Polar Bear Fade

Bill points out the obvious. The polar bear PR machine has struck its tent and has gone into hiding.

This is hardly a surprise since their shrill bleating had no basis in scientific fact. The only real option was to cut loses before they began to look even sillier.

For the record, populations are at a high and likely need to be actively hunted. This has been true for come time. Small wonder that those who know different, such as Canadian and Alaskan politicians were totally frigid to the whole idea and did everything possible to fend of the nonsense.

Anyway, Bill here says it quite well.

Polar Bear BS

By: Bill Steigerwald

FrontPageMagazine.com Tuesday, August 18, 2009

http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35967

Environmentalists and the media have successfully bamboozled half the populace and every school child in America into believing large numbers of polar bears are starving and drowning in the Arctic because of global warming.

But it's obviously not even close to being true. How do we know this?

Because if even just one emaciated drowned polar bear's body had been fished from Arctic waters in the last five years, we'd have seen its sorry carcass a thousand times on TV and on the covers of Time and Vanity Fair.

By now the poor dead bear would have been given a trademarked first name, marketed as the official victim of Exxon Mobil-caused climate change and starred in three Pixar movies.

Alas, not a single drowned polar bear corpse has come along. Until one does, professional polar bear-saving groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council will have to scare up money and new members with traditional direct-mail campaigns like "Polar Bear SOS!"

NRDC's latest effort to save the iconic, majestic, magnificent, precious polar bear cleverly combines the environmental left's blind hatred of Sarah Palin with the general public's mindless love for cuddly polar bears.

With six pages of exclamation points, underlined sentences, boldfaced type fonts and apocalyptic predictions about imminent planetary and polar bear doom, it looked like a direct-mail parody when I first pulled it from my mailbox the first week of August.

It was the real thing, however.

NRDC celebrity senior attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent two pages warning that unless we act swiftly and join NRDC or send it money, "Governor Palin" and "some of America's biggest polluters could help push America's polar bears to the very brink of extinction" by 2050.

NRDC -- which has an $87 million annual budget, 1.2 million members and a staff of 400 busy lawyers, scientists and lobbyists - can get a little loony when it's shaking down its target audience of unquestioning "caring Americans."

For example, Kennedy's cry for help was backed up by four pages of polar bear pathos from Frances Beinecke, the group's distraught $300,000-plus-per-year president.

Evidently chosen as NRDC's emoticon-in-chief because she can channel the distress signals of polar bears all the way from the melting Arctic ice packs, she presumed -- incorrectly in my case - that it probably pained the reader as deeply as it pained her to imagine:

"... The last gasp of a polar bear before it drowns in the vast waters of the Arctic, unable to reach the increasingly distant ice floes it needs to find food."

"... The muffled cries of newborn polar bear cubs as they are buried alive when their snowy den collapses from unseasonable rains."

"... The exhaustion of a mother polar bear and her young as they succumb to starvation after enduring longer and longer periods without food."

Beinecke's Arctic soap opera blathered and blubbered on and on, ultimately leaving the impression that it was a proven fact many polar bears were starving, drowning and even eating each other in heretofore unseen numbers because global warming is melting more and more of the sea ice they live on and hunt from.

Beinecke didn't use her great imagination to interview any polar bears for NRDC's unintentionally hilarious package of tear-jerky propaganda.

But since it's apparently OK to make up anything you want about polar bears, let's imagine how a wise old bear might react to his proud species being defamed by NRDC as helpless victims and having their allegedly endangered lives exploited for money-raising purposes.

"Dear NRDC," the average Grandpa polar bear might write. "Thanks a lot for your love and concern. But please don't worry so much about us. In fact, please leave us alone.

"We and the Arctic sea ice are doing just fine. We've lived on the frozen top of the world for 250,000 years. We've survived two ice ages and a meteor that killed off the wooly mammoths.

"We've seen a lot of climate change and a lot of pack ice come and go over the eons. Believe us, it's natural. It's cyclical. It's unpredictable. But we'll adapt, as we always have.

"We are not endangered. We are not going to go extinct in 30 years -- or 10,000 years. There are at least 25,000 of us living quite well up here and, trust me, we're going to survive the coming ice age with a lot less trouble than you will."

Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983. E-mail him at:

bsteigerwald@tribweb.com.

Human CO2 Saves Planet

This is a cute item that brings a couple of things back in focus. First off the apparent geological history of CO2 content is hardly constant and shows serious variation. Or so we think. We are depending on proxies and worse, interpretation built on those proxies. For that reason, I am very wary of the numbers bandied about as truth.

I also suspect that over the millennia, that the CO2 is held within a safe channel by the oceans’ CO2 sink. When it is far too low, it begins to give up CO2. I do not know this as a fact, but it fits the natural model of these things and it is also likely a rather slow process that reflects the centuries. The reverse process should kick in when the CO2 level abruptly climbs as has happened over the past two centuries. So what do we make of former levels approaching 200 ppm and even earlier levels approaching a supposed optimum of 1000 ppm.

Recall something else, often over looked. The Holocene is only 10,000 years old. It is clearly warmer and climatically stable. That should have caused a great deal of CO2 to be freshly sequestered in new plant growth. Also as the ice retreated, the mosses advanced and created huge frozen peat bogs again trapping huge amounts of carbon. Thus it is no surprise that CO2 was in decline and possibly from a high level.

Pre Ice Age, we believe CO2 was much higher. During the Ice Age it dropped severely provided the numbers here are correct and that the Ice Age was a lot longer than we think. This is not unreasonable.

Then post Ice Age a great deal of available carbon was again converted to plant material.

Yes, we might actually be busy restoring the necessary carbon content.

It all comes back to just how much we wish to trust our proxies.

Humans and Their CO2 Save the Planet!

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/humans-and-their-co2-save-the-planet/?print=1

Posted By Frank J. Tipler On August 5, 2009 @ 6:59 am In . Positioning, Legal, Science, Science & Technology, US News

As the Senate considers the fate of the cap-and-trade bill, we should consider what it means for more carbon dioxide to be added to the atmosphere, something the bill intends to prevent.

Carbon dioxide is first and foremost a plant food. In fact, plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use the energy from sunlight to combine the CO2 with water to yield glucose, the simplest sugar molecule. Carbon dioxide is also the source of all organic — this word just means “contains carbon” — molecules synthesized by plants. Without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there would be no organic molecules synthesized by plants. The less carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the fewer organic molecules synthesized by plants. All animals depend on plants to synthesize essential organic molecules. Without the organic molecules synthesized by plants, the animal world could not exist. Without plants, there would be no biosphere.

Several million years ago, a disaster struck the terrestrial biosphere: there was a drastic reduction in the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The flowering plants evolved to be most efficient when the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 1,000 parts per million. But the percentage had dropped to a mere 200 parts per million. Plants tried to adapt by evolving a new, more efficient way of using the little remaining CO2. The new mechanism, the C4 pathway, appeared in grasses, including corn and wheat, which enabled these plants to expand into the plains. If the carbon dioxide percentage had stayed low — or worse, had decreased further — the entire biosphere would have been endangered.

Fortunately for the plants and the rest of the biosphere depending on them, a wonderful thing happened about 150,000 years ago: a new animal species, Homo sapiens, evolved. This creature was endowed with a huge brain, enabling it to invent a way to help the plants with their CO2 problem. Gigantic amounts of carbon had been deposited deep underground in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas. Not only were these reservoirs of carbon locked away in rock, but they were in forms of carbon that the plants could not use.

These wonderful humans, however, worked hard to help the plants. Not only did the humans dig the coal, oil, and natural gas, bringing it to the surface, but they converted these raw materials into the only form of carbon that plants could use: carbon dioxide. Due to the diligent plant-saving efforts of the humans, the CO2 atmospheric percentage is now at nearly 390 parts per million. Were humans to continue in their biosphere-rescuing efforts at the present rate, the CO2 level will be returned to normal in a mere few hundred years.

The cap-and-trade bill is designed to stop this effort to save the biosphere. This is a profoundly evil act. In the words of the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, anyone who supports the bill, or any measure aimed at reducing the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is “guilty of treason against the planet”!

Those who want to reduce the use of fossil fuels are the mortal enemies of the biosphere. They must be stopped at all costs! Write your senator at once!

The astute reader will have noted that Krugman actually accused those who opposed the cap-and-trade bill of “treason against the planet.” What I have done is use well-known science to show that, from the biosphere’s point of view, it is the cap-and-trade bill that is “treasonable.” Remarkably, Krugman assumes that the climatic conditions of a mere century or so ago are the “natural” ones that must not be changed. A very anthropomorphic point of view is being used to denounce humanity. An ultraconservative reactionary political position is being called “progressive.”

19000 Year History - Great floods

I am in receipt of a 600 page manuscript written by Prithvi titled: ‘19,000 Years of World History - The Story of Religion by Prithviraj R ‘. It solves a problem for me.

Those who have been following my postings know that we have reconstructed a large swath of the Earth’s physical history covering the past through the late Ice Age and into the Holocene. In particular we have the Pleistocene Nonconformity, the collapse of the Ice Age itself, the rise of the Bronze age, its European collapse, Atlantis, global emergence of agricultural man and so on.

I have had some cultural sources, principally the Bible as an informant for certain times and places and as a strong source of suggestions for informed inquiry. Homer gives us the very late Bronze Age in the Baltic as per da Vinci. I always knew that a large stock of cultural data was also stored in the scriptural material surviving in the Indian subcontinent. This material has been effectively unavailable or at best inaccessible. Either we had raw translations by those blinded by a classical western viewpoint or interpretive reconstructions again misleading.

Whereas I am looking for the background and what is naturally written between the lines. The task was as daunting as the one that I was engaged on myself over my own lifetime and a cursory attack was impossible, just as a cursory reading of the bible will never help much.

Anyway, it seems that Prithvi was up to the task and has produced a fully modern interpretation of these scriptures that is informed by the mass of recent discoveries and due confidence in the observers themselves.

The first thing that arose when I cracked open the text is that we have hard cultural information on the Great Floods brought about by the reduction of the Northern Ice Sheet. This means that reconstruction has a viable starting point.

Recall that the shift of the crust almost 12,000 years ago moved the cap thirty degrees south along the Hudson Bay meridian. The ice then began to melt. In the process it produced Lake Missoula and that ultimately extended into the Bay. This water was impounded by the mass of the northern parts of the sheet and eventually highlands surrounding the Bay. Escapement naturally happened in catastrophic phases, many of which were small such as that which created the scablands in Washington and Oregon. However, major escapements were probable and would have caused sudden rises in the ocean level.

Prithvi reports:

‘14,000, 11,500, 8000, and 5000 years ago. And I believe that human civilization has been badly mauled during each of these floods. And worldwide flood myths, in all likelihood, are referring to four distinct floods! Each flood destroyed civilizations; and most importantly, the technology that existed at the time got destroyed, causing human advancement to go backward rather than forward.’

‘And chances are that such universal floods have occurred several times in recent history, four times to be precise. The most compelling evidence regarding the floods has been found off the coast of Barbados, in terms of three ancient coral reefs. These coral reefs survive only at a specific depth. And they seem to have been drowned suddenly, three times, during the last ice age at about 14,000, 11,000, and 8,000 years ago7. The fact that these coral reefs were not drowned 5,000 years ago seems to indicate that our 3000 BC flood was not that universal.’

So we observe the existence of four separate great floods, the last been the least. This also tells us something else that I suspected and now see essentially confirmed. I already know that the 11,900 BP event was no accident. However the sudden decline beginning about 18,000 years ago is also likely caused by an earlier crustal shift that was possibly naturally induced and provided the precedent needed to attempt the one that ushered in the Holocene. Otherwise, I simply do not see it ever been attempted.

The Floods of 11,500 BP is well attested to and been derived from the crustal shift would have been in the form of massive surges. We thus have two principal Holocene floods at 8000 BP and 5000 BP. I do not know how good those dates are, since the prior attempts at geological dating made them older. In fact I am going to have to revisit the dating problem again in an attempt to pin as much down as possible. The only thing that we can have confidence in is that the events took place and that cultural reports that should exist are now in hand.

What I will try to do is to stick to his dating in this and related articles.

The last two were both escapement floods, the last one finally clearing Hudson Bay. It did not wreck everything and largely went unremarked. The main escapement event would be the first such event in 8000 BP and this likely added over a hundred feet to the sea level. It also likely over topped the land barrier into the Black Sea to produce that flood. Wikipedia puts a time frame of 9500 years ago on this event and the 1500 year gap is similar to the gap I recall for the 5000 BP event which shows elsewhere at 6500 BP. I personally think that later is much better because there was a lot of ice to melt.

As I work my way through the manuscript, I will write columns on relevant material and post them here under the lead of 19,000 years of history.

Geological Climate View

This is a geological viewpoint of man’s impact on the climate and it is naturally very conservative.

The one event not recognized is the unusual temperature collapse coinciding with the end of the Bronze Age that has never been reversed. My conjecture is that this was caused directly by the deforesting of the whole Sahara resulting in the reflectance of incoming solar energy back out into space. This represents a huge chunk out of the global energy budget.

That is a man made climatic change event that puts current activities in the shade. We can and will reverse that event and in the process provide home and agriculture for billions of people.

Otherwise, the claims of significant human impact in the modern era are hard to substantiate or quantify and appear to be a distraction from real efforts aimed at the terraforming the earth.

As I have stated, it is becoming possible to convert all the deserts into productive farmland and woodland. It is also massively beneficial to do so.

Man's contribution to climate change is negligible in geologic time

http://www.examiner.com/x-2950-Denver-Energy-Industry-Examiner~y2009m3d21-Mans-contribution-to-climate-change-is-negligible-in-geologic-time

March 21, 11:49 AM

Most geologists, including those in the energy business, take a REALLY long view of the earth's history including global warming and cooling cycles. Within the framework of geologic time, i.e. the earth's history, man is a very late entry and relatively small contributor to climate changes.

The current debate concerning global warming is well publicized. It features histrionic presentations of data on both sides of the issue usually by writers or politicians, with no scientific background, "interpreting" volumes of data gathered by true scientists. The arguments, for and against, have been going on for about 40 years. The earth is about 4.6 billion (4,600,000,000) years old so the debate has been going on for about 0.000001% of geologic time. Man, or at least our earliest demonstrable "human" ancestors, arrived about 2.3 million (2,300,000) years ago so "man" has been an observer of climate change for about 0.05% of geologic time.

Climate change, as measured and recorded in the fossil and rock record, as "ice ages" (global cooling) and ocean expansion (global warming) have been occurring periodically but erratically throughout geologic time from about 3.3 billion (3,300,000000) years ago or approximately 1 billion years after the earth formed. The earth basically "cooled" from its nuclear, "Big Bang", inception for over 1 billion years. At least two, multi-million year length "ice ages" occurred before the first signs of organic, carbon based life in the form of algae or pond scum. At least four more ice ages occurred from the age of pond scum, through the age of creepy crawlers, fishes, amphibians, reptiles (dinosaurs) and early mammals. In the last 1 million (1,000,000) years, during the age of man, at least 10 well documented periods of cooling have occurred. The last "ice age", lasted about 60,000 years from approximately 70,000 years ago until about 10,000 years ago. In North America, the timing and duration are determined by measuring the advance and retreat of glaciers in the fossil plant and rock records. Within these overall "ice ages", there are also shorter cycles of warming and cooling. The warmer periods, in today's vernacular, would be called "global warming."

Without question, man's use of fire (wood), dating from 1.5 million years ago; coal, from about 3000 years ago; and petroleum for the last 150 years have contributed to the most recent cycle of warming. The significance of man's activity is a part of the ongoing debate. The CO2 emissions and ozone layer changes are measurable phenomena. The so called "greenhouse effect" is an unproven theory. At worst, however, man's contribution looks to have only "sped up" the earth's natural cycles by a few decades. Obviously, a "few decades" are significant to the earth's current human population but not in terms of impacting the earth's climate history. If this speeding up process began with the first burning of petroleum 150 years ago, man's activities have affected 0.000003% of the earth's history; 0.0065% of man's history; and 1.5% of the time since the end of the last ice age.

Some evidence exists suggesting that the current phase of warming MAY have peaked in the 1970s and the earth MAY be returning to a cooling phase. Regardless of the rhetoric on either side of the arguments, man's total contribution to global climate change is negligible and probably not measurable within the context of geologic time. Instantaneous events like the asteroid or meteor strike that ended the age of dinosaurs by creating a global wide "dust cloud" or continuous volcanic eruptions that have also shrouded the earth with ash and smoke clouds have had a far greater and long lasting effect on climates. If all of man's "contribution" were to cease immediately, the net effect, measured in geologic time, on the earth's natural warming and cooling cycles would not be measurable.

www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html
www.studyworld.com/newsite/ReportEssay/science/Earth%5CThe-Ice-Age-36240.html
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/global_cooling_is_here_evidence_for_predicting_global_cooling_for_the_next_
http://library.thinkquest.org/26157/fire_use.html
http://ecology.com/features/originsoflife/

Pleistocene Nonconformity Sequel and Rebirth

This posting is a sequel to my article posted a year ago last July titled Pleistocene Nonconformity. It is submitted for publication on Viewzone who published the original article.

I advise reading the original article first in order to refresh your understanding of the original conjectures.

The UFO Conjecture and Pleistocene Rebirth

This article is an update and sequel to the article named Pleistocene Nonconformity and expands on the consequences of that particular article.

It has become increasingly clear that a body of compelling and conforming evidence has emerged to support the following conjecture:

That fully modern humanity emerged in excess of forty thousand years ago. That humanity had thirty thousand years to fully replicate our present achievement that took us ten thousand years. That they did so.

They inhabited a world locked in a Northern Ice Age that limited his presence to the tropics and the coastal lowlands exposed by a sea level that was three hundred feet lower than today. All other areas were subjected to climate variation an order of magnitude more violent than we now experience and inhabited by hunter gatherers only.

They decided to migrate into space and to induce a crustal shift that effectively ushered in the Holocene and ended the Northern Ice age. This led to the Pleistocene Nonconformity. Appropriate cadres of hunter gathers were put in place to commence the process of terraforming this new world.

They have not interfered with this process, but have chosen to simply observe and to not disturb. Their presence has been noted through thousands of UFO sightings. This age is rather obviously on the verge of ending as we close in on their technical capabilities.

The evidence

What is a UFO?

It is a craft that is designed to operate in a magnetic field and possibly even produce one. Its working skin is a sandwich of single atomic layers that include a semiconductor cooling layer and a high temperature superconductor. We can actually do this in our labs now. Technical finesse will take a lot longer of course. This means that an activated skin sealing off the exterior will exclude the Earth’s magnetic field producing massive lift. Most likely, the larger the craft design is, the stronger the lift as total density drops. With this technology it becomes simple to leave the Earth’s gravity well and perhaps even selectively navigate in the solar system itself.
For my next trick we place a super conducting magnetic ring around the outside edge and use it to produce a directed pinched magnetic bottle steered in the direction desired. It is not that simple but you get the idea.

Therefore leaving the Earth becomes cheap and easy. It we had this technology tomorrow; we could move every human off planet inside a generation. We already know how and it will likely take us only another generation to create a working craft.

What is a Dyson Sphere?

It is a trivial matter to build an effective space habitation once man himself is modestly reengineered to prosper in the necessary environments. Everyone has heard of the Dyson sphere which is perhaps a step too far. The original idea espoused by Freeman Dyson was to create a monster shell that encompassed the sun and used up most of the Solar System with humanity living on the interior of the shell. I suspect that it is not really feasible in the first instance and that a modification to the idea is vastly superior.

We can simply inflate a balloon anchored to the ends of a central axis and spin it up around the axis to create a one gee acceleration at the equator. Cargo vessels can access this shell at an axis end (zero gravity) and material may then be lowered to the equator. A suspended multishell structure can be built from the equator inward, possibly occupying half to a third of the contained volume while maintaining useful gravity throughout. The outer wall can be readily thickened with additional balloon wall material and expansive foams that also bind the skins together forming stress skin panels. A spherical structure with a radius of 2000 feet could house a million individuals all living with ample Earth gravity and personal space. Ample room can exist in the lower gravity areas to develop a living ecology that can also cleanse the air.

The entire system is cable stayed and can be readily built out with very light and strong materials. We can build it today. Thousands could be built in the Asteroid Belt and never be noticed and with an efficient outer surface of nanosolar cells they would be a black as coal.

What is ET?

Of course we are now speculating but the form that has been purportedly observed over and over again is an entity with a larger head and skinny human like body without significant musculature. A pair of unusual eyes is also reported. These can all be explained as a sensible modification for living comfortably in space. A child like body is quite suitable for working in an environment that is often at gravity levels that is much less than one gee. The less muscle mass the less effort required to maintain that muscle mass. It only becomes a disadvantage if one wishes to work hard in full Earth gravity.

The large head is necessary to accommodate the larger demands made on the visual part of the brain by the obviously expanded eyes. These eyes are designed to observe over a much broader range of the spectrum which is surely a clear advantage for an individual living in space and possible working in the space environment directly.

Assuming that the eyes are manufactured and interfaced with the brain, it is then pretty apparent that transitioning from Earth Human to Space Human through a genetic modification most likely could be done in a single generation. That also suggests that the reverse is just as true.

Once the decision to evacuate Earth was made, it was likely accomplished inside a single generation, leaving behind the parents of the space generation or even taking a number with them. One gee gravity existed on the habitats and accommodation was easy.

Reshaping the Earth

It was then time to reshape and terraform the Earth. The first task was to shift the crust thirty degrees south alone a longitude passing through present day Hudson Bay. This event was the principle topic of my article on the Pleistocene Nonconformity.

That this event actually happened is completely evident from a number of facts that are discussed in that article. The weakness in the argument came from determining how it was induced in the first place. I was forced to postulate a relatively high latitude meteor strike as a possible and perhaps the only credible mechanism. The difficulty with that was that unless it was an incredibly lucky hit, life of earth would suffer a mass extinction. I was groping for evidence that must surely exist and would clarify the situation.

Another alternative was to propose that the ice mass had made the crust unstable and that it had moved several times before it got it right. I am not satisfied that there is any evidence to support that position and now think that we are dealing with a carefully directed impact. It is important to understand that the crust must move essentially along the Hudson Bay longitude, in order to end the ice age. This is the only way that the full force of the Gulf Stream can be turned on.

Knowing that, I was forced to look in a very small area for the appropriate impact, and I was looking for something big enough to satisfy my expectation of a random strike. Instead we got a sharp shooter that nailed it with the right weight in the best possible location. This eliminated cosmic luck.

We have now discovered that a meteor impacted just to the west of the then location of the North Pole at a steep angle into the mile thick ice cap in 12900 BCE. The direction was south east and the impact blasted rock into the Ohio valley and large masses of ice into the Carolinas. We have found diamonds that could have reached their locale in no other way.

There is also recent buzz that we may have found the impact crater. This can only be described as a bulls eye that minimized the size of the impact.

The heat from the blast incinerated North America so quickly that a charcoal layer was left behind in the event horizon.

The crust was thus unstuck and begin moving south with perhaps a slight rotational slowing to spread out the final stresses. Braking was perhaps applied as the Indian Subcontinent and South America came off their respective equatorial bulges applying local compressive forces along the center of movement. The compressive stress may have been relieved by fresh mountain building in the Himalayas and the Andes since these were the primary areas of crustal weakness.

Massive tsunamis ravaged the coastal plains worldwide. It is reasonable to project extensive seismic activity as the crustal movement took place over perhaps several days. This would have released a fair bit of volcanic activity besides. The impact itself was remote from the tropics sparing them from the worst of the initial shock wave. However it appears at this time that the large animals out on the plains of Siberia were felled, perhaps by that shock wave or from the passage shock wave of the meteor. We have snippets of evidence that is otherwise impossible but put together create this coherent story.

Once the crust settled down and perhaps after the environment had begun to properly recover, the Earth was settled with a few cadres of hunter gatherers in a number of locales around the globe. Perhaps many such actually rode out the event itself. It seems reasonable though that some groups were also provided with a head start on some useful crops avoiding a long period of chancy empirical development. Further intervention appears also likely if the cultural record is interpreted correctly.

At some point is was all completely self sustaining and clearly running itself and no further intervention was necessary. More recently, intense observation appears to have become necessary generating the spat of sightings over the past sixty years. This appears coincidental with the onslaught of the nuclear age and our early enthusiasm for testing. I have always felt that the whole UFO phenomenon is a scientific sampling program focused on humanity as subjects. We can only speculate as to purpose.

If it is a sampling program and general data collection initiative, then it also make sense and sound practice to have agents embedded within the population. They certainly have all the tools necessary to land a human being on Earth and to support his efforts without us ever knowing. That means that they also tap into the internet and can now gather all the raw data they want.

Thus once you accept the existence of the Pleistocene Nonconformity and recognize that it was impossible unless it was intentional, you are led inexorably to accepting a living involvement with humanity in the here and now. We are also given a great genesis for all the legends and myths that have come down to us.

This also clarifies the mission of humanity. Our task is to terraform the Earth which has become a primary theme of my blog.

Through over a year of daily posting and related investigation, I have uncovered a range of agricultural protocols that will transform the planet into a verdant ecosystem that will support human populations at least an order of magnitude greater than the present. The most transformative is the use of biochar to quickly manufacture soil anywhere inside of a generation. Of equal importance will be the use of standalone atmospheric solar water harvesters to water any patch of earth anywhere. The rest is simple back work and an appreciative mind.

Venus

That then leaves us with the other great cosmic coincidence discussed at length in my article Pleistocene Nonconformity. That was the recent emergence of Venus from Jupiter as witnessed by the persistent red spot.

That it was a recent event is assured by the fact that the atmospheric temperature is still that of cooling magma. The greenhouse explanation is and was convenient only and clearly open to alternatives. The initial difficulty was that it was way too coincidental to believe that over several billions of years that it should just happen on our watch.

Yet it did. And obviously it was helped. Now I do not think that our cosmic engineers had to move a volume or rock the size of Venus. More likely ninety percent was already in place and waiting for the final straw. The temptation to create a sister planet was just too much for space human.

Sensibly they very likely did this about the same time that the crustal shift on Earth was engineered just in case of accidents. That suggests that Venus is almost fifteen thousand years old which I am more comfortable with in view of the long damping program necessary to circularize its orbit.

Essentially we have twin planet waiting for us to terraform. We will need to get out into the Kuiper Belt and nudge a great deal of both water and methane into an intersecting orbit. It should not be a very difficult trick.

The water will penetrate miles into the surface rocks of Venus, speeding the contained heat up to the surface until a balance is reached between boiling point and pressure. The atmosphere will also be saturated as huge amounts of incoming ice is melted and turned to steam. If we are lucky the incoming ice will be sufficient to absorb most of this heat without us having to wait for the surplus to be radiated of into space.

Once the temperature has stabilized it is a simple matter to introduce the necessary lifeforms to bring down the carbon in the carbon dioxide and the methane and to produce oxygen. This planet will surely start almost with a carboniferous age. Once breathing is possible it will be easy for humanity to quickly create working soils and derivative ecosystems. Any given patch of land should be within the ability of one person in a single lifetime.

It is hard to suggest time frames for Venus since we not clear on the time needed to bombard the planet or to cool it down, but I suspect that two lifetimes are ample. I estimate that it would take a lifetime of concentrated effort to finish the job on Earth.

Conclusions

We have integrated the mysterious phenomenon of the UFO into our human reality with this conjectured alternative human history and have resolved a number of unrecognized anomalies. Our eyes are now opened and we can see without been blind. There may be another better conjecture and some day we will have history, but for fifty years we have had neither.

For forty years, I lacked a physically possible explanation for the UFO craft itself. That was resolved for me in the lab work published over the past year. The demonstrations of capability have been made. We only need to energize it and we can do that with a battery in the early going.

ET may be a space faring alien from elsewhere. But then why does he care about us? Besides, I am really uncomfortable in terms of ever achieving a method of producing directed worm holes that can take us across the universe. I think that the equivalent of quantum worm holes will exist allowing the transmission of information. I am simply not so sanguine over anything larger been ever invented.

We are left with the challenge of determining how to actually test the veracity of our hypothesis. The crustal shift idea which got this all going is in many ways the easiest to test and prove out as much as such can because there will be predictable geological anomalies to uncover and delineate. The best evidence will have been destroyed as a result of the three hundred foot rise in the sea level, but we can still expect anomalies perhaps tied to locales in which the ground was up lifted. It was in this manner that the idea of continental drift resolved a massive amount of previously unexplained geology. This will not be as all encompassing but it will still work. Remember that there are huge numbers of geologists with the relevant information in their files that merely need to be recognized. They merely need to start looking.

We still have a lot of work to do before we can replicate the skin of a UFO, but it certainly is well started today, even if the researchers do not understand what they have discovered. Producing a first working prototype will utterly silence the naysayers of the UFO phenomenon and likely convince everyone that this conjecture is possible right.

Then we would like to find evidence of a modern technological age from around 15,000 years ago. This is a different challenge almost certainly made more difficult by the likelihood that our predecessors cleaned up before they left Earth. They needed all the metals and like us soon learned to mine all their waste tips.

Their civilization was based on the coastal plains which were slowly inundated by the sea with the natural result of utterly destroying any evidence. Even the soils were destroyed, so unless it is possible to locate a strata buried by the initial tsunami without wrecking the soil, we are not going to find 15,000 year old terra preta. And if we did it would not be evidence of an advanced civilization.

Since they were setting the stage for a complete rebirth of modern civilization from the ground up, they certainly made sure that real evidence was missing. We are looking instead for randomly lost tools and the like that are discovered just as randomly. We may even have stuff like that whose significance is not understood.

That really leaves only one place in which to look that would support the existence of a modern civilization 15,000 years ago. That is the remnants of large mined out deposits up in the hills. These are tough to find and recognize but it is exactly what our geological folk have been doing for years. And such evidence will be first identified as the nonerosional removal of mineral and perhaps the displacement of waste.

I think that the geologists will enjoy exploring the limits of this conjecture.

Terraforming the Boreal Forest with Cattail Paddies

I have introduced readers to the astounding productivity of the wild cattail. This is possible because it is a wetland plant that never lacks water and is a sponge for dissolved nutrients. It produces a biomass an order of magnitude greater than the most prolific field crop and much of that are starch rich rhizomes.

I am revisiting it because its natural range takes it deep into the boreal forests of both Canada and Eurasia. This is the single largest woodland wilderness in existence and has always resisted human agricultural methods. The soils, derived from pine forests if they have any depth at all, resist cropping and are best left undisturbed. Much of that is from the actual recent nature of these soils from the end of the Ice Age.

Yet in Canada in particular vast wetlands remain as well as multitudes of interconnected lakes. The actual plant life is well adapted but with minimal speciation throughout. You see the same handful of species. Some of this is perhaps also a result of the Ice age and the limited time for local speciation.

The cattail prospers in most of this range. It does not seem to go all the way to the tree line, but then neither do the trees except as stunted remnants. The one range map that I am able to use shows coverage throughout the lands south of a latitude running through James Bay. I suspect that I will be hearing of its presence much further north.

What this means is that land greater in area than the Great Plains can possibly be farmed using a cattail paddy culture. One can even envisage using beaver ponds as the natural cattail field.

Farm preparation will require the leveling and grading of large swathes of wetlands and setting up a system of fall drainage to accommodate pre winter harvesting.

This also means that direct management of the adjacent wildlife becomes possible. Deeper waters are natural fish farms easily isolated for management purposes because of the general slow movement of water through these lands. Non migratory sturgeon are particularly promising.

More obvious is the moose that will naturally graze these lands and can be harvested in the fall. In fact it is perhaps reasonable to store the chopped reeds as winter fodder for the herds of moose. The same may also applicable to the other ruminants but the moose is surely best source of commercial meat.

Once the paddy culture is established and the moose husbandry integrated, many other options will become practical. The beaver, in particular is eminently domesticatible and readily adapted to this culture. In fact, both these animals will be around anyway and one may as well maximize their value. Actual beaver harvesting will take place in the winter when the pelt is at its best. The meat also is of value.

Note that so far I have made sure that harvesting takes place in the late fall and winter. The first reason for this is that the insect burden during the summer is prohibitive. The second reason is that the animal and fish populations must be hugely reduced before full winter kicks in and their food supplies disappear.

In any event we have yet another model farm concept that can work and put boots on the ground everywhere throughout the boreal forest.

Curiously, the Cree whose ancestral lands these are likely survived the onslaught of Europeans best of all indigenous peoples. They are well positioned to develop this new form of agriculture and provide an economic base that once seemed improbable.

We have discovered it is possible to turn the boreal forest to agricultural advantage and thus terraform one of the largest biomes on Earth.

David Archibald on Solar Variation

David Archibald has given us this very detailed paper on historical global climate and focuses on the role of solar activity. This is as complete a workout of the issues as I have so far seen.

http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/Conf2007/Archibald2007.pdf

Although he goes back through geologic time and produces the appropriate graphs, most of the data is hardly settled and certainly subject to and has been subject to ongoing debate and access to new proxies.

It is unfortunate but any proxy that can be projected to directly reflect temperatures, can also be modified almost randomly by other factors and we have no way to properly correct for this. The second problem is that once one draws a line between two points it is impossible to avoid thinking that this is a continuous process that is been measured. Yet climate is famously discontinuous

In any event, this is still a nice presentation, but do not get comfortable that any of this is all settled. More importantly, the Pleistocene Nonconformity has changed everything that has gone before inasmuch as the variation range of global temperature has been hugely narrowed. Therefore a look at the implied variation range for the past millions of years is misleading in the context of the Holocene.

What has been in fact remarkable has been the implied two degree range maintained for the past ten thousand years.

Archibald lays out the argument for the direct involvement of solar activity in driving the heat content of the atmosphere. He also spells out the nature of the current apparent slow onset of solar cycle number 24. His work is well done, and he argues forcefully for a major two degree drop over the next twenty years very similar to the Dalton minimum.

He also puts the contribution of CO2 to global warming into complete perspective and the result is negligible, largely because any response is logarithmic rather than linear and at best is good for a tenth of a degree. Solar variation appears to be able to produce variation over two degrees, several times any Anthropogenic effect.

This paper is well worth the read as it pulls together the total argument for the importance of solar variation and attempts to place it all in a continuous narrative that may be full of gaping holes but is at least making the attempt. This is much better than the many studies that usually focus on a narrow window of results and assume a position outside that window.

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This short item gives the accepted opinion on solar variation.


Solar Variability: Striking a Balance with Climate Change

05.07.08

Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center The sun has powered almost everything on Earth since life began, including its climate. The sun also delivers an annual and seasonal impact, changing the character of each hemisphere as Earth's orientation shifts through the year. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, new forces have begun to exert significant influence on Earth's climate.

"For the last 20 to 30 years, we believe greenhouse gases have been the dominant influence on recent climate change," said Robert Cahalan, climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

For the past three decades NASA scientists have investigated the unique relationship between the sun and Earth. Using space-based tools, like the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE), they have studied how much solar energy illuminates Earth, and explored what happens to that energy once it penetrates the atmosphere. The amount of energy that reaches Earth's outer atmosphere is called the total solar irradiance. Total solar irradiance is variable over many different timescales, ranging from seconds to centuries due to changes in solar activity.

The sun goes through roughly an 11-year cycle of activity, from stormy to quiet and back again. Solar activity often occurs near sunspots, dark regions on the sun caused by concentrated magnetic fields. The solar irradiance measurement is much higher during solar maximum, when sunspot cycle and solar activity is high, versus solar minimum, when the sun is quiet and there are usually no sunspots.
The sun radiates huge amounts of electromagnetic energy in all directions. Earth is only one small recipient of the sun's energy; the sun's rays extend far out into the solar system, illuminating all the other planets. Credit: NASA

"The fluctuations in the solar cycle impacts Earth's global temperature by about 0.1 degree Celsius, slightly hotter during solar maximum and cooler during solar minimum," said Thomas Woods, solar scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "The sun is currently at its minimum, and the next solar maximum is expected in 2012."

Using SORCE, scientists have learned that about 1,361 watts per square meter of solar energy reaches Earth's outermost atmosphere during the sun's quietest period. But when the sun is active, 1.3 watts per square meter (0.1 percent) more energy reaches Earth. "This TSI measurement is very important to climate models that are trying to assess Earth-based forces on climate change," said Cahalan.

Over the past century, Earth's average temperature has increased by approximately 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit). Solar heating accounts for about 0.15 C, or 25 percent, of this change, according to computer modeling results published by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies researcher David Rind in 2004. Earth's climate depends on the delicate balance between incoming solar radiation, outgoing thermal radiation and the composition of Earth's atmosphere. Even small changes in these parameters can affect climate. Around 30 percent of the solar energy that strikes Earth is reflected back into space. Clouds, atmospheric aerosols, snow, ice, sand, ocean surface and even rooftops play a role in deflecting the incoming rays. The remaining 70 percent of solar energy is absorbed by land, ocean, and atmosphere.

"Greenhouse gases block about 40 percent of outgoing thermal radiation that emanates from Earth," Woods said. The resulting imbalance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing thermal radiation will likely cause Earth to heat up over the next century, accelerating the melting polar ice caps, causing sea levels to rise and increasing the probability of more violent global weather patterns.

Non-Human Influences on Climate Change

Before the Industrial Age, the sun and volcanic eruptions were the major influences on Earth's climate change. Earth warmed and cooled in cycles. Major cool periods were ice ages, with the most recent ending about 11,000 years ago.

"Right now, we are in between major ice ages, in a period that has been called the Holocene,” said Cahalan. “Over recent decades, however, we have moved into a human-dominated climate that some have termed the Anthropocene. The major change in Earth's climate is now really dominated by human activity, which has never happened before."

The sun is relatively calm compared to other stars. "We don't know what the sun is going to do a hundred years from now," said Doug Rabin, a solar physicist at Goddard. "It could be considerably more active and therefore have more influence on Earth's climate."Or, it could be calmer, creating a cooler climate on Earth similar to what happened in the late 17th century. Almost no sunspots were observed on the sun's surface during the period from 1650 to 1715. This extended absence of solar activity may have been partly responsible for the Little Ice Age in Europe and may reflect cyclic or irregular changes in the sun's output over hundreds of years. During this period, winters in Europe were longer and colder by about 1 C than they are today.

Since then, there seems to have been on average a slow increase in solar activity. Unless we find a way to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning, the solar influence is not expected to dominate climate change. But the solar variations are expected to continue to modulate both warming and cooling trends at the level of 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.18 to 0.26 Fahrenheit) over many years.

Future Measurements of Solar Variability

For three decades, a suite of NASA and European Space Agency satellites have provided scientists with critical measurements of total solar irradiance. The Total Irradiance Monitor, also known as the TIM instrument, was launched in 2003 as part of the NASA’s SORCE mission, and provides irradiance measurements with state-of-the-art accuracy. TIM has been rebuilt as part of the Glory mission, scheduled to launch in 2009. Glory's TIM instrument will continue an uninterrupted 30-year record of solar irradiance measurements and will help researchers better understand the sun's direct and indirect effects on climate. Glory will also collect data on aerosols, one of the least understood pieces of the climate puzzle.

Solar Variation

As I have posted before. for the past 10,000 years or so, the Earth has experienced the climate regime known as the Holocene. The Northern hemisphere is warm and is experiencing an apparent variation range of perhaps one degree. The range may be in fact slightly larger, but I do not count on that. The reason for that, is what we have seen in the Arctic. A few short summers at the heat transfer levels experienced for the past two decades will clear the Arctic of sea ice and generally improve conditions. No further increases are actually needed.

I have to reasonably assume that a similar phenomena will emerge at the other end of the scale and give us the possibility of the cold climate of the little ice age that occurred four hundred years ago.

This also gives us a deeper appreciation of just how inhospitable that the temperate zone would have been during the Pleistocene when apparent temperatures were driven back and forth over several degrees. A hunter gathering lifestyle was the only viable option in such a regime.

Which leaves us to discuss the natural drivers of this one degree or so range of global temperature. And let us make one thing a little clearer. That one degree is not necessarily that precise since most of the solar energy is absorbed in the tropics where a much smaller range will generate the observed impact in the higher latitudes. In other words a rather modest variation in solar output can do all the heavy lifting quite handily.

It is also telling that global variation lags solar activity which presumably follows the sunspot activity levels. And it has also been very telling that a long apparent minimum in sunspot activity came with the little ice age. This is why climate science has long recognized solar variation as a prime driver of global climate variation.

The mechanism there may be a simple cyclical release mechanism in which a surface heat build up causes a slight expansion of the radiating diameter of the sun and thus providing slightly more energy to the Earth. The sunspot activity thus represents the discharge part of the cycle. It is possible then that periods of low sunspot activity occur when a large mass impacts the sun, cooling off the surface slightly for some time.

I have already explained in the Pleistocene Nonconformity (July 2007) why the ice age so totally ended and why we are in the Holocene. Te remaining question is what real effect does man's activities have on the global climate?

I ask this for another reason. We are now capable of knowingly impacting the globe with our efforts. The advent of agricultural man has transformed a major percentage of the land surface. It has eliminated a huge biomass of both land and sea life without much organized forethought. We have dumped a huge amount of slowly absorbed CO2 into the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels. And we have released a range of biologically resistant chemical pollutants into the environment. All of it could have been done much better.

Then there is the contention that global warming is also been at least aided by the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. The first problem that I have with that, is that it is an unnecessary hypothesis. Why look for a problem when you have a solution in the room that is more than satisfactory. As I have said before climate variation has not removed itself outside of signal noise.

We are certainly obligated to use removal strategies to divert our CO2 waste back into the natural cycle. Perhaps for the first time in human history we will globally do something. And shipping our acid rain to China was not a solution. It was a regulatory dodge. In twenty years these steel mills will be built in Africa. And the actual solution to that problem is simple and cheap, just inconvenient to implement.

Without a global submission to a rule of law, any strategy will simply encourage the best minds to find new and exciting ways to dodge .

The Global Climate Engine

I have just commenced reading a book that focuses on the past 20,000 years of human development as seen through the eyes of archeology. It appears useful and once I have properly gotten into it I will do a review for you all. What really jumped out at me however, was a chart that maps the oxygen isotope ratio in the ice caps.

Variations in the ratio is a proxy for whether the global climate is warmer or colder. It is also reasonably reliable over the twenty thousand year time span as is the ability to take ice samples in the Antarctic covering the same period. I think that we can accept the results as useful over the designated time span. What certainly can be trusted is the observed variability ratio.

What stands out in the chart is that the Pleistocene Nonconformity is more abrupt than perhaps understood before. The global climatic shift was not just from a seriously cooler climate to the our warmer era known as the Holocene, but from a clearly very volatile regime of shifting worldwide climatic conditions to the current regime of very low variability.

The chart is utterly compelling. For twelve thousand years the chart has flat lined showing minimal variability. Prior to that, not only was the average temperature colder, it moved back and forth over a wide range of variability that is at least an order of magnitude greater than is apparent today.

In reality, this confirms the geologic nature of the Pleistocene Nonconformity more that any other argument. A one million year regime that included a huge northern icecap ended in a couple of thousand years due to the ice cap been shifted thirty degrees into a nonsustaining environment that also was able to prevent the mere rebuilding of the icecap in one place as it was been melted in another. We had an incredibly lucky throw of the dice that has actually likely seen the global climate restored closer to the type of climate experienced over the past billion years.

My readers will want to revisit my posts under Pleistocene Nonconformity back in June and July.

For the record, the onset of the northern ice age coincides with the establishment of the Panama - Central American land bridge that closed off the Atlantic a million years ago. A pretty unique event in global geologic history. It has also taken a pretty unique configuration to prevent the establishment of a full icecap at the pole during our era. It is principally dependent on a large imbalance of northern equatorial waters been forced into the Arctic. It is almost an engine.

That engine has made the northern hemisphere hugely habitable to ourselves. Without it, North America, Europe and all of temperate Asia becomes largely uninhabitable, as was true during all of the Pleistocene.

Perhaps now we understand better why humanity broke out of the tropics only ten thousand years ago. Prior to that it was not really a very good option. All the advantages of the temperate climate were simply not available and in those small areas were they existed, wide climate swings made any culture other than game hunting terribly vulnerable. Our so called climate shifts are trivial by comparison.

Thus, prior to the shift from Pleistocene to Holocene, mankind could hope to establish a proto civilization in only the tropics and semi tropics. This included all of Africa, the Indonesian Plain and India and not much else.

The advent of the Holocene gave us the world and the possibility of agriculture as we know it.

Pleistocene Nonconformity - 6 - the changes

What makes the logic of this shift so compelling to myself is the elimination of a lot of theoretical impossibilities that the scientific community was forced to accept simply because they were there. We replaced Noah's ark as an explanation for an Ice age location or two that was simply impossible by climatic ideas of the past and I am rather certain, doubly impossible with today's climatic knowledge.

Resultant Crustal Changes

1 Hudson Bay, formerly the pole is shifted south by thirty degrees, taking the bulk of the massive north American Polar Ice sheet into temperate climes. This is extraordinarily important because it ultimately releases this ice into the ocean lifting sea levels over 150 feet. The Laurentian sheet finished melting out about 9,000 years ago, 3,000 years after the Scandinavian Sheet and the European Mountain glaciers which also contributed 150 feet in sea level gain.

2 Greenland migrates from one side of the polar region to its current locale staying within the Arctic Circle and permitting the survival to date of its ice cap. Precipitation levels change. This conforms to the anomalous precipitation levels currently experienced in both Greenland and Antarctica. Less precipitation is now associated with the thickest ice sheets and vice versa for both regions.

3 The Caribbean shifts from the Temperate Zone to the tropics commencing the full heat pump of the Gulf Stream. This leads directly to the warming of Europe and the swift removal of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet and the first major lift of the sea level. Between the two ice sheets enough fresh water was supplied for the sea level to rise 300 feet. Prior to the application of this heat pump the two sheets likely covered the entirety of the Arctic Sea and partially inland at all the margins. The only release was ice calving in the North Atlantic at the edge of the Arctic shelf and through the Davis Strait. There is no reason to assume that much of it was even floating since huge thicknesses existed. The Northern Hemisphere was much like Antarctica today with massive seaborne ice sheets struggling to reach open water.

4 Eastern Siberia migrates from cold Temperate Zone conditions to the sub Arctic. Conditions do not markedly change as we move from a world of extensive glaciation as existed in Europe to one further north and just as unpleasant. The major change comes over time as the grounded Arctic Ocean ice sheet dissipates and fresh water accumulations from the northern Siberian plains escape into the sea. Little is thoroughly understood, but it is likely that much Siberian Drainage had no escape route except to ultimately build ice on the Arctic Sheet. This may also hold for the Mackenzie River in Northern Canada.

5 Africa merely rotates around the center of rotation in the Congo. With the exception of a wave of earthquakes and tsunamis, life goes on virtually unscathed with minor climate changes. Africa retained massive genetic diversity, while the rest of the global population was almost wiped out, probably reduced to remnant hunter-gatherers in the hills with the necessary survival skills. Genetic diversity collapsed. It is also argued that since Africa is the homeland of all primate development, this diversity is it’s expected due. This might be true except there is no wall and movement and forced intermarriage is the norm for these populations. Because of the huge time frames involved, I am more inclined to expect close similarity in terms of genetic complexity in the Old World. Certainly any successful base population could cover the geography of the Old World in an historical eye blink.

In fact many of the putative successor populations in the Old World outside of Africa appear to be strongly linked to the mountainous regions of Central Asia. These were never areas famous for naturally promoting high population densities. Their genetic influence can only be possible if the much denser natural populations of the lowlands had disappeared.

6 Europe is tilted slightly northward, but the advent of a hugely strengthened Gulf Stream is now the major factor in climate change. The Mediterranean begins to warm up as the northern glaciers swiftly disappear inducing the first major lift in sea levels. The Scandinavian ice sheet and the extensive mountain glaciations are eliminated as well as near sub arctic to Arctic conditions.

7 The Amazon shifts from been largely north of the equator to been largely south of the equator. It remains in the tropics and experiences little change save coastal devastation.

8 India and Southeast Asia including southern China and most of Indonesia shift from the south tropical zone to the north tropical zone. Climatic conditions remain largely the same although a major redistribution of rainfall probably takes place. Inundation from the sea is at its worst here, simply because of the area’s total vulnerability to the likely maximum stroke of the tsunamis. There is no shelter from any direction except into the Himalayas. This area was on the arc of rotation.

9 Australia was deep into the temperate to sub arctic. It moved north into the warm temperate to sub tropical. Glacial cover as existed was removed, particularly in Tasmania.

10 The bulk of Antarctica stayed within the Antarctic Circle preserving the main ice cap. The remainder (Lesser Antarctica) which was sub arctic to almost temperate moved into the Antarctic Circle and started rapidly accumulating additional ice. A warm ocean current similar to the Gulf Stream may have originally bathed this area, leaving a lot of room for climate variation and habitability. Otherwise, it would certainly have been highly glaciated and cold prior to the crustal shift.

Let us take this a little further. We have already intimated that polar ice caps are just that. Global rotation forces atmospheric circulation in such a way as to create a profoundly stable accumulation environment at the poles. Antarctica is an excellent example. What went wrong in the Arctic? Millions of years of ice accumulation disappeared in a geological second. A huge part of the answer, at least for Europe, was the emergence of the Gulf Stream, which delivered the heat necessary to not only eliminate the Scandinavian icesheet, but also prevented the Arctic Ocean and the islands west of Greenland from been covered with ice as they should be.

Even if we do not accept the premise of a global shift of the crust we still have to explain where the heat build-up in the Atlantic tropics went for the preceding millions of years. This leaves only the South Atlantic and the Antarctic Archipelago, which is rotationally in the right direction. Pre shift we would still have a weak Gulf Stream that delivered plenty of moisture but far less heat, and a strong southern current that pumped heat and moisture into a temperate Lesser Antarctica.

11 The Pacific rotated like Africa on an axis near its center. Ferocious Tsunamis on its edges would have been restrained by the massive mountain ranges girding it with the exception of the area of Southeast Asia.

The most compelling argument for the validity of this event is the simple fact that it eliminates an even more troublesome theory. That the output of the sun declined so substantially as to expand subarctic and arctic conditions deep into the Temperate Zone. We do not have permanent ice on Baffin Island or Bathurst inlet or in Siberia today, yet the climate there is at the limit of our capability for sustaining a presence. And the Sun’s annually available energy there, is a fraction of what is received in Buffalo. For an ice sheet to develop and be sustained in the latitudes of Buffalo, the sun’s energy output would have to drop to much less than currently received today in the high arctic.

Other consequences of such low solar output would be the elimination of larger life forms in the sub Arctic at least. This includes Siberia. The tropics would see snow and killer frosts similar to current temperate conditions along with massive mountain glaciation, sharply reducing plant diversity. All the available evidence supports none of this. At the most an Antarctic style ice sheet chilled the Northern Temperate zone and generated a somewhat cooler sub tropical zone. This may have been more local than general.

The likely truth supported by our knowledge of stellar physics is that the sun’s energy output has only fluctuated mildly during the last three billion years. And this ultimately means that polar icecaps had to be at the pole, not the latitude of Buffalo. Polar icecaps form at the pole and spread out from there for a lot of good reasons to do with atmospheric convection and maximum heat loss. They do not form elsewhere.

The one major consequence of this type of event is that the North Polar Region is now largely oceanic. It may be that when the next cyclical cold spell arrives in about 18,000 years, this region will not be able to buildup the ice sheet normally associated with an ice age and the Northern Hemisphere will be largely spared. It will still be chilly.

Although this is off topic, a rather interesting geological consequence of the mile thick polar Laurentian ice sheet was that the land itself was depressed by perhaps up to a thousand meters. This depressant effect extended into the Western Canadian Sedimentary basin.

Now when organic material sinks below two thousand meters, heat, water and pressure combine to convert this material into oil. When this oil is formed it then migrates upward to the surface unless trapped by sealed strata. In practice most of this oil escapes back into the surface environment leaving a scant remnant behind, which is the source of all our oil industry. During the million-year life of the polar ice sheet the eastern edge of the sedimentary basin was pushed down, sending a huge thickness of organic bearing strata into the oil production zone. As a result the produced oil came to the surface and was initially preserved by the extreme conditions associated with the high latitudes. These today form the Canadian Tar Sands, which today represents a possible twenty percent of the global oil reserve.

On an optimistic note, related subsurface heavy oil deposits in combination with the Tar Sands could approach one trillion barrels of producible reserves. This is as much as has been used globally over the past one hundred years. And the necessary production technique breakthroughs are happening now.

Pleistocene nonconformity - 1

I think it is timely to commence posting excerpts from chapter seven of my book Paradigms Shift. We will end up with a completely different appreciation of the Ice Age than is currently accepted and this will allow us to place global climatic behavior in a much broader perspective. Since the chapter is twenty pages long, I am going to post a page daily. This will let you read often dense material in digestible chunks and also give you a chance to comment. Enjoy.

Chapter 7

The Pleistocene Nonconformity

It is now the time to deal with an extremely important event in human history. Over a period of approximately 3,000 years huge swathes of valuable prime coastal lands were inundated. Whatever came before, was uprooted and destroyed. We simply do not know what was lost. We also do not know precisely how sudden the onset was globally although cultural sources argue strongly for an abrupt transition.

This event, though attracting tremendous speculation thanks to extensive and possibly misleading cultural sources over the years, is also based on a physical fact pattern as compelling as the fact pattern originally supporting Wegener’s continental shift hypothesis before it was confirmed by ocean drilling and magnetic mapping. We will set out to introduce and describe one mechanism capable of causing this event and draw a number of key inferences.

Starting approximately 11,600 years ago we know that the sea rose over 300 feet due to the rapid melting of the northern ice caps. This event happened in two surges about 3,000 years apart. We also know that grain based agriculture appeared spontaneously in the aftermath in several locales globally. Large game populations collapsed and went extinct. Average precipitation on the Greenland ice cap was sharply changed according to the ice core data.

The rise in the sea level, whether slow or catastrophic would have liquidated all coastal antique civilizations such as may have existed. In the event of a slow rise, such civilizations would have lost access to rich delta lands, and would have been forced back onto lands already supporting a more primitive lifeway and rarely capable of supporting any other. In the tropics this meant slash and burn agriculture in the highlands where soil leaching made any other form impractical.

As suggested in the previous chapter, humanity has had the capacity to generate antique civilizations for as much as thirty thousand years. The best and most likely place for first emergence would be on the massive coastal plains in and around the Indonesian archipelago. These coastal plains were all submerged over a three thousand-year span beginning 11,600 years ago. What was a serious inconvenience to the continental based societies was a complete catastrophe to residents of the plains of the South China Sea. They absorbed a complete loss of their homeland leaving only the mountainous rim.

I will go further to suggest that such a coastal plain, fully exploited by agriculture as we described in the last chapter, would be hugely stable and unlikely to generate any prior out emigration with the exception of trading forays. We only have to look at China to see a country that for most of its history was the Promised Land, leading only to nominal out-migration, and then mostly to Southeast Asia.