Winter is coming, and other stuff

I rarely publish graphs. It’s been my experience that people for the most part do not know how to interpret them. It must be some specialized teaching that comes about in post-graduate studies. Graphic interpretation should be taught in grade school forward, but is not. Here’s one to ponder, however:

That is a rough cut, I realize, as I cut the page out of a book and scanned it. But here is the important content. The graph is a representation of Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperatures for the last 10,000 years, which we call the “Holocene Interglacial period.” Climate alarmists, steeped as they are in lies and propaganda, have changed the Holocene from an “interglacial period” to an “epoch,” in other words saying that humans have interrupted the normal cycle of events, and that the Holocene, due to warming, will continue on now, in perpetuity. That is scientific trash.

The Greenland Ice Core Project (GISP) is a remarkable bit of real science in its ability to chart NH temperatures back thousands of years. The Antarctic ice cores go back hundreds of thousands of years. The genius behind them is this: Contained in the ice cores pulled from the depths of the ice sheets are gases, among them oxygen. An “isotope” is a common molecule, but one that differs in the number of nuclides in the same element. With oxygen, two isotopes are used in interpretation of the ice sheets, 16 and 18 nuclides. Each isotope represents the air close to the land mass at the time the ice was laid down. 16 is cooler, 18 is warmer, and by means of comparison over thousands of years, (real) scientists are able to plot the temperatures in place during that time.

I wonder if the GISPs were available when Michael Mann developed his fanciful Hockey Stick? Mann used tree rings (and trickery and deceit) to construct that graph, Tree rings are far less reliable than ice cores in interpreting the past.

I inserted the red arrow. What the graph tells us is that over the past 4,000 years, each succeeding 1,000 year period has been cooler than the preceding one. In other words, the NH is cooling. Someday in the very distant future, the Holocene interglacial period will end, the ice sheets will return, arable land will disappear, and we will return to the Pleistocene Ice Age, which we never left. (Having ice sheets on both poles of the Earth is the definition of an Ice Age.)

That graph was supplied by John Kehr from his book The Inconvenient Skeptic. I’ve searched for Kehr on the web with no luck, so I do not know his cv. It is as if he dropped this morsel on us, and then retired from view. Who can blame him, as he would only be attacked by the hive if he kept a public profile and became a “denier.”

I am going to cite Kehr below, something I find fascinating. The Holocene Interglacial period came in like a lion, like maybe ~10,000+ years ago. The NH heated up precipitously, and ice sheets and glaciers melted en masse. Ocean levels rose in the area of 400 feet, wiping out any coastal cities and settlements. Then, about 4,000 years ago, cooling returned, and the glaciers returned. What we see in NH glaciers is a modern phenomenon.

There is an even more important lesson being told by glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere though. That story is even more important to understand. Most glaciers in the NH have only formed in the last 4000 years. While these new glaciers are often used as evidence of global warming, that these glaciers have formed in the past few thousand years is actually evidence that the Earth and the NH specifically are cooler now than they were in the past few thousand years.

If most people are asked about how long glaciers have been around, they believe that they are remnants of the last Ice Age. Very few people understand that this is not the case. It is not something that is given much attention, but the fact is that when the last glacial period ended and the Holocene began, very little ice outside of Antarctica and Greenland survived the warmer periods of the early Holocene. Most of the glaciers adopt the NH today are new glaciers that have formed since the insolation anomaly went  away ~3000 years ago.

The glacier that is only a few hundred feet thick represents normal variability of the Earth’s temperature in the modern period. It is no exception. Some of these new glaciers are already hundreds of meters thick. That is the real story of the current state of the Earth. The NH has been growing glaciers for thousands of years now. That only happens when the warmth of an interglacial is starting to fade. (Page 116)

The glaciers tells the story of Earth’s climate. Part of that story is that the last 1000 years have been the coldest 1000 year period of the last 10,000 years.

Then I am told that warming is the greatest threat facing the Earth today because in the past 150 years the average temperature of the Earth is varied by the amount that is perfectly normal. There is no evidence in the climate data that anything unexpected is happening. The only thing that is evident from the data is that the Holocene Interglacial is starting to fade. Glaciers exist now that did not exist 1000 years ago. (Page 122)

In other words, winter is coming.

Climate science is complicated business. The idea that carbon dioxide, a miniscule gas that comprises .04% of the atmosphere (.0004) is a control knob is nothing short of a convenient lie used to hide a more sinister agenda. CO2 responds to ocean temperatures. As the oceans warm, its presence in the atmosphere rises, as they cool, the levels retreat. Climate responds to insolation, Milankovitch Cycles, precession, obliquity and eccentricity. There ain’t a modern climate scientist around who grasps that nasty business. It’s all CO2 all the time with them.

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The above cartoon appeared on Reddit, a website I sometimes go to out of sheer boredom. That site has done more in-depth analysis of Star-Trek than any other, so much so that I suspect its readers, who come off as young, must be in their seventies. The comments that follow are interesting, as most do not grasp that they must work to form a world view based on their own mind and ideas, and not some authority figure. For instance:

HoddyToddyPotty: They think that belief in scientific consensus is an argument from authority but will believe everything that their favorite podcast says. Ironic.

That’s the view from the stack of turtles beneath, that if one is thinking at all, one would go along with a “scientific consensus” rather than being cast adrift and forced to listen to a podcast and analyze its content without benefit of some authority figure. If it’s a podcast, it is not credible. If it is a man or woman heavily coiffured and wearing expensive clothing, they are speaking truth.

“Staebs” posted the following:

You’re not going to change the mind of people like this, full stop.

You can’t expect someone who has the cognitive dissonance to reject countless peer reviewed studies in favour of a crackpot selling herbal supplements to actually be swayed by your argument that science is too complex for them to understand to any large extent.

Their worldview centres around a fundamental distrust in authority, ironically this makes them put their trust in precisely the wrong people because these people know exactly how to appeal to the anti-authority sentiment.

You’d need to convince them that

1. They aren’t as smart as they think they are – very hard.

2. Highly educated people can actually be trusted – very hard.

3. Gurus they like are untrustworthy and are taking advantage of them because they are stupid- impossible.

4. They don’t actually understand or appreciate the scientific method, and they fundamentally don’t really think about science in the right way – impossible.

So yeah, don’t even try.

OK, that sounds reasonable, but if I take it to heart, it is merely saying “Stay in your lane, don’t even try using your own brain.” I am reminded of a quote by the Buddha, speaking of appeals to authority, who said something like “Don’t believe anything anyone says, not even me, unless it accords with your own thoughts.” Rough quote.

I could not resist answering this comment, even as none will see it in a three-months old thread:

ForwardVanilla9356: Remember Galileo? He was just an early victim of peer review.

That is not original with me. Someone beat me to it, and I would credit the source had I written it down. Am I “ForwardVanilla9356?” No! I have no idea how I came about that moniker.