By Jo Nova
Perhaps Africa could use some global warming?
Thanks and credit to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone:
New Study Finds The Early-Mid Holocene Sahara Had Lakes With Depths Of ‘At Least 300 Meters’
During the hottest part of the Holocene, for thousands of years, there were deep lakes filled with water in the middle of the Sahara Desert. From 9,500 years ago to 6,000 years ago the monsoons rained on the Sahara, freshwater plankton frolicked in the lakes, and greenery grew far and wide. The wetter conditions made it possible for “widespread human occupation and the development of agriculture across North Africa”. Amazingly, that last quote comes from Kuper and Kropelin fully seventeen years ago. Strangely the UN experts don’t mention very often that in the warmer world not that long ago, the hyperarid Sahara desert was rich, green and filled with water? We wouldn’t want people to start wondering if climate change might mean Chad and Libya could be nicer places for Africans to live? Instead we’re told that global warming will turn into our whole world into the Saharan desert, only to find out that in a warmer world even the Sahara didn’t turn into the Saharan Desert.
There once was a lake here…
Era Kohor, northern Chad.
The new study by Yacoub et al shows how the water came and went in more detail, in the Tibesti Volcanic Massif (TVM) of northern Chad, but they cite twenty years of other studies that show a lost rich Saharan wilderness. The period is quietly known in academic circles as the African Humid Period (AHP).
So yet again we find that the climate on Earth has always changed, that lakes, forests, and rainfall came and went without any input from coal fired plants or SUV’s and that solar panels probably would not have saved the once great green Sahara from turning into a hyperarid desert. We claim to have expert climate models, but we don’t really know why these big shifts happen, or how fast they occurred or what caused them — they are vaguely “linked” to the changes in sunshine that happen due to our orbit.
But if we are still debating whether it ended quickly or gradually, then obviously we haven’t got a good grip on the driving forces.
….
7,020 years ago freshwater plankton lived and died leaving behind their silica skeltons.
Diatoms. Photographed by a Scanning Electron Microscope
Things started to dry out about 5,500 years ago.
The introduction to Yacoub et al is eye-opening. It is a literature review of scores of papers showing just how wet and green the Sahara was, and then wasn’t — in the blink of a geologic eye. There is still debate about how fast the green era disappeared.
An extensive array of palaeoclimatic records (Shanahan et al., 2015; Holmes and Hoelzmann, 2017) and archaeological investigations (Cremaschi et al., 2014; Manning and Timpson, 2014) have shown that during this humid period, large parts of the present-day hyperarid Sahara and the semi-arid Sahel regions were much wetter and “greener” than today, and thus characterized by grasslands with tropical trees (Hély and Lézine, 2014), hosting numerous lakes (Hoelzmann et al., 2004; Drake et al., 2011) and incised by vast fluvial networks (Skonieczny et al., 2015). This early-to-mid Holocene period of greening of the Sahara, named the Green Sahara period (Claussen et al., 2017), was linked to the low precession in Earth’s orbit associated with high boreal summer insolation that induced the northward extension of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and the intensification of the associated African monsoonal rainfall belt (Kutzbach and Liu, 1997; deMenocal, 2015; Dallmeyer et al., 2020). These wetter conditions enabled widespread human occupation and the development of agriculture across North Africa (Kuper and Kröpelin, 2006; Manning and Timpson, 2014). After the mid-Holocene, the southward retreat of the monsoonal rainfall belt led to drier conditions that provoked the desiccation of most lakes (Gasse, 2000) and critical demographic shifts (Manning and Timpson, 2014), sealing the end of the AHHP. Throughout the African continent, the timing and magnitude of the termination of the AHHP were probably variable in space and time (Shanahan et al., 2015) and there is a long-standing and on-going debate about whether the end of the AHHP and the subsequent drying of the Sahara was abrupt or gradual (deMenocal et al., 2000; Holmes, 2008; Kröpelin et al., 2008; Bard, 2013; Collins et al., 2017; Ménot et al., 2020; Chase et al., 2022).
REFERENCES
Yacoub et al., (2023), The African Holocene Humid Period in the Tibesti mountains (central Sahara, Chad): Climate reconstruction inferred from fossil diatoms and their oxygen isotope composition
Kuper and Kropelin, (2006): Climate-controlled holocene occupation in the Sahara: motor of africa’s evolution. Science 313, 803e807. https://doi.org/10.1126/ science.1130989
No one cares any more, no one wants to know. While the facts in the article give a clever person pause to think, there aren’t too many clever people out there. Mostly drones who will vote for more “free” stuff.
693
Tragically, I think you’re right Tim.
The vast majority of the population is now far too dunbed-down to understand or care. They only want “free stuff”, whether it be taken from their fellow citizens in the form of excessive taxes, or taken by looters as in France now or America a couple of years ago.
The dumbing down of the education system that caused this was quite deliberate, of course. It started with the nefarious plan of German communist Rudi Dutschke and his 1967 plan of “the long march through the institutions”.
452
Far too pessimistic. Far too much hand-wringing. I still see 2-3 cars in every Aussie garage; the airports and cruise terminals packed, which…according to the defeatist hand-wringers should NOT be happening. They are dumbed-down and hate fossil-fuels…DON’T THEY?
Facts are that the same “we-is-all-rooned” guff was being written about the “dumbed-down masses” during the Covid farce…despite the million or so Aussies in the nation-wide protests against govt over-reach: despite the hysterical bullying, berating etc by Govt SHOWING us that Govt knew there was mass NON-compliance: despite the various actors (McGown, Gunner, Gutwein, Young, Sutton, Chant, etc) fleeing as their bases collapse.
Instead of insulting the “masses”, why not support them by helping the few who believe govt propaganda to differentiate between the lies of the elites, and reality?
BTW: An Indian airline has just ordered 500 Airbus Jets, this after already “Boeing, Airbus to sell up to 1,000 airliners to Indian carriers” WashPo June 20 2023
These are the biggest deals in history, and here you are NOT getting what Govt BS is? Here you are BELIEVING what they tell you about people being dumb? Why is this?
92
I understand where you are coming from Tim, but you’re wrong. The tradies and truckies can see through the propaganda, it’s the “clever” ones trained at uni who can’t.
Last year 60% in the US said Climate Change was more religion than science.
Never forget we are absolutely the majority, and most people are good people. Talk of “no one cares” is just what Big-Green wants skeptics to say. They hope we’ll give up and talk ourselves into serfdom.
Fight back instead. This Sahara story is another red-pill moment in the battle of hearts and minds. It’s another way to reveal the UN propaganda.
290
Yes, but the ‘free stuff’ isn’t really free.
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Correct. But the vast majority of the masses don’t understand that.
And the following quote is not in reference to you, Johnny.
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Yes. That ‘free’ stuff is paid for by someone who works and pays taxes.
60
The presumption of Global Warming is that the world turns into desert. But it was cooling which turned the lush areas of North Africa into desert. It’s simple. Warmer means more evaporation and more evaporation means more rain. What’s so hard about that?
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Many observations and reconstructions have been made of Lake Chad in the lower Sahel which indicated an extensive sub- equatorial system. I remember a National Geographic article in the early 1970’s attributing its decline to overextraction of water. This piece reinforces how quickly in time a sudden change can overwhelm a previous system. There is both catastrophism and gradualism in the Earths mix.
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Rock art in the Sahara depicts animals consistent with a wet climate, not desert as exists now.
The climate is always changing, something warmists don’t seem to be able to understand as they are staticists.
And there has never been a period in human history when natural warming such as the Minoan, Egyptian, Roman or Medieval warm periods, when civilisation hasn’t thrived.
If significant global warming was happening now, and there seems to be little unaltered evidence that it is (we are more likely cooling) it would only be a good thing.
Rock art in Sahara: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharan_rock_art?wprov=sfla1
290
In fact, if the above holds true it seems like that we are indeed headed for a “cooling”, not a “warming”. Because I fail to see that human “civilisation” is flourishing today.
30
The Romans were dependent on North Africa as the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Which is hard to understand from what we see today in North Africa.
Sahara in Arabic means desert, so it’s an oddity of language that people call the Sahara the Sahara Desert.
“The Arabic word ṣaḥrāʾ simply means “desert,” and its plural form, ṣaḥārāʾ, is where the northern African desert gets its Anglicized name.”
The bulk of India is dependent on the same phenomenon today from June to September when Western and Central India receive 90% of their rain. Southern and NorthWestern India receive 50-75% of their rain. Failure of the heat driven monsoons is a disaster.
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A colleague in South Africa who was raised in a Zulu village where his father worked for the SA Government that the Zulu tribes were recruited as mercenaries by the Roman Empire Army. The Zulu learnt the tactics and with flame hardened hide shields in formation they gave the British Army a few scares in later times.
71
Plausible, because the Kwa Zulu are a part of a LONG southwards migration from further north on the African continent.
They were preceded by the “Hottentots; completely different people from the Bantu / Zulu lot. The Hottentots, in turn, had driven the !Kung “Bushmen” almost to extinction, everywhere except the South-Western Desert region. There may have been “other” tribal groups, lost to time, in this shuffle, In the early 19th Century, the “locals” recounted tales of wide-ranging famine and slaughter that left the land littered with human bones for generations; LONG before the Portuguese, popped in for a look around. The BIG difference between the Bantu / Zulu and their predecessors, was that the former were cattle herders. Originally, they were purely nomadic, but on the endless grasslands in the south, they spread and settled. They also brought with them iron-working skills and the rudiments of an organized military system.
The Southern Cape was very lightly populated when they and, in turn, the Dutch started to set up shop. The Zulus were still moving south when they encountered the Dutch “Boers” ( lit. “farmers”) moving North, into the Transvaal and Natal.
Ring any bells about the much “pooh-poohed” wave theory of Australian pre-colonial (British edition), “migration”? Tell me about the the Mungo people, the very different “Tasmanians” and the “Little People” of North Queensland.
50
It is amazing to me that talk of 1.5C in an ‘average’ is considered a disaster, when it is of no consequence anywhere to anyone. For example the 1.5C since 1750. When the temperature scale was being invented the two constants of our world were the freezing point of water and the boiling point of water. But until chemistry, it was of so little consequence that Sir Isaac Newton suggested 100 should be water so hot you could not keep your elbow in it.
What forced the refinement of thermometer technology was chemistry and specifically beer fermentation as it is temperature critical. Human health too is strangely critical as even a degree either side of 37.0 is a real problem. Both relate to biochemical processes. But the larger planet cares zero for our needs as in Colorado the temperature varies from -40C to +40C every year. And people recommend living in Colorado.
410
Given that the earths average temperature is 14.2C -a fact not known by many, beggars the question how cold or warm should it be, I wonder then why so many Victorians are migrating north. Political refugees notwithstanding.
150
GlenM. Having been gene-jabbed and terrorised for years on end…most Victorians can no longer think clearly. This means they somehow BELIEVE warm to hot Qld is a better climate than cool to freezing Victoria, despite Dirty Dan persistently telling them otherwise.
See? So “dumb” they believe their lying senses over Andrews’ straight-out lies. Tsk Tsk. Used to be “four legs good: two legs bad”…is now “four legs good: two legs better” Been that way down there for 39 years now!
40
As Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the founders of the peace and environmental movement Greenpeace before it was captured by communist, lawyers and money men wrote that naked humans would die of hypothermia at 20C. So we know our hairless ape species evolved in much warmer latitudes.
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The system of zero Celsius to 100 Celsius is arbitrary. I much prefer to acknowledge Absolute Zero (-273). Thus the idea of limiting Gerbil Warming to +1.5 deg C ( a 10% increase in the earthling system) reduces to just a 1% increase in the AZ system. And we are wasting our civilisation for a 1 percenter? Defies all logic.
70
The serious matter for all life on earth though is the availability of the two molecules for photosynthesis. CO2 and H2O. Both live 98% in the oceans and with a catalyst capture sunlight as hydrated carbon dioxide which we call carbohydrate.
The current world is historically very low in CO2 after the last ice age only 11,000 years ago not really hot enough to get enough of either. And without evaporation and the major greenhouse gas H2O, the planet can turn into an iceblock. CO2 cannot keep the planet warm. Cold oceans means no H2O evaporation which means no blanket. It also means less CO2 but that is tiny anyway, 1% to 0.2% of the effect.
Until recently CO2 was at an historic low at 280ppm, not far above the point at which all life ceases. Luckily the solar and ocean cycles have produced ocean warming which is releasing more CO2. And it’s no one’s fault.
But the Biden White House is today looking at plans to block the sun in space and lower temperatures! Which shows how the UN claims that they should control the world’s climates could lead to the greatest disaster in human history. But then you get people who say there are too many people on the planet, other than themselves. We call these people communists.
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It is becoming popular to also blame ocean warming on the increase in CO2. But no one has explained how ocean warming could be caused by CO2? NASA claimed that the oceans ‘stole’ the warming, without explaining how that was possible. This is what you get when paid promoters write climate propaganda.
In fact not only 98% of the CO2 and H2O are in the oceans, 99.9% of all surface heat is also in the very deep oceans. The air can go from boiling to freezing in a single day in the desert but water vapour moderates that. And water vapour for most of the world is 1% of the atmosphere and up to 4% in the tropics, a vastly more effective and also invisible greenhouse gas which utterly dominates tiny CO2.
And oceans control all climates not only by supplying all the H2O and CO2, but by moderating all land temperatures near the water. Except on gigantic Antarctica which is a frozen ocean the size of South America on land like all oceans and as tall as the ocean is deep. And by virtue of that, largely above 3200 metres or 10,000 feet and so freezing and not likely to melt any time at that altitude. Six months of night also has an effect with average winter temperatures of -50C.
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And when the monsoons failed and the lush North African area became the Sahara, people retreated into the deep Nile valley, which in turn created one of the world’s first civilizations. Even today it is amazing to see this entirely linear country stretched along a single wide river just 35 metres below the rim of the absolute desert. A country in a canyon.
Above on the desert is zero humidity and incredible temperatures and below a steamy valley until you get the wet delta. There is perhaps no land which so demonstrates the critical connection between water and life over such a short distance.
There is one road in Egypt, one train line, one river. And few trucks as Egypt runs on subsistence agriculture along the river banks. Lush life in the valley and death above. I can see the origins of Phillip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series. “On the Riverworld, every human who ever lived and died is resurrected on the banks of a seemingly endless river ”
Which is why the ancient Egyptians buried their dead on the high plateau in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens where you have to drink water all the time or die. However the dead do not rot. Nothing rots as there is zero humidity. Which is why there was so much wood and plants in tombs thousands of years old.
So in this water world of Earth we are told that we humans control CO2. These people are not real scientists but politicians and opportunists, wanting to tax the air you breathe. And it has worked incredibly well. Even people who should know better believe the incessant bleating about Global Warming when their own experience tells them it’s not true. And full time climate alarmist Greta Thunberg visits Ukraine to assure them that she has their backs. It’s high farce and politics and cash and lies, not science.
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Greta is an expert. She knows. She has an honorary doctorate from the Theology Faculty of the University of Helsinki.
200
If Greta ever gets married, they will not need an encyclopedia set in the home, as Greta knows everything.
120
I know a man planning to marry Miss Wright. He may have realised her first name is Always.
60
If she did marry she would not consider having a child would she, the tipping point is not far away, well the next one as 2023 was a bad prediction.
sarc
20
I wonder now that Greta is grown up whether she really believes in the imminent end of the planet. And what good news should would bring to Ukraine to be making a state visit? Is she urging them to use Green non CO2 shells for killing Russians? Or organic fuel flame throwers? Or face Climate extinction?
What really can an environmental activist say to a country at war? Be careful of the planet? Like Greta herself, the visit is nuts.
100
Surely a big possibility is that this current cycle of warming ocean temperatures is caused by underwater volcanic activity? What is causing that is anyone’s guess.
20
‘We call these people communists.’ Or eugenicists, with one William Henry Gates the third as self-proclaimed high priest. Very low grade human being.
100
Actually I think he is a good man, but utterly misled. His silent partner Paul Allen was a physicist with a SAT score of 1600, the highest possible. He came up with the name Microsoft and persuaded Bill to drop out. Sadly he is gone. But clearly Bill believes what his friends tell him and as the one time world’s richest man, he has many friends. When Bill came to Australia, he was met by John Howard. When Paul came to Australia, no one noticed.
90
Perhaps you can be misled initially, but once the facts are known to you, your mind can be changed. Gates well knows the facts – he is in the ‘information’ business, after all. Remember the ‘information superhighway’ we are all supposed to be on? There is no excuse now.
70
This conversation would not exist without Bill Gates. His Microsoft and Steve Job’s Apple changed the world forever and did so much good. But Bill was a bit head, a first class nerd, a sharp businessman and now likely single. Trying to save the world is a wonderful retirement idea but there is so much money being tossed around and he is listening to all the wrong people. And it’s all virus climate equity cash.
For example making friends with Jeffrey Epstein was a big mistake, likely not his first or last like both the Clintons and Prince Andrew. Epstein made many friends and all regret it now. Many billionaires had good reason to want Jeffrey Epstein to vanish. You see when you are a trillionaire, everyone is your friend.
40
Yes, lay down with dogs, get up with fleas. We agree to disagree on the rest.
20
“But then you get people who say there are too many people on the planet, other than themselves. We call these people communists.”
I fully intend departing the planet in another 30 years so as to make room for another human.
10
Water erosion on the Sphinx, as Robert M. Schoch analysed
Following the direction the Sphinx is looking to then one can ralise that it’s looking to the place where the Lion constellation was rising even some thousand years earlier.
150
The Biden White House will fix it though. Bill Gates was pushing the same barrow a few years ago. We could do without these non science nut jobs trying to leave their mark on the planet. Wasn’t the Wuhan Flu enough?
200
Another example of The Simpsons correctly predicting the future, while intending it to be satire. Though he is not 102 years old like Mr Burns, Biden isn’t that far off.
100
Yes, the great ecologist Mr Burns. See my vest! Springfield’s David Attenborough.
70
This is extremely dangerous. I’ve long thought the worst outcome could be that nutters undertake engineering of the atmosphere. I believe it is impossible to kill the planet via man’s actions – as is the core of environmentalism – but that is the one exception.
20
In terms of evaporation, the release of a gas like water or CO2 into the air, there is still the escape from solution at the air/water boundary. This is determined by Henry’s Law. Warmer water releases more gas as more molecules reach escape velocity. The major output is water itself which cooled falls as rain and without which all land would be desert.
CO2 at greater depths though under vast pressures largely exists as a liquid and the proponents of man made Global Warming like to argue that this liquid CO2 does not interact with the atmospheric CO2 at all, so they can explain how the tiny amount of man released CO2 can possibly build up in the atmosphere. In fact the evidence is that all CO2 interacts with the atmosphere and the carbon age of CO2 at the bottom is only 350 years. Given that it means this CO2 had to be in the atmosphere 350 years ago and only 2% of CO2 is in the air, all CO2 rotates through the atmosphere every 350/50 or 7 years.
At these immense volumes our tiny human output from burning old leaves is of no consequence. Highly soluble, 30x more than oxygen, this CO2 is all quickly swept into the ocean.
What is missing from the voices of Al Gore, Tim Flannery, Joe Biden and the rest is the complete lack of science in the proponents of human made warming and sea level rise and even the idea that any warming is a bad thing. But then we are supposed to believe there are lots of sexes, when there are only two. We are being given fantasies, not science.
300
Frankly I think ecology should have stayed in the Arts department with botany, biology and zoology. While valuable, there is little science in any of it, more emotion than logic. You had to change your thinking. But combined with chemistry as in Biochemistry, microbiology or even my favorite Biophysics, it is real science. Ocean acidification is just ridiculous. A lie in fact. No oceans are acid.
The idea that ancient wombat person Tim Flannery was a qualified scientist let alone this new species of ‘climate scientist’ makes fun of actual science based meteorologists who are largely ignored by climate scientists. Not one of ex PM Gillard’s salaried “Climate Commissioners” on her “Climate Commission” was a meteorologist! None seemed at all bothered that they were paid as experts in a field where they had zero qualifications. So why did she do it? Why did they do it? And why is the almighty UN still pushing this barrow on their ‘highway to climate hell’? Shouldn’t they be worrying about Ukraine not windmills?
310
Frankly, I learned more about “ecology” in my primary school days than today’s faux environmentalists and later when going through the hard grind of a Metallurgy Degree was given the skills to analyse the CO2 is evil concept in full.
After joining this blog I found a similarly qualified, old workmate, “Harbs” was already posting here.
Our hard won understanding of “modelling” in it’s true quantitative and thermodynamic aspects showed us the unpleasant truth of the Global Warming hoax.
Climate Change degrees are a modern scientific cover for a new brand of political activism.
300
TdeF, our Triple-C, ie. Climate Commission Czar, is the ex-head of the NZ Reserve Bank, so you know it’s about the money and not meteorology. He’s also ‘legally’ blind. And his name? Rod Carr.
Stop the bus – I want to get off!
50
Ref to John Harbs re carbon capture and storage.
https://joannenova.com.au/2013/10/22-billion-wasted-on-carbon-capture-which-increases-cost-of-electricity-by-70/#comment-1328495
Thanks Cohenite who I met at John’s funeral.
30
TdeF,
Psychrometrics is an engineering (chemical engineering- my study area) subject – from Wiki “Psychrometrics is the field of engineering concerned with the physical and thermodynamic properties of gas-vapor mixtures. Wikipedia”
psychrometry defined
“The art of measuring the moisture content of air is called psychrometry. The science which investigates the thermal properties of moist air, considers the measurement and control of the moisture content of air, and studies the effects of moisture on material and human comfort, may be called psychrometrics.”
There are some good meteorologists but none understand the thermodynamics and heat transfer (engineering subjects) which are necessary theory behind the formation of clouds, or the movements of clouds through winds or jet streams which involves another engineering subject -fluid dynamics.
Professional Chemical engineers such as the late Prof Dr(Eng) Noor van Andel are the only ones who can properly assess climate and weather.
Climate Scientists are the modern alchemists -dreamers of the way to earn money.
140
They tell us we have to stop burning petroleum because it releases the minor warming gas CO2.
They want to change to burning hydrogen, which releases water vapor, the major green house gas.
They wanted us to change from petrol to diesel to fuel our cars. It was better for the environment they said, until it wasn’t.
Now they want us to change from petrol to hydrogen, better for the environment they say, except it isn’t.
Of course we know the environment has nothing to do with their plans.
120
Yes, Hasbeen, unintended consequences again. And another UC.
Back in 1970, when car emissions were polluting the atmosphere (causing cooling), they made a decision to fit all cars with a catalytic converter to change the carbon monoxide to – CO2. What a great idea.
10
Gee thats funny! It’s about the same time that glaciers and ice disappeared frome the PNG highlands.
150
There was a lot going on
‘We found that ENSO variance was close to the modern level in the early Holocene and severely damped ~4000 to 5000 years ago. In addition, ENSO variability was skewed toward cold events along coastal Peru 6700 to 7500 years ago owing to a shift of warm anomalies toward the Central Pacific.’
https://www.science.org › doi › science.1252220
10
Modoki El Nino conditions where ‘SST warming is largely in the central equatorial Pacific region instead of in the eastern equatorial Pacific region.’
10
Puncak Jaya / Carstensz Pyramid on the Indonesian side of New Guinea has “snow showers” falling all week… according to mountainwatch’s forecast.
30
I’ve found that very few Environmentalists are versed in natural history. They have no idea that Greenland was full of vegetation (hence the name) just 1000 years ago before glaciers reclaimed the land, or that North Africa was a verdant breadbasket as recently 6000 years ago, or that Great Britain was connected to European continent just 8000 years ago, or that Great Lakes were filled just 12,000 years ago as glaciers receded. They seem to believe the earth has been static for the entire course of human existence, up until the dawn of Industrial Revolution, at which point evil man-made technology caused catastrophic changes never seen before.
210
And even Melbourne’s Port Phillip bay was a swampy, grassy hunting ground for the locals perhaps as recently as 1000 years ago.
50
12000 years ago at the nadir of the last period of glaciation, the sea level was 130m lower than today and there was 3000m of ice over North America/Europe and Antarctic sea ice likely extended to the Cape of Good Hope and Tasmania. The Great Barrier Reef did not exist or was a dead limestone range of hills along the edge of cold dry coastal plains. The Pacific Islands were 130 m higher above sea level than today. Then because of natural events there was a dramatic period of climate change. The glaciers melted and there was a rapid influx of fresh melt water into the oceans, sea levels rose at about 60mm/a over 2000 years, roughly sixty times the current rate of 0.9-1.0 mm/annum! Coral reefs regenerated, and grew in sync with the sea level rise.
The planet has been enjoying the Holocene inter-glacial through which there have been at least five periods warmer than or as warm as the 20th Century warm period. Human civilization has thrived. Even through these climate cycles, the warmest periods have seen the most advancement in society, the cooler periods were periods of drought and pestilence.
But hey! it is better to ignore all that evidence and blame the current mild warming on a trivial change in the partial pressure of CO2, the gas of life, for an 0.3% increase in average surface temperature of this dynamic planet over the last 180 years.
90
Hi Ross,
the last ice age max was twenty thousand years ago.
As you say, oceans were up to 130 lower then.
About 10,000 years ago the heat cycle that brought the big melt was topping out and so much had melted that oceans were up to 6 and at least 4.2 metres higher than the present.
The final phase of the adjustment of the overshoot was a drop of 1.2 metres over just the last two thousand years.
Ephesus, accessible during the time of Christ, is now a dry port.
Locally, off Newcastle I would suspect that the aboriginal people lived near the shore at that time, 19 km off the present coast and were slowly driven back over the last 20,000 years. Their former home is now under 120 metres of sea.
20
As also mentioned by Gary S, Port Phillip bay in Victoria was a grassy plain with the Yarra river flowing through the middle of it and where the present Port Phillip heads are would have been a waterfall. ( Point Lonsdale). Then, at some stage around or before there, Bass Strait was also a vast grass plain extending to the present shores of Tasmania. With aboriginal tribes wandering over it, back and forth.
30
I’ve just finished reading an amazing one page summary of Earth’s history in the Spectator.
Ian Plimer covers four and a half billion years in describing the interaction of the solid earth, the atmosphere above and the oceans in between.
The inhospitable atmosphere changed to eventually respond to developing life in the oceans, oxygen and carbon dioxide were mentioned in this macro view of things.
The obvious point is that human activity is miniscule in the quantification of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Really great.
370
He is such a lucid knowledgeable scientist with a geologist’s long term view. Yes, humans are irrelevant. No one moved the continents.
But I have failed to get him to appreciate that radio carbon dating which measures the age of carbon dioxide molecules can be used to date carbon dioxide in the air. And that shows man made CO2 is only 3%, not 33%. So whether increased CO2 has any effect let alone a significant effect, it is not man made. That should be the end of it.
Like so many scientists, he wants to defeat the arguments by pointing out the facts of CO2 across vast ages. After all geology is about mining and oil, coal and gas is about geology. The idea that the carboniferous period was one of zero life is clearly a contradiction. It was when all this free solar energy was stored and the jungles must have been incredible for what is still left. And life was booming even before airconditioners and the UN.
160
Measurements of temperature during the day are wrong in terms of CO2 as you are measuring sun strength. And it’s unbelievably hot and dry in the Sahara. Australia has 1% humidity almost everywhere, even our deserts. You can see the frost in the morning.
So if a few ppm of CO2 produced a significant change in the loss of radiation from land at night, you would see this effect most strikingly in the Sahara at night with zero humidity. According to the essential theory, the night time temperatures should be significantly higher because the CO2 blanket was 50% thicker.
Why measure the whole world temperature, night and day, summer and winter?
So if CO2 driven Global Warming proponents were serious about measuring the effect of increased CO2, they would measure night temperatures in the Sahara over time. And certainly not some make believe temperature of the planet. If the effect is not clear in the Sahara, it doesn’t exist.
100
But I suppose it was never about real science. And now even the IPCC has dropped all predictions of disaster and admits that CO2 is not enough to produce warming, politicians around the world are talking up disaster. Especially Joe Biden. But then he needs a distraction from the many allegations of corruption swirling like a tornado. And ultimately to suck in the Obamas and the Clintons and Al Gore.
90
That’s exactly the point: they average the total 24 hour range of temperature; totally, scientifically ignorant of reality.
There are two different scenarios not acknowledged by the climate catastrophists:
1. Daytime.
2. Nighttime.
Bizarre that this ugliness has gone on for so long.
The “democratic” nation that we built and thought we lived in is No More.
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Because we reduce observations to 2 dimensions e.g. graphs, maps, charts, lists, tables etc., we forget that the earth is a revolving sphere with, at any point in time, half the sphere is warmed by the sun and the other half is not. Average temperatures in one observation point is meaningless. Average global temperature is impossible to measure unless you coordinate all observation points (say 10 km apart, land and sea) to be recorded at the same time interval. Then what medium do we measure: a column of air, a metre above the land or sea surface, or whatever?
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How does radio carbon dating differentiate between natural and man-made carbon dioxide. Thanks.
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“We are told by climate activists that a few parts per million increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from human activities will lead to unstoppable global warming and a climate crisis. The past shows this is false.”
– Ian Pilmer
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It just shows what an obscene lie this whole man-made climate change myth is.
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IMO it’s a mistake to be always looking inward and neglecting to consider we are a planet spinning through space at a great speed and essentially powered by variable radiation from our Sun. Scientists don’t understand the dynamics of our solar system and its huge timescales. Our coming and eventual going will pass unnoticed. Just enjoy your time here, you only get one, short, go !
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“So yet again we find that the climate on Earth has always changed, that lakes, forests, and rainfall came and went without any input from coal fired plants or SUV’s and that solar panels probably would not have saved the once great green Sahara from turning into a hyperarid desert.”
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Yes, that Climate Change that has always impacted Planet Earth and always will do. A Very Inconvenient Truth for the Climate Alarmists.
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The push is on for more windmills and solar panels and taxes on breathing. The IPCC no longer alleges man made Global Warming let alone arbitrary Climate Change. But the science is in and according to the climatebaggers, the science now cannot be changed. It is a cash cow. And I read this morning that there is now a Commonwealth Australian Energy and Climate Change department to add to the numerous ‘clean’ energy departments.
Really, Australia has a Department of Climate Change. Isn’t that amazing? Government controlled weather. The BOM may as well go home, Canberra is in charge of the weather.
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There was a thriving population in the Sahara during the inter glacial. People left as the Sahara dried out. Civilisations rise and fall on regional changes in climate. Radically changing climate inputs is not a good idea, it can lead to severe unintended consequences.
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No one is changing climate inputs Simon. We don’t have the technology.
“Terraforming” to change the climate is a science fiction fantasy concept, at least for any time soon on earth.
The term terraforming was invented by Jack Williamson and used in the science-fiction story “Collision Orbit” published in 1942.
Don’t let fantasy become reality.
I’m glad you acknowledge climate does naturally change. It always has. There are Milakovich cycles and variation in solar output and other powerful natural drivers that alter climate. Your fellow warmists don’t seem to understand this.
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Paleoclimate scientists understand this far better than you or I. You have conspicuously omitted the largest drivers of climate processes which is the concentration of greenhouse gases and aerosols in the atmosphere.
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Bunkum.
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More ephaaasis is appropriate.
Bunn Kumm
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Thats horsedropings.
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Don’t be too hard on it.
It’s just in training to become a politician.
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The major drivers are the sun which supplies all energy. And the oceans which are a huge solar heat bank 1400x the size of the atmosphere (320x the weight and 4x the heat capacity_. And the monsoons which created the Green Sahara were a result of one on the other. Nothing to do with Greenhouse gases. And El Nino/La Nina and a direct result of ocean heat oscillations. Then the other ocean oscillations.
However the third biggest gas in the atmosphere does control our surface temperature and stop it from turning into an ice planet. Water. And it does act as a blanket. And it is at a concentration of 1% to 4% around the planet.
Why would you expect tiny CO2 which is 1/25th to 1/100th of the volume and a fraction of the infra red absorption bandwidth would matter at all?
In fact no one thought it did. The original proposal was that it made enough of a difference that there was more water in the air through evaporation and the extra water made the difference. Except that would require a cloud of warm wet air over the equator and it’s not there.
So no one actually expects CO2 to make a difference to the world temperature let alone a significant and unwelcome difference. Not even the IPCC.
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Conundrums abound.
Many scientists believe that CO2 has a saturation point where little warming will appear when that happens. Then the ‘warmer weather’ will cause more evaporation which increases the water vapour and cause higher temps. The extra evaporation is supposed to develop a ‘hot spot’ over the tropics but it has failed to materialise.
Of course, more evaporation leads to more cloud and thus cooling – yet the ‘experts’ don’t seem to factor that in.
More interesting, tropical areas with greater water vapour levels actually have less propensity to higher temps than moderate climes. For instance, Darwin rarely gets above 40C – even Hobart’s top themp is higher than Darwin. Maybe someone can tell me why this is.
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Aerosols, does that take in water vapour, the major driver of climate.
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If you are genuinely interested in the topic, I recommend reading The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan.
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“Peter Frankopan”
How can just one man “Transform de Earff”.
Not on.
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Steven Poole did a review of the story.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/02/the-earth-transformed-by-peter-frankopan-review-history-through-a-different-lens
Essentially its correct, civilisations rise and fall depending on environmental conditions.
A good example is the collapse of the Indus Valley civilisation and the remarkable story of how the dingo came to Oz.
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We are still in the inter glacial period.
And what did those people in the Sahara do to change climate inputs?
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I agree Simon, which is why Biden’s plan to spread aerosols in the atmosphere is extremely dangerous
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The level of common sense and proven truths in the article and associated comments are astounding! Thanks, Jo and all contributors for the enlightenment! But here we are being controlled by a few illiterate incompetents who are more concerned with a border dispute between Russia and Ukraine while a self-induced quasi-war, that could change the face of Europe, has erupted in France. The WEF and its sycophantic off-shoots WHO and UN act as puppeteers for the great farce.
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So true! You cannot have a renegade country like Russia disobeying the New World Order. Keep the candle of truth and knowledge burning.
[Headed too far off topic. Please take the Russia-Ukraine talk to the unthreadeds. – Jo]
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So a period where a few million pre industrial humans did not have an effect on the climate is used to assert that multi billion, industrial humans in the here and now can not affect the climate. For those who are comfortable with using the internet- I suggest you look at the rate of change, between then and now
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No SUV, no human CO2, and it was warmer as it’s now. Seems finally to be time to start some deeper reflections, at least before typing. 😀
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Maybe so, but humans ate differently and took bigger dumps then.
They also cooked over inefficient natural material fires and when you add in the extra methane they’re pretty close to where we are now.
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There is nothing radical about the rate or intensity of change. Of course, if you believe that natural disasters like bushfires,floods,droughts and UFO sightings have become more “unprecedented”, then go ahead.
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UFO sightings have been increasing since humans began exploding nuclear weapons.
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The Mediterranean Sea is getting close to the maximum sustainable surface temperature for open water of 30C in August now.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2022/08/19/0000Z/ocean/primary/waves/overlay=sea_surface_temp/orthographic=-341.98,32.62,780/loc=16.471,33.715
It is already showing signs of establishing monsoon conditions – so called medicanes. It is a large enough in area to support convective instability. Powerful convective towers will form and draw atmospheric water in from the Atlantic. Once the Sahara starts to green again from the north, it will accelerate as the vegetation will retain moisture essential for cyclic convective instability.
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I have always thought people could change climates, with water. In Australia by flooding Lake Eyre, 9 metres below sea level from Spencer gulf. And there is always the possibility of taking the vast fresh water reserved of the Ord river South, although that is uphill. A path could be found and powered. ANd surely something could be done in Jordan/Israel with the Dead Sea at 400metre below sea level? The Red to Dead project however seems to be Dead.
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The climate is always changing and Australia is no different.
I was watching an ALF match in Alice Springs yeasrday. It was wet and apparently cold. In just 3 days of July 2023 the rainfall at Alice Springs has already exceeded the monthly average. The June 2023 rainfall was 19.6mm compared to 13mm mean. So there is more water in the interior now than recent years, particularly before 2020.
The long trends are that the Northern Hemisphere is getting more summer sunshine and less winter sunshine which is leading to warmer summers and wetter winters i.e. more snowfall. The sunlight in the Southern Hemisphere is doing the opposite. Peak summer sunlight is reducing while winter sunlight is increasing.
Peak January insolation at 30S was 504.16W/m^2 some 500 years ago. It is now declining but only 0.2W/m^2 below the peak. The minimum of 472.58W/m^2 is 9,700 years away. Hence summers will moderate over the coming centuries providing the land and biomass retain the moisture.
July insolation at 30S bottomed at 217.68W/m^2 1800 years ago. The July sunlight is already 1.5W/m^2 above the minimum. So winters should be moderating as well but the atmosphere a little more active The threshold for convective instability is surface temperature of 15C. Normally Alice Springs is above 15C but the persistent cloud has kept it under that for the last few days. Obviously this reduces evaporation so the water tends to hang about. AS soon as it warms up, there is enough moisture in the atmosphere to support convective instability that will pull moisture off the oceans. The threshold atmospheric moisture for instability is 30mm.
The conditions for central Australia’s climate appear to be positive without human intervention. Australia is greening probably due mainly to the extra CO2 but also moderation of the extremes promoting more surface moisture. It may eventually work out that Lake Eyre becomes a permanent water basin again without direct connection to ocean. There would be some risk bringing seawater in as it leads to more salt accumulation.
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There was a Resources minister in the 1970’s Whitlam Labor government ( can’t recall his name, but I bet someone here will) who proposed building a mountain range somewhere in outback Western Australia. The idea being that these man- made mountains would attract clouds etc to force precipitation onto arid country. At the time, everyone said it was a silly idea, the vast amount of fill required just too big. That was 50 odd years ago. Probably if they’d started then and continued, maybe now those man- made mountains would be getting quite large. Cost? If you think of all the money wasted on intermittent energy production in the last 50 years, the cost would probably be meaningless for that build. Which is a more ludicrous idea- man made mountains or unreliable intermittent electricity supply?
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I had the same idea, but without building a mountain range which is impossible. So much good humidity flies over Australia without stopping as we are so flat.
It’s much simpler and cheaper. You see the air does not hit the mountain range, it only hits other air going up. So you need an updraft.
Rutile, the black sand of the Pacific, titanium oxide. A black strip strip say 50km x 0.5km on the East side of say Lake Eyre in flood. Or just where there is desert but high humidity. And you get the same effect, a massive updraft just like a mountain range.
In somewhere the land is useless, partly because there is no rain.
Perhaps the border of SA and Victoria/NSW away from the Murray.
Maintenance. Very low. Worth trying.
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And a huge tourist drawcard for parasailers, gliders and more. Yes we could change the climate. Australia blooms with even the slightest rain. It is not a desert like Nevada which just gets wet.
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Just remembered his name (ok, I googled it). Rex O’Connor. His basic thinking was correct, just ahead of his time.
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Lang Hancock also proposed building it out of slag.
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Thanks again Jo for telling the truth about the WARMER climate in the Sahara in the earlier Holocene.
We should also mention that our Holocene is cooler than the previous 4 Interglacials over the last 400,000 years. See Vostok ice core studies from Antarctica.
Also the ice core studies also show that temperature is the driver and co2 follows with a lag of hundreds of years to thousands of years.
Also the previous Eemian Interglacial was much warmer and Hippos swam in the Thames and the Rhine during that period about 132 K to 115 K ago.
BTW here’s a list of many studies from Co2 Science linking many co2 and temperature studies that don’t agree with the co2 control knob narrative.
http://www.co2science.org/subject/c/co2climatehistory.php
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“So-called “climate change” has, for some considerable time, been in that realm where conversation is untenable. In this case, the competing premises are wrapped around truth. One side believes in telling it, wherever it leads; the other side believes its agenda is much more important than the truth. Failed alarmist predictions, one after another, are simply buried under more alarmist predictions. Polar bears will die off, children in the UK will not know what snow is, Australian dams will never fill again, the summer Arctic ice cap will disappear, there are just ten years or less to save the planet – twenty years ago, ten years ago, today, ten years hence, ad infinitum.”
As per Peter Smith of Quadrant Online
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On my farm in western queensland a bit over 3m down in the soil, one hit 600mm of compressed rain forest.
This was the end of the mega fauna era. So what was 1500mm plus rainfall now is 325mm rainfall. From my research,
this does not coincide time wise with Sahara which I was aware of. Just look under your feet and the answer is there.
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Yes, astounding to think of that, and also the fact that over that time, 3m of compacted soil has been formed on top of that. You go and tractor slash a paddock and hit a rock, which you swear wasn’t there last year…..
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Don’t tell the BOM. They won’t want to know, that 6000 years ago, the Sahara was lush, green and wet with plankton doing all that disrespectfull un-woke frolicking.
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“The African Humid Period exemplifies the dramatic climate transitions that our planet experiences as a result of subtle changes in the Earth’s orbit.”
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/green-sahara-african-humid-periods-paced-by-82884405/
” Now we show that it’s primarily these cyclic changes in Earth’s orbit that have driven wet versus dry periods. ”
https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/archaeology/shedding-new-light-on-the-lost-civilisations-of-the-sahara/news-story/ea5d2380d4eedeeef61dfdee1bf2325d
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The sun is a variable star.
Most people, most present company excepted, don’t know that.
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The problem isn’t what we know – it’s what we don’t know . Our worst existential threat is ourselves – we just don’t seem to learn . I wonder how many genders the dinosaurs had ?
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As many as they could eat?
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I believe we need to stop playing the game the way the Marxists have set it up! A recent article on this blog clearly laid out the circle of influence which has captured the West and the current effective method is using the propaganda machine they developed to distract from their end game; fill the coffers of the investment bankers with sovereign nations taxpayer dollars.
RFKjnr sees the top tier in big pharma and they are the same players in climate. The useful idiots are there to muddy the waters and manipulate the zealots, hone the rhetoric and claim science is on their side. Shiny tech and computer model this and that is nothing more than smoke and mirrors for the uneducated to swallow.
The rungs under the top echelon are where the weak spots are. It’s time the Wests conservative leaders took up the fight with centre left critical thinkers like Kennedy, because to play this ‘game’ on the Marxists terms is no strategy at all!
Facts matter, as does blindsiding the media activist class in live telecasts by presenting facts and excellent links to genuine science as this blog does.
If the conservative citizens of the world don’t see real opposition soon, the next decade is bleak, because the well armed right-wing has been remarkably silent for five years now, but history suggests that won’t last forever, especially if they see no support from what is now a completely ineffectual conservative ‘presence’ in politics, continually playing catch up, or as in Australian politics, completely stunned into oblivion!
Factual resistance needs leaders now as you could drive a mining truck through the hole in the Marxist logic. But as history has shown, they (Australian Labor included) don’t care about governing for all, they don’t even campaign with their actual plans, they merely bulldoze through with their ideology.
Isn’t it time after the centre left Turnbull & Morrison governments that conservatives learn that lesson and purge the party of bedwetters and stand for the values which made Australia the richest country on earth in 1980 thru hardwork, less than a decade after the communist Whitlam attempted to socially engineer and bankrupt the country?
That same hard left lunacy has percolated to the top of the Labor swamp again, but who is the 2020’s Fraser?
You don’t have to be liked, to be grudgingly respected, you just have to be effective at providing personal advancement and belonging!
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The US political culture is different to Oz, we are a quarry and outpost of the Alliance, the coming decade is looking bright.
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The way that current Climate Change fanatics, supporters of gender”diversity”, and various other blindingly illogical memes seem to aggregate in the same people is amazing. I know otherwise intelligent people who wave all of these flags at once. None of them are deprived in any way – quite the opposite. I sometimes think that it must derive from some sort of “herding” instinct.
I suspect that this is far more apparent today because of the commonality and proliferation of communication in this Information Age. Of course the transformation of childhood “education” and later “education” in the tertiary sector has aided and abetted the narrowing (almost abolition ) of focus on critical thinking.
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That term “critical thinking”- heard it again on a podcast last week. It was a term that was used often, but no longer. In fact it was part of the 1970’s English subject curriculum. But I suspect it’s not taught any more. It basically taught you to investigate/question everything you read. To think about the validity of the written verse. Not just accept it blindly. Now if you were called a critical thinker, someone would say you were a “cooker”.
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Sorry Jo, did it again. (…. must not stay up and watch cricket).
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That’s a good one Simon!
Here on this blog there’s enough scientific firepower to demolish the pharcical concept that CO2 is some sort of demon gas that can “heat the atmosphere”.
The Global Warming construct is baseless, but the Controllers have effectively silenced the truth tellers by offering newer scientists big contracts to ignore it and just crushing and smashing the more mature group.
If this truth was exposed we, as nations, sue those responsible as seize their assets.
There is physical, thermodynamic, engineering truth out there but the Controllers won’t allow it to surface.
We are constantly being manipulated into being at war with each other while the manipulators cash in.
Go Wall Street! ££$$€€
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I think it was pooh poohed because it involved using nukes.
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What the idiotic alarmists need to realise is that hotter nearly always means wetter. Colder means drier, as the oceans do not evaporate as much and thus less water goes into the atmosphere.
Pretty basic physics but so is the fact, as others have pointed out, that water is by far the dominant green house gas. I even have a Swiss paper where the researcher carried out extensive experiments and found that Co2 was not actually a green house gas of any strength at all.
But the liars in the BOM, in govt and bureaucracy with no brainpower between them will keep on lying. And people will keep on believing them because they are from “the government”. Although as the weather cools in the coming years as the sun heads inexorably to a minima hopefully people look out the window and realise that the disasterous climate catastrophy is not coming.
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From my understanding, deserts exists where Hadley cells return to the surface. So if the ITCZ was further north during these times did Hadley cells still exist and therefore were there desert areas further north?
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What caused the desertification of Norther Africa? I don’t know. Consider the following. . .
In East Africa, from Kenya down to Mozambique (and also along the South American coast), there are small fish (killifish) that are adapted to seasonal rain and drought. Their eggs hatch when the monsoon rains come, the fish grow rapidly, lay eggs and die when the seasonal puddles dry up. Over 100 different species with this adaptation are known. They are real. (if you want pictures, look up Nothobranchius.)
I’m left with the question. . . If the rainfall changed so drastically in North Africa 8,000 years ago (or so), why was there no change in other parts of Africa? Or did radical adaptation (with specieation) occur in over only a few thousand years?
This is a puzzle that the current data doesn’t match up with.
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Not too sure about my memory but I have a vague idea that there may be something similar operating in Australia.
A factor may be the distance from the equator but the most significant thing for me would be to take a backwards look at the melt cycle after the last glacial maximum.
The big melt started about twenty thousand years ago and raced on until it was stopped for a while, maybe a thousand years, before it continued on. This temporary interruption was about 12,000 years back. The melt then continued until oceans were at their peak, presumably world temperatures were also peaked out.
Then after the turn around, about 7,000 years back, it began to get cooler. This is shown in the graphs of ocean levels over that time til the present.
In the last 6,000 years the oceans have oscillated down to present levels with three clearly defined peaks, getting lower each time. This cycle in our current interglacial shows that even in relatively stable times there are still big fluctuations. Maybe one of these ocean drops and recovery over a thousand years was the event that people around the world recall as the Noah event. But these were only a metre or two at the most. The last fall was over the last 2,000 years and that was the smallest drop being 1.2 metres.
The North and Southern hemispheres are not the same in this bigger melt analysis, it’s my understanding that the ice was much more extensive in the North.
In other words, there’s been a lot going on in the last 10,000 years which could give perspective to the Sahara desert thing.
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The process which shall remain nameless again proves the very point being made.
Almost makes you want to give up.
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Of course the so called “drying out” period refers to a reduction in water availability.
Yes, it’s hard for water to become “rain” when it’s locked up as ice. This growing ice mass has been confirmed by the drop in ocean levels over the last six thousand years.
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[…] eine Antwort Only 6,000 years ago the world was warmer and the Sahara was lush green and wet Dieser Beitrag wurde am 2023-07-04 von Friedrich in Politik veröffentlicht. Schlagworte: […]
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