By Jo Nova
Antarctica would have been unrecognizable
The worst global warming nightmares all came true 130,000 years ago, done by mother nature all by herself. Most of the time the media ignores all this inconvenient catastrophe that lasted an astonishing ten thousand years. New research suggests almost all the Ross Ice Shelf melted and large parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disappeared too, yet somehow Emperor penguins survived. So did the seals and the whales, and there was no tipping point that broke the planet. But the Hunter-gatherer beach clubs of 131,000 years ago were all washed away.
A new study looked at dust in Antarctic ice cores and noticed there was an ominous shift 120,000 years ago. In other periods the ice core had a layer of fine dust that seems to have traveled all the way from South American volcanoes. But when the Earth last warmed out of the depths of the ice age 130,000 years ago, a different type of coarse grainy dust appeared in the ice core they dug out. Normally big grains don’t travel far on the wind, so this implied that it was coming from a close volcanic source. And while there are plenty of volcanoes on Antarctica, they are normally buried under ice and their dust doesn’t spread. This meant the icesheets must have melted so far that the volcanoes were exposed.
The isotopic fingerprint of the fine dust matched dust from volcanoes in South America. But the large grained dust matched rocks in McMurdo Sound in the West Antarctic Rift area.
We already knew things must have been dramatic in Antarctica at the time because sea levels were so much higher. There are remnants of corals up to 9 meters higher near Kalbarri in Western Australia, a stable part of very old crustal plate.
The map dramatically changed:
The Eemian period was hotter than our current Holocene.
Lest we forget, every hottest ever record today is nothing compared what has already happened.
Seas are rising at 1 to 3mm a year. Yet humanity saw the seas rise by 125 meters (twice) — children used to play on the continental shelf until all their beaches disappeared, their homes washed away, and their favourite reefs were destroyed. Humans saw ice caps a mile thick roll over Manhattan and humans saw the wall of ice melt away too.
Things were so bad, at some point our ancestors waved good-bye to an entire species of hominid which had brains bigger than our own, and the vast forests of the Sahara desert turned to dust, the fish died, the rivers stopped flowing and the communities that existed for thousands of years were wiped out.
Teach the children what real climate change is. The more they know about prehistoric times and geology, the less vulnerable they’ll be to the scaremongering.
But sometime, some day, the ice sheets will return. We do need to talk about that.
REFERENCE
Austin J. Carter et al, Diminished Ross Ice Shelf and West Antarctic Ice Sheet during Last Interglacial warming, Nature Geoscience (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-026-01988-1
This knowledge, this story needs to be as well and as widely publicized as the CAGW scare campaign has been and you tell it so well and so clearly, thank you.
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Every so often, the Antarctic Dry Valleys are briefly used by fanatics as proof of the evils of man made climate change.
I don’t know why they feel the need to invent fantasies, everyone knows it’s an area created by Martians who just wanted to feel at home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Dry_Valleys
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Even as recently as 20,000 years ago, sea level was as low as 120 to 135 metres lower than today. Since most humans prefer to live close to the sea, there is possibly a lot of human history yet to be discovered buried beneath the ocean floor, at least durable, non-biodegradable artefacts like stone tools. They already get dredged up from time to time. Unfortunately the deepest depth is below that accessible via standard scuba diving techniques so access is extremely difficult.
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The widespread belief of warmists and Leftists in general of an Aristotlean, static, never-changing earth is hugely problematic in terms of the Thinking Community trying to get its message across and symptomatic of the general dumbing-down of the “education” system, now an indoctrination system.
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I don’t get this kind of article. So, in the past there were tremendous physical events that affected the world. How does that have anything to do with what might happen now were similar events to happen? Is the suggestion that because the planet survived far worse a long time ago, we don’t have to worry about bad things today?
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Graeme M,
If you re-read Jo’s last paragraph you’ll see that she thinks there *are* things worth worrying about.
The message of the rest of the article is that the extremes of relatively recent *natural* variability (during the time that humans have been around) are vastly hotter and vastly colder than today’s temperatures. Therefore: (a) we are nowhere near an emergency, and (b) we shouldn’t be so sure that today’s trend isn’t entirely natural.
Hope that helps.
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>I don’t get this kind of article.
It’s about the difference between significant sea level variations and climate changes caused by natural events over which we have no power, versus the allegation that we’re causing catastrophic climate changes, (which didn’t happen), by burning coal and oil, so we’re collectively spending fortunes destroying our economy and our land addressing an alleged problem for which there’s no evidence, and which obviously doesn’t exist except in the minds of those affected by this particular mass formation psychosis or those whose incomes depend on keeping the lie alive.
>How does that have anything to do with what might happen now were similar events to happen?
It’s the same. If similar events happed now we would have to adapt. We would be powerless to stop it. Even the almighty power of carbon taxes couldn’t stop it.
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I suggest your look at today’s The Australian and the article by HENRY ERGAS.
The medieval mind divided the world into the children of light and the children of darkness. Those who doubted the end-time’s imminence were Satan’s keepmates; those who questioned its numerological proofs were the bastard offspring of the Antichrist.
Climate discourse reproduces this structure. Sceptics are not people who need to be convinced; they are “deniers” – a term calculated to demonise them with the moral infamy of Holocaust denial.
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Brought forth the usual alarmists, all busy calling everybody else deniers.
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>Brought forth the usual alarmists, all busy calling everybody else deniers.
Are you confused? Because I feel confused by what you’ve written.
Are you saying that the alarmists are those who maintain there is no cause for alarm?
Are you saying those who are constantly called deniers are busy calling everybody else deniers?
If you could express yourself more clearly it would make my job as the reader easier.
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Thought it was obvious that the sceptics were being labelled deniers. Ergas’ article notes this fact.
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One of the things that humans have to deal with – and the most existential is abrupt changes to the physical environment. Life in Eden doesn’t exist as such we take the good and the bad and suck it up. We find a way as all life does.
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So Graeme M what are “the bad things today” that we should worry about?
Please provide a list for us.
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You won’t get it.
This is the actual catastrophe to worry about.
Happens way more than climatic ‘catastrophes’.
Acute human not getting.
Developing amongst us now.
I’m not getting that you don’t get that CAGW is exactly designed for the great ungetting that certain elements of modern society appears hell bent on manufacturing.
I also don’t get when those that profess knowledge of science can’t recognize that climate tumult is the very engine of life on this unique probably divine dynamo.
Mars has no tumult.
And in fact the modern carbon age has been the least tumultuous of all.
Producing the magic of me being able to respond to a disembodied entity I do not get.
BTW, I barely get myself most of the time.
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Don’t worry Honk- we’re getting you. You’re abstruse, but on point.
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When coupled with the forgetting (the many climate alarm predictions that have failed to manifest), the human not getting is a serious problem. One might say it’s a pandemic and only about 5% of the world’s population is inoculated against it.
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‘ … we don’t have to worry about bad things today?’
Industrial CO2 is minuscule and cannot change climate, but volcanic eruptions can.
https://theconversation.com/two-centuries-of-continuous-volcanic-eruption-may-have-triggered-the-end-of-the-ice-age-83420
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‘ … what might happen now were similar events to happen?’
If you look at the graph in the post its clear that the Holocene is shorter than the Eemian Interglacial. This is because a comet twice the size of Manhattan Island struck the planet and produced the Younger Dryas, which had a big impact on the Northern Hemisphere climate for 2000 years.
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The point is that the theory that global temperature is solely Human-made-CO2 related is long busted. The point is that we know with a lot of certainty there are inexplicable other factors in local and global temperature (let alone climate) that bust the Human CO2 affects temperature thesis. We also know that there is some relationship between temperature and CO2 (does it follow or cause, is not known for sure). We have so many factors affecting even temperature (some unknown), that we should not worry about Human CO2. We should nor worry as humans always cope with change. So much money is gone into climate research that we know a lot more than 20 years ago, so now we know with certainty much less. This should be humbling. It looks like the ‘God of the gaps’ – again!
It is also useful to know that such events have happened, and will happen as we then do not firstly and falsely blame Human CO2. If we know that such events will happen we can be prepared to be resilient or do what most humans do – move as required.
And then there is the fun of just knowing things – if we can see a pattern in the past we can have a feel for the time we are in, yet always know that we don’t know the future, (will it go further up or down now, who knows?)and we can’t ever know the future for sure. Only God knows that.
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Janet wrote: (does it follow or cause, is not known for sure) We have the data, of course we know CO2 changes followed Temperature changes. Also basic principles dictate the vapor pressure of a gas that dissolves in water depends on the temperature of the water, open a cold and a warm carbonated drink.
Now CO2 has gone up a lot and Temperature did not proportionally follow. All the focus on CO2 prevents any proper study to understand other reasons that are much more likely. Benefit from more CO2 is plants growing better, better food supply, harm from more CO2 is not proven and not likely.
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Well that’s the point, climate change demands so much attention and sucks money from other environmental issues. Imagine a taking a few billion dollars spent on trying to change the weather and dedicating it to a program to remove micro plastics from the ocean? Or maybe taking the abundance of food we have now and feeding the hungry in Africa?
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Fair Question GraemeM.
1. They claim warming and sea level rise is “unprecedented” when it isn’t.
2. They claim we are killing all the penguins and polar bears, and endangering practically all life on Earth, when life evolved to survive shifts that are far more extreme.
3. They imply repeatedly that we are reaching tipping points that could change our climate irreversibly when clearly that didn’t happen in the Eemian, despite it being much warmer than today. There was no runaway disaster. There was no sixth mass extinction.
4. They hide almost all this paleoclimate information from the public and don’t teach it in schools. Shouldn’t the basic structure of the last million years of mostly ice-age with brief warm periods, and massive changes be a core thing every student learns? Isn’t that a primary school science topic?
5. This study shows we desperately need climate models that work so we can predict these awesome shifts before they hit us.
6. We’re panicking about all the wrong things. Wasting a fortune.
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“Humans saw ice caps a mile thick roll over Manhattan and humans saw the wall of ice melt away too.”
I live in Northwest Montana and my wife and I are in Glacier National Park from April to November doing wildlife photography every weekend. Glacier Park is named for the landforms caused by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet during the Pleistocene. I have heard ignorant tourists for years lament the disappearance of the glaciers due to CO2.
Where my home presently stands the ice was anywhere between 3,000 to 5,000 feet high some 20,000 years ago.
Me – I don’t miss the glaciers at all.
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Also in Montana, back in the day, 15,000 to 13,000 years ago was glacial Lake Missoula, caused by an ice dam. When it periodically ruptured it caused the devastating Missoula Floods which created the Channelled Scablands of eastern Washington.
No one could work out how they were formed until J Harlen Bretz came along in the 1920’s with his hypothesis of massive periodic flooding but he was subject to intense ridicule as his hypothesis didn’t conform to the Official Narrative.
Joseph Thomas Pardee later discovered evidence of glacial dam bursts that caused the floods.
Bretz’s work wasn’t fully and officially recognised until 1979 when he was awarded the Penrose Medal when he was 97 years old.
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Well, those glaciers are taking their time about disappearing. In the 1920’s there were scientists (and others) claiming that those glaciers would all be gone in 30 years.
When the 30 years were up, the claim was that they would all be gone in 50 years.
When that didn’t happen, there were signs (put up by the Federal Govt.) claiming there would all be gone by 2020.
When that didn’t happen, the signs were removed. I haven’t keep up with the doomsayers, but I believe the newer claims are that there will be all gone around 2035.
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Touché here too John III,
indoctrinated tourists looking at the deep gouge which is Lake Wakatipu, nestled amongst snow-capped peaks in the South Island of NZ, complain of humanity’s cruelty to the planet – despite having flown here – wishing to ‘go back’ to nature and the way things were… which was a valley FULL OF ICE as yuge glaciers gouged their way through schist from the mountains to the sea.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/1966/wakatipu-lake
Maori myths explain Te Whaka-tipua – the place of the giant – was formed when an ogre/monster was set alight & burned, wriggling his way into the ground to put out the fire, which had been started by a young Maori dude whose girlfriend had been stolen by the ogre (always a love story, but with a happy ending: dude got his girl back and when it rained they had million-dollar lakefront views).
12,000-or-so years later, picturesque Queenstown and Arrowtown (plus a gaggle of wealthy foreigners building underground bunkers awaiting The End) occupy what was once the floor – the bottom – of a very deep, frigid, grinding river of ice which, thanks to climate change™️, has long gone… until it returns again.
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During the last Ice Age, Aboriginal groups in Australia, including those around the Gulf of Carpentaria, sought refuge in well-watered areas as harsh conditions led to a significant decline in population and forced them to concentrate in smaller, habitable regions. This period saw them abandon up to 80 percent of the continent due to the uninhabitable environment.
Australian Geographic
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John
Re “and humans saw the wall of ice melt away too.”
Do you reckon the human inhabitants of the time would have been ring dancing with incantations to try and prevent the melt?
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Logic tells us that our ancient ancestors would have prioritised trying to stay warm and sourcing food for calories and fuel for fire. They would have made the distinction between what they could hunt and what could hunt them. They (without articulating it) made it through the Great Freeze and their descendants thrived in the following warmer periods.
Which tells us they had a far greater understanding of energy needs and sustainability than Chris Bowen.
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And our little bit of not-so firma terra, has been bumping and grinding its way roughly “north-ish” for a lot longer than 130K years.
Limestone formation s at “altitude”?
If limestone is “heavily-compressed” coral, consider the Jenolan and other “elevated” major deposits in oz. Also consider the marble (compressed and HEATED limestone, basically at the SURFACE, in North Queensland. Then there is Carrara marble in Italy. It is perched as high as 8000 feet above the current sea-level..
If we accept the concepts of a “Gondwanaland” break-up and “plates” wandering all over the place, it gets really “interesting”.
What sort of event saw off the marsupial megafauna in geologically recent times and at a spectacular speed? A bunch of naked nomads with sharpened sticks and Dingoes? A “change in the weather”? BOTH?
EVENTS, boys and girls, catastrophic events. Some, like the numerous “mega-bolide” falls. happened in seconds. Others, like serious basalt floods, rolled on for thousands of years. Continental drift and subduction is relatively slow, but rather “final” for the plate doing a deep dive under another one.
And as is becoming ever-more obvious in the wastelands of Turkey, humans were doing very organized “stuff” a LOT earlier than the “standard-true-view” dictates.
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Thanks for the link to this study, but the Eemian interglacial was at least 8 c warmer than our Holocene today.
And the Holocene climate optimum was much warmer than the temp today in 2026. And early Holocene SLs were much higher than today.
Of course the LIA temperatures were the coldest temps for thousands of years, but gradual warming started again about 250+ years ago.
https://co2coalition.org/facts/the-last-interglacial-was-8c-14f-warmer-than-today/
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Neville,
thanks for the link which has been mentioned before.
Can I point out that only means that that the temperature in Greenland was 8C warmer than today, otherwise it is unlikely for ice cores to be continuous? Unless the warmth wasn’t long as it was 370 – 400 thousand years before when (Camp Century) ice cores showed that northern central Greenland was ice free with grasses and shrubs growing.
However it did take 35 years before the scientists realised this, almost by accident. They had assumed that the snow was continuous.
Certainly the Eemian must have been much warmer than today, as fossils of elephants, giraffes, lions were unearthed in central London, and 2 species of rhinoceros (one now extinct) were unearthed in Yorkshire.
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‘ … unlikely for ice cores to be continuous?’
Perhaps a bit more slushy, this IPCC brief summary suggests.
https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/075.htm
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I gave a presentation to a group of old white men last week that included the linked handout:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tPE_gJUFQXhPHmtyiUbTF6wR4ogSbWYn/view?usp=sharing
The first slide shows 800,000 years of sea level change and its linkage to precession of Earth’s orbit. Right now is almost identical solar forcing conditions as occurred at the termination of MIS-11 interglacial 400,000 years ago.
I then show how precession drives changes with some specific charts for 37S on 16-March, which is the day of the year sunlight is rising most at 37S.
I then point out that all climate models are wrong because they all show tropical oceans warming and all exceed 30C at some point – 30C is the sustainable limit for open ocean surface temperature.
The fourth chart shows how warming in the SH is slowing down. No climate model predicts this.
The fifth shows that Greenland has large areas of “negative thinning” above 2300m. Again, no climate model predicted this.
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Nice presentation Rick.
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How do you know solar forcing?
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The solar forcing is based on NASA JPL daily data for declination, distance and solar constant (based on the Sun velocity).
Once those three numbers are available, the forcing can be determined for any latitude for any day.
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How did the audience group react to this information ?
I’ve tried presenting hard geological evidence, as simplified as I am able, and the small audiences always politely ignore these facts. Occasionally, one or two members of said groups approached me later to have me reiterate some point, but that’s about the limit of acceptability of hard evidence that does not demonstrate the sinfulness of homo sapiens.
Of course, no matter my simplifications of the facts, my presentations may be incoherent to a lay audience anyway.
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I once gave a presentation to a group of retired “teachers” and they were extremely angry and hostile that I questioned their beliefs but could not counter anything I said either. They just thought “experts” wouldn’t lie to them.
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Assuming those angry teachers were women, then you know its a religion and has nothing to do with science.
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They got the message that they have been lied to for years.
I opened the talk by going through some of the places I have worked at along with my experience in scientific developments for industrial processes.
I have been more fortunate than most to have large companies spend a lot of money on my education. But most got value in return.
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the temperature limit is 32 not 30. It is actually quite significant.
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No its not – you are writing nonsense. It can go to 32C for brief periods but it cannot be sustained above 30C. In fact places like the Persian Gulf can get to 35C for a month or three but that is due to the semi-enclosed nature of the water way and the dry, high altitude air that prevents an LFC from forming.
Show me any open ocean surface on earth over the past million years that that has sustained 32C for more than an annual cycle.
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Buckminster Fuller believed that precession was a force few understood. Certainly includes me. But Grok extended the explanation of precession into other aspects of life. That I understood. Fascinating.
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I had a number of items for display on things I have done. I included a globe and made some effort to show how precession od the orbit works but I may have confused some rather than elighten them.
In the second slide I list the range of years from 1181AD till 1409AD when perihelion often occurred on the SH summer solstice. Those years are the top of the cycle for the Southern Hemisphere. Since then, the daily solar intensity in higher latitudes of the SH have been trending down.
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Not just “negative thinning” but “negative shrinking” as the permanent snow area of Greenland increases year by year.
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As one of the audience, I had little problem understanding essentially everything on Ric’s presentation. Before I met Ric a couple of years ago, I had not seen elsewhere his involved math calculations showing how the intensity of sunlight is affected by the geometry of the earth relative to the sun. There are many expert opinions saying that processes like precession have too small an effect to be worried, others who treat the position of the sun relative to earth to be fixed, when in real life it is complicated by other planets. This work by Ric is groundbreaking on international scales and it is a privilege to share it first hand. Geoff S
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Sorry,meant to hit green
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If anybody really wants to know what climate/weather etc was like at any period or point in the past they will need a time machine. So, best work on that rather than silly headlines.
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Even a cursory look at that graph suggests that climate drives atmospheric CO2 not vice versa (that is to say smoothed temperature changes lead smoothed CO2 changes both up and down)
My first guess would be warmer temperatures lead to more bountiful life (animal, vegetable…), more carbon enters the lifecycle, and the decay leads to more CO2 … and the opposite as the temperature cools.
I may be completely wrong of course, but the one certainty is that future increases in CO2 cannot possibly drive earlier increases in temperature.
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I’ve been celebrating since Thursday.
The greed of the banks started the “global boiling “the recent term” and the greedy banks have ended it.
They need reliable and a greater amount of energy than turbines and toxic smokey mirrors could ever provide.
The delicious IRONY.
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