In the 70s when I became a science editor at an academic publishing house, covers like the above were beginning to grace popular magazines. The light bulb went on in my head: Why not a book on this issue going into sufficient detail for people to grasp what is going on?
I contacted three different climatologists, each happy to talk with me and each patiently explaining why there could be no book.
- In the first place, we are currently in not one but two ice ages. An ice age occurs in one of earth’s hemispheres whenever that pole is ice-covered year-round and long-term.
- In the second place, the ice age in the southern hemisphere, the Oligocene ice age, commenced 30 mya when the South American plate broke free from the Antarctic plate and started its northward drift, in the process opening up the Drake Passage leading to formation of the Circumpolar Current, the planet’s largest and coldest.
- When the South American plate joined the North American plate 2.58 mya blocking the flow between the Atlantic and Pacific, we got the Quaternary ice age in the northern hemisphere, the one of greater concern as it affects large tracts of potential agricultural land suited to human habitation.
- Given that our exit from this situation depends on tectonic plate movements (which proceed at the speed of fingernail growth), we are likely to be in these two ice ages for many millions of years to come. Other ice ages in our past have lasted well more than a hundred million years.
- Antarctica is now stuck dead center over the South Pole and is likely never going anywhere again.
- No modeling offers a clear picture of what it will take for continental plates to reconfigure so as to end the Quaternary ice age.
- Our present Holocene epoch is part of our ice age, an respite from glaciation (by which is meant not glaciers but ice slabs covering land masses well down from the polar circle in the northern hemisphere).
Then they showed me this:
This is a reading of ice-core studies, which are only deemed accurate for 450 ky. This chart happens to be from Vostok, the Russian center on Antarctica. The one I was shown back in the day was Greenland ice, but the story was essentially the same.
Those pink-topped peaks are interglacial periods. That is our Holocene on the far right. You will see that it is cooler than prior interglacials, which has nothing to do with industrial COO but instead models, in addition to the ice melt chilling ocean currents typical of each interglacial’s onset, to a bolide strike that caused the Younger Dryas cooling for a millennium.
A few million Paleolithic members of our species peopled the Earth at the onset of our Holocene epoch, which was estimated to be near the carrying capacity of the planet during glacial conditions. Old stone-age man thrived on a high-protein diet as the cold-adapted fauna were slow and easily hunted while there was year-round refrigeration. Tribes were even able to put away food stores and firewood to survive in caves during frigid winter months. Mesolithic man, through the Younger Dryas, was on the brink of extinction, surviving only on fairly sessile foods—roots, mushrooms, turtles and such.
As the warm returned and grasslands replaced the tundra, Neolithic man was daunted by the fact that his more advanced atlatls and bows were still no match for the fleet species occupying the Steppes. We were reduced to eating grass, the seeds anyway, and to domesticating certain grassland species. Our genes had to undergo change before we could well-digest the grains and milk, but the eventual result was civilization.
As our Holocene draws to an end, we have as many billion people as we had million people at the start. As the paleo-climatologists I spoke with pointed out, when we return to glacial conditions any old time now, whether in two more decades or two more millennia, a new glacial period will dramatically cut growing seasons and lock up carbon dioxide in the ice and chilly waters, thereby returning us to a flora of conifers, lichens and other plant life edible only with four stomachs. The carrying capacity of our planet will return to some few million of us who will have no reason to cling sentimentally to the notion of civilization.
The only ray of light I see is that if we go back to Miocene conditions, the epoch before the Oligocene ice age which was the dreaded 5 °C warmer than now, it was a worldwide Mediterranean climate. How is that?
With two frozen poles, as now, heat gets trapped into tropical latitudes creating tropical hot spots. Our jet streams, north and south, then rocket around the planet redistributing tropical heat and polar chill willy-nilly. Get rid of the tropical heat and polar cold, and the jet stream simply redistributes balmy weather.
We could simply end all the restrictions on carbon output, except that all the hot air is coming from Al Gore and company, not carbon. Still, we could take all the funds wasted on creating a climate scare and plow it into finding a reasonable model for melting the poles and getting us out of an ice age, our future as a species will be a lot brighter.
Evolution Didn’t Start with Darwin…
I don’t think it matters, they actually copied each other and Darwin came out ahead stealing the star. In fact, the idea is not new.
The idea of the origin of life (through spontaneous factors) and the idea of the evolution of species come from pagan philosophy.
Anaximander (610-546 BC) believed that animals arose from the sea due to solar heat; that at first they were covered with a bark of thorns which they afterwards lost.
According to Empedocles (483-423 BC) life was born from heated mud from which segments of living beings, isolated, eyes without heads, etc. emerged.
Democritus (460-370 BC) believed that man was born like a worm, from mud.
Aristotle (384-322 BC) considered that it spontaneously passed from the non-living to the living through some intermediate elements. He also believed that plants were intermediate links between inanimate objects and animals.
Theophrastus of Eresos (370-287 BC) believed that plants can metamorphose spontaneously.
Lucretius (98-55 BC) stated that specifics appeared through the accidental combination of some elements.
Geber (720-813) by his Arabic name Abu Musa Djaber ibn Hayyan, a follower of the philosophy of Empedocles, had an evolutionary view extended to all matter. Based on external similarities, he believed that copper could be turned into gold through chemical reactions.
Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) was convinced that plants can change from one species to another under the influence of soil, nutrition or grafting. He believed that barley could turn into wheat and oak into vines.
Pierre Charron (1541-1603), French writer and moralist, affirmed the kinship of man with animals and tried to separate morality from religion.
Georges Louis Leclerc comte de Buffon (1707-1788), French naturalist and writer, believes that tapeworms, caterpillars, cockroaches and lice can be born from rot.
Julien de la Mettrie (1709-1751), materialist philosopher and French physician, accepts the progressive improvement of species and considers that man is a machine whose activity does not require a soul.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784), French materialist philosopher and writer, one of the most famous Enlightenmentists and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia, believed that life arises spontaneously through random chemical combinations.
Jean-Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamark (1744-1829), French naturalist, believed that life arose spontaneously and then evolved from simple to complex.
Pierre Jean Cabanis (1757-1808), French materialist philosopher, writer and physician, believes that matter in motion produces life forms.
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Charles Darwin’s grandfather, also thought that life arose spontaneously. He also believed that life evolved due to their desires and efforts of will.
In that era, the idea circulated that animals with teeth arose from those without teeth, from their desire to chew food.
In this context, the thinking of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), I consider the father of evolutionism, took shape. He believed that man descended from a hairy mammal with a tail and pointed ears that lived in trees. Darwin took the evolutionary philosophical ideas and gave them a scientific exterior.
color code
(ADHOM): Ad hominem attack. A personal attack on a questioner. Usually used when an evolutionaut is defending his position, and he is asked a question he can’t answer.
(MOD ANAT/GEN):
(DEMEAN Q or Q ): Trying to make the question look silly, or demeaning the questioner.
(READ PPRS): Because he doesn’t have the answer, refer the questioner to a plethora of books/papers that don’t have the answer either.
(EVO ANS/DOESN’T MATCH QUE.):
(ACTUAL ANS ): Actual answers TO THE QUESTIONS POSED will be in black bold letters. I doubt we will see any of these, so I want it to be easily found if there is.
[ME] A comment by me
Evolution: An Objective Look 