A Critical Analysis of Profound Alarmist Climate Claims

Written by Dr. Matthew Wielicki on March 20, 2024. Posted in Current News

Scientifically, it is inaccurate to claim that the current rate of ‘climate change’ is the most rapid or extreme in the Earth’s entire history without specific qualifiers, especially when considering geological epochs that have experienced dramatic shifts due to various natural processes

Last week in CNN a piece by Bill McGuire, a professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, discusses the issue of ‘climate change’, making this claim….

Think about that for a moment. We’re experiencing, in our lifetimes, a heating episode that is probably unique in the last 4.6 billion years.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/07/opinions/climate-scientist-scare-doom-anxiety-mcguire/index.html

Over its 4.6 billion-year history, Earth has undergone numerous and profound climatic shifts. These include ice ages, known as glacial periods, and warmer interglacial periods. The most recent Ice Age ended approximately 11,700 years ago, ushering in the current interglacial period known as the Holocene epoch.

Throughout this vast timescale, Earth’s climate has been influenced by various factors, including volcanic activity, changes in solar radiation, continental drift, and atmospheric composition changes.

Geological evidence offers invaluable insights into the Earth’s climatic past, revealing periods of significant temperature changes that dwarf the scale of contemporary warming.

These records, encompassing ice cores, sediment layers, fossil data, and isotopic analyses, paint a vivid picture of a planet subject to dramatic shifts long before human influence became a factor.

For instance, the “Snowball Earth” hypothesis suggests that, during the Cryogenian period (720 to 635 million years ago), the Earth was completely or nearly completely frozen over.

Meanwhile, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) around 56 million years ago was a period of rapid warming, likely caused by massive volcanic eruptions, leading to significant environmental and ecological changes.

Ice cores drilled from Greenland and Antarctica provide detailed and direct archives of past climate conditions, going back as far as 800,000 years. These cores contain trapped air bubbles that serve as time capsules, preserving ancient atmospheres.

Analysis of these bubbles has shown that Earth has oscillated between glacial and interglacial periods, with temperature swings of up to 10C (18F) associated with these cycles. Note: modern warming has been estimated at 1.1C since 1880.

Sedimentary layers, especially marine sediments, offer evidence of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) around 56 million years ago. This event is marked by a rapid increase in global temperatures by approximately 5 to 8C (9 to 14F), a rate of change that is comparable to, if not faster than, what is observed today.

The PETM is characterized by a negative carbon isotope excursion (CIE), suggesting atmospheric changes related to volcanic activity

Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events and the Younger Dryas are examples of abrupt climate changes that occurred in the more recent geological past, during the last glacial period, and at the transition towards the current interglacial period, respectively.

These events offer insights into the Earth’s climate system’s capacity for rapid shifts and serve as important comparisons to contemporary global warming.

As discussed before, estimating global temperatures from the distant past poses significant challenges, primarily due to the indirect nature of the evidence available to scientists.

Unlike modern instruments that directly measure temperature, researchers rely on proxies—natural recorders of climate information, such as ice cores, tree rings, sediment layers, and isotopic compositions in fossils—to infer past climates.

One of the more telling proxies of past global temperatures is sea level changes, which reflect the volume of water stored in ice sheets and glaciers, thereby providing insights into global ice volume and, indirectly, temperature.

Following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), approximately 21,000 years ago, sea levels rose dramatically by about 120 meters as vast ice sheets covering North America and Eurasia melted.

This melt suggests a period of significant warming. Intriguingly, the initial stages of post-LGM warming occurred with relatively modest increases in atmospheric CO2 levels, pointing to a complex interplay of factors driving the climate system.

In fact, modern sea level change is estimated to be about .24m since 1880 or 3.5m per 2000 years (looking at longer timescales allows for a better comparison to the geologic record which is rather insensitive to century scale changes).

This is about 1/10th of the rise observed in the geologic record between 16k and 14k years ago when sea levels rose by more than 30m (grey dashed lines), with relatively little change in atmospheric CO2 concentration recorded in ice cores from Antarctica.

These examples from geological evidence highlight that Earth’s climate has undergone extreme changes over geological timescales, often resulting in significantly faster rates of chnage than those observed today.

These past events were driven by natural factors such as orbital changes, volcanic activity, and continental drift, and underscore the Earth system’s sensitivity to factors other than ‘GHGs’.

Understanding these past climates provides critical context for evaluating the current rate of ‘anthropogenic’ global warming and its potential long-term impacts on Earth’s biosphere and highlights the absurdity of Prof. Bill McGuire’s claim.

So why make such an unscientific claim that is sure to drive climate anxiety?

Because that is exactly the intention.

In fact, in the opinion piece, Bill refers to a 2022 study titled, “Climate anxiety: What predicts it and how is it related to climate action?” which found that increased climate anxiety leads to increased climate action.

The game plan is simple… make unscientific claims about ‘climate change’ that increase anxiety in young people so that they will glue themselves to the road or destroy art pieces in the name of saving the planet.

This will do significantly more damage to young people than ‘climate change’.

Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

See more here substack.com

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