperatures and without any hectoring from Greta, either.
Actually, Greenland got all frozen up and thawed several more times thereafter.
Needless to say, the Holocene Optimum 8,000 years ago is not the “preindustrial” baseline from which the Climate Howlers are pointing their phony hockey sticks.
In fact, other studies show that, even in the Arctic, it was no picnic time for the polar bears.
Among 140 sites across the western Arctic, there is clear evidence for conditions that were warmer than now at 120 sites.
At 16 sites for which quantitative estimates have been obtained, local temperatures were on average 1.6 °C higher during the optimum than they are today.
... the warmer and wetter Holocene Optimum and its aftermath gave rise to the great river civilizations 5,000 years ago, including the Yellow River in China, the Indus River in the Indian subcontinent, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile River civilizations among the most notable.
... the quest for higher and higher industrial productivity spurred the search for ever-cheaper energy ...
... during the 230 million mainly ice-free years of the Mesozoic, the planet itself accomplished one of the greatest feats of “work” ever known:
... the conversion of massive amounts of diffuse solar energy into the high-density BTU packages embodied in coal, oil and gas-based fuels.
... when one of the previous “preindustrial” warming eras (the Roman Warming) was coming to an end in the late 4th century AD ...
From Part 2:
,,, as we showed in Part 1, global temperatures have been higher than the present—often by upward of 10–15 degrees Celsius—for most of the past 600 million years!
Moreover, during the more recent era since the great extinction event 66 million years ago, the decline in temperatures has been almost continuous, touching lower than current levels only during the 100,000-year glaciation cycles of the last 2.6 million years of the Pleistocene ice ages.
Not unsurprisingly, therefore, the Climate Howlers have chosen to ignore 599,830,000 of those years in favor of the last 170 years (since 1850) alone.
... there is a reason why they start the graphs in 1850, and it is not just because it was the tail-end of the Little Ice Age (LIA), from which low point the temperature trend might well climb upwards for a time as climatic conditions normalized.
... the Climate Howlers want you to believe the absolutely anti-scientific notion that the global climate was in general equipoise until the coal barons and the John D. Rockefeller’s of the mid-19th century set off a dangerous chain of climate dysfunction
as they brought the stored solar energy embedded in coal and petroleum to the surface and released its combustion by-products–especially CO2—into the ambient air.
... What there’s been is 4.5 billion years of wildly oscillating and often violent geologic evolution and climate disequilibrium owing to manifold natural causes, including:
plate tectonics that has sometimes violently impacted climate systems, especially the assembly and breakup of Pangaea between 335 million and 175 million years ago, and the continuous drift of the present-day continents thereafter;
asteroid bombardments;
the 100,000-year cycles of the Earth’s orbital eccentricity (it gets colder when it’s at maximum elongation);
the 41,000-year cycles of the Earth’s tilt on its axis, which oscillates between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees and thereby impacts the level of solar intake;
the wobble or precession of the earth’s rotation which impacts climate over the course of its 26,000 year cycles;
the recent 150,000 year glaciation and inter-glacial warming cycles;
the 1500 year sunspot cycles, where earth temperatures fall during solar minimums like the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715 at the extreme of the LIA when sunspot activity virtually ceased.
...These modern warmings include the previously discussed Holocene Climate Optimum (5000 to 3000 BC);
the Roman Warming (200 BC to AD 500);
and, most recently, the Medieval Warm Period (AD 1000-1300).
Contrary to the false claims of the Climate Howlers,
Current mildly rising temperatures are in keeping with the historical truth that warmer is better for humanity and most other species, too;
What “pre-industrial” temperature baseline can be picked out of all these eras and all these climate change forces that would be anything but an arbitrary political, not science-based, choice?
... We think the planet’s climatic resilience is especially evident in the fact that, after five major ice ages, warming forces returned with robust energy until they reversed again, thereby proving there is no doomsday loop that leads in linear fashion to inexorable catastrophe as is embedded in the climate models.
There have naturally been extended periods of global warming in between these ice ages, but the last three listed below are of special significance.
They all occurred during the last 600 million years of generally much hotter temperatures and CO2 concentrations that were 2–6 times higher than current readings.
That is to say, the last three ice ages prove better than anything else that the planet’s subsequent warming cycles have been self-limiting and self-correcting.
If that were not true, the earth would have been boiling into perdition eons ago:
Huronian (2.4–2.1 billion years ago),
Cryogenian (850–635 million years ago),
Andean-Saharan (460–430 million years ago),
Karoo (360–260 million years ago),
Quaternary (2.6 million years ago–present,
... the last glacier retreat gathered warming steam about 14,000 years ago until it was interrupted by a sudden cooling at about 10,000–8500 BC, known as the aforementioned Younger Dryas.
The warming resumed by 8500 BC.
By 5000 to 3000 BC, average global temperatures reached their maximum level during the Holocene Optimum and were 1 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today.
... during the Holocene Optimum, many of the Earth’s great ancient civilizations began and flourished because conditions were especially hospitable for agriculture and the generation of economic surpluses.
The Nile River, for instance, had an estimated three times its present volume, indicating a much larger tropical region.
In fact, 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was far more fertile than today and supported large herds of animals, as evidenced by the Tassili N’Ajjer frescoes of Algeria.
... warmer and wetter was far better for mankind than prior bouts of cold.
Nevertheless, from 3000 to 2000 BC, a renewed cooling trend occurred.
The latter caused large drops in sea level and the emergence of many islands (Bahamas) and coastal areas that are still above sea level today.
A short warming trend took place from 2000 to 1500 BC and the associated renewal of the Egyptian dynasties, followed once again by colder conditions from 1500 to 750 BC.
This caused renewed ice growth in European continental glaciers and alpine glaciers, and a sea-level drop of between 2 and 3 meters below present-day levels.
Incidentally, that period is also known as the Dark Ages and preceded the flowering of Greek and Roman civilizations.
The period from 750 BC to AD 800 brought a general warming trend, but it was not as strong as the Holocene Optimum.
During the time of the Roman Empire, in fact, a cooling began that intensified after AD 600 and resulted in a renewed dark age that lasted until about AD 900.
During the AD 600–900 Dark Ages, global average temperatures were significantly colder than they are today.
From writings of the time, we know that at its height, the cooling caused the Nile River (AD 829) and the Black Sea (AD 800–801) to freeze.
Thereafter came the crucial Medieval Warm Period from AD 1000 to 1300.
... temperatures were at or above current readings during most of the period, which saw a rejuvenation of economic life, trade, and civilization in Europe.
... prior to the post-1850 warming, there had been five distinct warming periods since the last glaciers with temperatures above current levels.
... during this period, the Vikings established settlements in Iceland and Greenland.
Long before the industrial era, Greenland was so warm, wet, and fertile that major colonization occurred after AD 980.
At its peak, it included upward of 10,000 settlers, extensive farming, numerous Catholic churches, and a parliament that eventually voted for union with Norway.
So, obviously, the Vikings named their settlement Greenland not because they were color blind but because it was hospitable to human settlement.
As another measure of comparison, studies show that the snow line in the Rocky Mountains was about 370 meters above current levels (it was warmer then than today).
Thereafter, the climate trend again reversed in the colder direction.
There are ample records from around the world of floods, great droughts, and extreme seasonal climate fluctuations up to the 1400s.
Horrendous floods devastated China in 1332 (reported to have killed several million people).
Likewise, by the 14th century, the Viking colony was lost to sea ice expansion, and the growing season got ever shorter, thereby undermining the economic viability of these farming settlements.
Food eventually got so scarce that the remaining settlers’ last winter turned out to be one of rampant cannibalism, as archeologists have documented with respect to the remains of the settlement pictured below.
... Nor was the reversal from the hospitable climate of the Viking era settlements in Greenland merely a regional anomaly has some Climate Howlers have claimed.
During the Medieval Warm period, great civilizations flourished in many other areas, which then became uninhabitable.
For instance, a great drought in the American southwest occurred between 1276 and 1299.
Grand settlements like those in Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde were abandoned.
Tree-ring analysis has identified a period of no rain between 1276 and 1299 in these areas.
... these extreme weather perturbations were not caused by industrial activity because there was none, and they occurred during a period when it was getting colder, not warmer!
From 1550 to AD 1850, global temperatures were at their coldest since the beginning of the Holocene 12,000 years ago.
Hence the designation of this period as the Little Ice Age (LIA).
In Europe, glaciers came down the mountains, thereby covering houses and villages in the Swiss Alps while canals in Holland froze for three months straight, a rare occurrence before or after.
Agricultural productivity also dropped significantly, even becoming impossible in parts of northern Europe.
The cold winters of the Little Ice Age were famously recorded in Dutch and Flemish paintings, such as Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525–69).
From 1580 to 1600, the western part of the United States also experienced one of its longest and most severe droughts in the last 500 years.
Cold weather in Iceland from 1753 to 1759 caused 25% of the population to die from crop failure and famine.
Newspapers in New England called 1816 “the year without a summer.”
Self-evidently, when the LIA finally ended around 1850, global temperatures were at a modern nadir (no wonder the Climate Howlers start their charts in the middle of the 1800s).
... to erase the above-described oscillations of the modern climate, climate change advocates have actually gone so far as to literally attempt to airbrush them out of existence.
We are referring to what we call the climate “Piltdown Mann,” named for one Michael Mann, a newly minted Ph.D. (1998) who became the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) lead investigator and advocate for what famously became the “hockey stick” proof of global warming.
The latter, of course, was the blatant fraud embedded in the image that Al Gore made famous in his propagandistic movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006.
Suffice to say, the purpose of the hockey stick was to wipe out all the evidence summarized above.
That is, in lieu of the planet’s long-term and recent severe climate oscillations, the IPCC posited an entirely opposite thesis.
Namely, for the pre-industrial millennium before 1900, global temperatures were nearly as flat as a board.
Accordingly, only when the industrial age got a head of steam and reached full force after 1950 did today’s warming temperatures first appear, or so it was alleged.
The suggestion, of course, was that an uncontrolled temperature breakout to the upside was well underway and that a planetary disaster was just around the corner.
The only problem is that Mann’s graph was as phony as the Piltdown Man itself—the latter famously being confected in England in 1912 and conveniently “discovered” by an amateur anthropologist who claimed it was the missing link in human evolution.
At length, it was shown that the fossil was a forgery; it consisted of a modern human cranium and an orangutan jaw with filed-down teeth.
In the case of the graph, Professor Mann and his accomplices at the IPCC doctored the evidence, used misleading data from southwestern US tree rings in lieu of abundant alternative data showing the contrary ...
... this was accomplished by simply pasting modern temperature records showing steady increases on top of a pre-industrial baseline that never happened.
... The mid-19th century is exactly the wrong baseline from which to measure global temperature change during modern times."
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Monday, November 8, 2021
Climate History: "GreenMageddon and What It Means for You", by David Stockman
Note:
I never expected an article on climate from economist David Stockman. A good summary of climate history is in these excerpts from Part 1 and 2 of the four part article. The small change in our climate over the past 100 years is almost meaningless in relation to the amazing climate history of our planet over geologic time.
Ye Editor
Sources:
Part 1:
Part 2:
From Part 1:
"What actually lies smack in the center of our warmer past is a 220-million-year interval from 250 million years ago through the re-icing of Antarctica about 33 million years ago that was mainly ice-free.
Part 3:
Part 4: