The idea is that Earth’s climate went through a warming period just over 100,000 years ago that was similar in many ways to the warming now attributed to the actions of man. And the changes during that period were so catastrophic, they spawned massively powerful superstorms, causing violent ocean waves that simply lifted the boulders from below and deposited them atop this cliff.
If this is true, the effort kicking off in Paris this week to hold the world’s nations to strict climate targets may be even more urgent than most people realize....
November 29, 2015
"Another danger of climate change: Giant flying boulders?"
A WaPo headline. Excerpt:
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Is there anything, anything that these 'media' people won’t uncritically echo from the deranged environmental left?
Giant boulder smashed into this post and broke the link.
Huh.
Did people cause all the warming 100,000 years ago, too?
When this theory is true the boulders will have to share the skies with all the flying pigs.
Oh. good lord.
On global warming the Left has moved past parody. Flying boulders? Laughable.
ISIS killed hundreds in Paris. Global warming has been predicted to cause all sorts of problems for at least 20 years and global temps are flat. They never give a date when the big events are to happen and the horribles are always at some vague future date when we will all be living under Sharia law anyway.
I think that all you need to know here is that the driving force here is the infamous James Hanson. And, it is still galling that he was paid for a number of years by NASA (i.e. our govt.) No wonder they don't have enough money to go back into space, with squandering what they have on this sort of nonsense (as well as Muslim outreach). The longer the stall in global warming, the more desperate the proponents get to push how horrible things are going to get thanks to the, apparently non-existent, anthropogenic global warming. Or, now, Climate Change, which is what they are now calling the snake oil that used to be global warming, but can't be, because it hasn't been warming.
And, notice here that the article starts with the observation that it used to be much warmer on this planet, and that Hanson thinks that these huge rocks are the result of this (non-anthropogenic) global warming. So, we should panic that part of anthropogenic global climate change could result in this sort of tragedy. Notice the switch here - from (paused) global warming to global climate change. Something might happen because of global warming, but since we don't have global warming, they will just attribute it to global climate change instead, in order to justify continuing panicking the American public (and those of the rest of the 1st world).
This sort of thing happens constantly in the climate debates. Or, I should call it statist climate advocacy. The research involves global warming. But, that isn't happening any more, so the same research is used to justify global climate change. Of course, global warming can be falsified, and arguably was. Anthropogenic global climate change cannot, which is why it is so attractive to its advocates. If there is more rain, or less rain, more hurricanes, or fewer, warmer weather, or cooler, it is all proof of anthropogenic global climate change. But, since it cannot be falsified, it isn't a scientific theory, but rather, merely a strategy for advocacy wrapped up to look like science.
Bad link.
"If this is true, the effort kicking off in Paris this week to hold the world’s nations to strict climate targets may be even more urgent than most people realize...."
And if not true, just another example of alarmists perpetuating the biggest hoax in history against all mankind.
We've been through periods of hysteria before, but this one has the potential to wreck the world. The two great destructive influences of our day are religious: Islam and environmentalism, and both are determined to destroy western civilization. Barring reform from within these movements, they will succeed, each in its own way.
1) Where's the evidence weather is becoming more severe?
2) There is in practice no such thing as a carbon cap:
Carbon emissions are the product of growth in gross domestic product and of the technologies of energy consumption and production. More precisely, this relationship is called the Kaya Identity – after Yoichi Kaya, the Japanese scientist who first proposed it in the 1980s.
Thus, by definition, a “carbon cap” necessarily means that a government is committing to either a cessation of economic growth or to the systematic advancement of technological innovation in energy systems on a predictable schedule, such that economic growth is not constrained. Because halting economic growth is not an option, in China or anywhere else, and because technological innovation does not occur via fiat, there is in practice no such thing as a carbon cap.
-Roger Pielke Jr.
Bruce Hayden
James Hanson and Congressman Steve King are from the same town in Iowa. I think they were high school classmates.
Killing the satire business.
What's left for them.
Technically, I suppose the global warming 100,000 years ago was Neanderthal-caused, not human-caused. Not that they weren't warned by some: "Fire bad; eat raw."
Sadly, The ability of the climatistas to parody themselves is overshadowing all opportunities for mocking them.
"If this is true"
You see how they do it? Very clever, those Prog alarmists.
Manbearpig!
Guess the rich lefties will be selling off their oceanfront properties now ... right?
MadisonMan will be along any minute now to explain how global warming is totes true.
@MadisonMan, Meade pointed you out as a person who understands Global Climate Change. What's your take? Can wind make boulders fly? Or are Hanson and Obama bat-shit crazy?
Bruce Hayden, I think you go too far when you say global warming "isn't happening any more." None of the models predicted the, by now decades long, slowdown of increase--indicating that they are, at best, too simple. But there is still an upward trend.
Ronald Bailey, one of the best science reporters working today, passes along satellite data every month (on Hit and Run, the blog of the libertarian Reason Foundation). His most recent such post is
https://reason.com/blog/2015/11/03/hottest-october-in-satellite-record-glob
Sebastian said...
"If this is true"
Little brother to "some scientists believe..."
It is very difficult to believe that people who have no problem with $500 billion dollar annual deficits and believe the Social Security money 'is there' are actually concerned about what happens next week, never mind two decades or two centuries from now.
over 100,000 years ago
Boy, that was a close one!
You know the funny thing? The polar bears easily survived the Eemian, which was much warmer than today for thousands of years.
But there is still an upward trend.
The arbitrarily chosen endpoints and time frames define 'trends.' Choose a thousand years ago and we have a downward trend. Choose two thousand years ago, 8 thousand years ago, all downward trends. Choose the depths of the Little Ice Age and we are all gonna die!
The concept of a 'trend' proving anything about data presupposes that we understand the data, and we then we use the arbitrarily defined 'trend' to prove that we understand the data. The 70's when the satellite era began was the coldest time in the decade. How about if a prediction that would show, for instance, something that was highly unlikely to be a natural cycle? Well, fortunately for us, the warmies made such a prediction, that the stratosphere would cool! And you know what? It hasn't! So if it is still getting hotter, it is due to more incoming radiation, maybe solar, maybe albedo changes, not to any trapping of heat.
"ALIENS."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/11/28/oceans/
The last interglacial was a little warmer than ours, according to what I have read before.
Now, prior to our current ice age, 3 million years ago and more, when the global temperatures indeed were much warmer than even in the optimums of the interglacials, plant and animal life thrived all over the globe in the more benign climates then prevalent, according to the biologists, zoologists, etc.
Hansen, incidentally, is reported to have become a multi-millionaire from his books and lectures on the hazards of "global warming."
10 years ago the NOAA contructed new climate testing sites accross the US specifically to remove any question of transient man made readings. As such these stations are in some pretty remote places. To date they have recorded no evidence of warming.
None.
Soooo.
Who ya gonna believe?
The alarmists have never adjusted to the fact that they lost the debate after ClimateGate. Exposed as charlatans, their only hope is to continue doubling down, waiting for an uptick in warming. If that happens, they will be "proven right". Luckily, Americans know the value of their hysteria, causing the alarmists to move the goalposts from man made global warming to global warming to climate change. Since everybody knows the climate changes, the alarmists have a "winning" project name but a losing debate.
If we've seen this before, it will probably happen again. Postponing the inevitable by a century by destroying the world's economy isn't the answer. We need to figure out how to live through. Quit building windmills and start building bunkers, I say.
These reports of temperature readings should be scrutinized as to the details which are rarely given and few people have either the competence or the patience to do it anyway, but I just read a small article somewhere the other day that said that the data, without the "adjustments" made by Hansen et al., show that temperatures peaked around 1940-50 and have cooled lightly since.
This may, of course, be only the peak of this 1,000 year cycle, it does not mean the peak of our interglacial, which apparently occurred 9-11,000 years ago.
Human caused global warming is a hoax.
"The polar bears will be fine" -- Freeman Dyson
In search of a cause...
Shall I tell you my instinct on this?
...Black militants!
Come on, Harry, so we were wrong.
"Hookers" moved the boulders after all?
And the changes during that period were so catastrophic, they spawned massively powerful superstorms, causing violent ocean waves that simply lifted the boulders from below and deposited them atop this cliff.
My M.S. in Geology was simply wasted.
Of all the potential explanations for the boulders on Eleuthera--erosion, meteorites, etc.--Hansen and Hearty decide that a storm-generated monster tsunami is the most plausible. Since when do hurricanes trigger tsunamis?
I don't care anymore.
"Anymore"? Actually, I never cared.
From the above link to an article in reason on satellite measurements: "..registered the third largest deviation from seasonal norms..."
Of course, this is pure bullshit. The problem being that the specific satellite measurements have been made for a very short period of time; so short that they have no statistical basis to calculate any valid deviation. (It doesn't matter if there has been satellite measurements since 1978, those measurements have differed in how they were done and what, exactly, they are measuring.)
The other problem is that the temperatures have been adjusted.
A final point is that if you measure atmospheric CO2 now using the same methods as in the early nineteenth century, the concentration IS LOWER today than in 1827 (and in 1940.) This is extremely well documented and complete ignored.
It's the opposite of the Animal House scene with Kevin Bacon saying "Remain calm, all is well, nothing to see here."
President Impotent can't get more than 3% of Americans to share his viewpoint about climate change, the most important issue he thinks Americans and the world face.
I give Obama credit for having the GOP congress get the blame for the $8T in new debt under his leadership, true leading from behind and what Trump will do times 1000.
And yet, all is quiet on the climate system front in a semi-stable world. Perhaps this is the calm before the histrionics. Or we are in the eye of the JournoListic cycle.
Spinning off CERN's research that cosmic rays increase cloud formation, some guy [who I'm not going to look up] is theorizing that the last 3 million years of ice ages with a periodicity of ~100,000 years is due to our solar system passing through one of the arms of the Milky Way galaxy. Seeing that interglacials are 15 to 30 thousand years long and, as Tim in Vermont pointed out, the temperature trend has been down, I think, again without checking, for 10,000 years since the peak of the Holocene warm period.
Fear the ICE. Do more science, real science.
Bruce Hayden, I think you go too far when you say global warming "isn't happening any more." None of the models predicted the, by now decades long, slowdown of increase--indicating that they are, at best, too simple. But there is still an upward trend.
Maybe, maybe not. It was pointed out above that much of such "trends" revolves around the period of the me utilized. When this scare started, we were apparently near the end of a decade or so warming trend, which essentially falsified the claims of anthropogenic global cooling that we had to sit through back then (I can remember hearing Sen Timmy Wirthless (D-CO) give the same AGC speech three times one year).
But the other part of this is that a lot of the intermediate data seems to have been fudged by our govt in a warming direction over the last couple decades. We mostly don't know how they get from the raw data to the intermediate data that looks fudged. We do know that East Anglia can't reproduce from scratch their temperature database that was used to calibrate the other major climate databases, and we also know that more and more intermediate results are turning out to be rising when the underlying raw data is showing nothing of the sorts. So, yes, I think that the jury is still out here, as to whether there was a little warming, or really none, over the last decade or so. Definitely not enough to justify the panic.
And maybe that is why all these statists and closet fascists have switched from AGW to AGCC. A warming climate with plenty of CO2 is probably beneficial to the earth, and, in particular, humans. More of both equals more plant life, more food, and fewer deaths due to the elements. Rising seas are essentially irrelevant, if true (and they probably aren't), because economic obsolescence of the buildings involved is faster than the theoretical rate of ocean rise. In short, under the more plausible theories of AGW, we would most likely be better off, but there is a remote possibility that we would be worse off. The more we knew about the "science" and the likely probiotics, the less reason there was to panic. But panic was needed to drive all the big government solutions and opportunities for graft being pushed by our betters. So, they switched from AGW to AGCC, which is scarier, since it might mean that we got more of some sort of bad climate events. Maybe if we can't have more or bigger hurricanes, we can have more people freeze, or die of air conditioning failures. Just use your imagination, and pretend that all that global warming research applies to global climate change, whatever that means, as long as it is bad.
I would like to repeat a point made above. There has been measurable warming since the depth of the little ice age. Thank you, Mr. Sun, or whatever the mechanism is.
So, climate hysterics, so what? Overall, there has been measurable cooling since the Holocene.
And the Minoan, Roman, Medieval warm periods were warmer than the modern warming period coming out of our little ice age trough, though each was not as warm than the one before.
Fear the ICE.
The Gaia Religion needs its big miracles too. Faith in Flying Boulders will become the test of true believers.
Merely believing there is a warmer earth while it is getting colder and colder and sea level is falling is nothing. Any brain washed low information fantasist can do that. Flying Boulder dogma is a higher theology for Phds.
When I saw Ann's headline-in-quotes, Another danger of climate change: Giant flying boulders?, I thought that the cause and effect had been reversed.
After all, a large-enough boulder flying into Earth from outside the atmosphere might cause some pretty serious climate change.
Climate change that might have triggered the extinction of most species then living on Earth.
But when I read further, I realized that this wasn't what the article was about.
I stand with George Carlin on this planned redistribution scam.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BB0aFPXr4n4
Hansen seems to be forgetting the key word: "anthropogenic", caused by humans. Whatever happened 100,000 years ago was not caused by humans (or Neanderthals, as a commenter noted above). The global warmists say that it's vitally important that we today focus on anthropogenic climate change; it makes sense because that's the only kind of climate change that the UN and Pres. Obama, etc. can argue we can prevent by changing human activity. There were no coal-fired power plants or Keystone Pipeline 100,000 years ago that could have caused the tsunamis that threw the boulders around on Eleuthra, so replacing the non-existent coal plants with solar or wind power wouldn't have changed the world.
The WaPo story, in addition to being filled with speculation, doesn't address what was the CAUSE of the global climate change 100,000 years ago that Hansen says made “'all hell break[] loose': a collapse of polar ice, quickly rising seas, a shutdown of heat-transporting ocean circulation, and then superstorms spawned by a greater temperature contrast between warm tropics and cold poles." So we are faced with the possibility that we could shut down all the coal-fired power plants, ban fracking, prohibit flying (except for warmists attending conferences), thereby destroying all hope for economic development and relief of global poverty, only to find that the mysterious event that caused the flying boulders 100,000 years ago returned and destroyed our world anyway.
All of human history has occurred during a warm interval in the middle of an ice age. Global warming has been very good for humans.
Any day now...
any day...
Imagine if the trend going into the Little Ice Age had continued. Imagine if there were no "blade" on the hockey stick. We already were seeing the beginnings of glaciation a couple of centuries ago, what if they had continued? Much of the "bread basket" regions of Asia and the Americas would be too cold by now to grow the crops we grow.
It's getting harder and harder to tell the Washington Post from the Onion.
These people are clinically insane.
This Hanson clown is the NASA hotshot who originally explained AGW to Al Gore. I'm afraid his science is a tad unsettled. Got to love this;
"Scientists have long debated how the boulders got where they are now,
Hansen, a retired NASA scientist, and Hearty believe they were catapulted to the top of the cliff from below by ‘violent ocean waves’ caused by powerful superstorms more than 100,000 years ago when the Earth went through a warming period, according to the Washington Post.
The changes to the Earth’s climate then are similar to the global warming taking place right now, the scientists believe.
Hearty, who is an expert on geology in the Bahamas, published his ideas about the boulders in 1997.
Hansen, whose warnings about global warming to the US Congress in 1988 made headlines around the world, has used Hearty’s work as a basis for his grim theories about climate change.
The idea has been doubted by fellow scientists."
Hmmph. Violent ocean wave denialists, every one of them.
"No wonder they don't have enough money to go back into space...."
Oh, they have enough money, (if by "they" you mean the government). The question is: what do "they" consider a more worthwhile expenditure of funds available to them? Apparently, squandering trillions on wanton murder is preferable to spending money on our space program. This can only be because war is more profitable than space exploration.
I just finished a book about the medieval warming period, which climate alarmists usually ignore. However this book did not, but went to great lengths to show it was a great disaster for everywhere but Europe, causing floods and droughts and destroying civilizations around the world. These stretched from South America to Cambodia and beyond. The last chapter explained that this was going to happen to us too if we didn't address climate change aggressively. Not once did the author discuss the obvious question of what caused the medieval warming and why human beings could do anything about a new one--even if there is one.
gbarto said...
If we've seen this before, it will probably happen again. Postponing the inevitable by a century by destroying the world's economy isn't the answer. We need to figure out how to live through. Quit building windmills and start building bunkers, I say
I got a better idea. Much cheaper too. Next spring. Plant a garden. Cultivate some flowers, some veggies. Will it help the planet? I don't know. But, hopefully it will keep people too busy to dwell on shit they can't do anything about.
Blogger Robert Cook said...
"No wonder they don't have enough money to go back into space...."
Oh, they have enough money, (if by "they" you mean the government). The question is: what do "they" consider a more worthwhile expenditure of funds available to them? Apparently, squandering trillions on wanton murder is preferable to spending money on our space program. This can only be because war is more profitable than space exploration.
Jesus, skippy. Give it a rest. Or do us all a favor an stick your head in the oven and turn on the gas. Yo have got to be the second most depressed person I've met.
"I just finished a book about the medieval warming period, which climate alarmists usually ignore."
They do more then ignore it. My understanding is that the medieval warming period must disappear if the warmist's argument is to be believed. That's what Michael Mann's tree rings are all about.
I guess the Washington Post has figured out that no one is paying attention and no one cares about the little boy who cried wolf, so now the little boy is crying "flying dinonsaur" or something. It's just pathetic.
We're all hurtling towards heat death. We may as well enjoy the ride.
Am I the only one frustrated when someone says, "I read an article that said ..." or "I just read a book that said ..." without telling what the book or article is? I have found that books and articles vary greatly in quality.
There is another theory on the Eluthera boulders that is better supported by the geology. That is, they are simply the remnants of the original soft rock formation (ossified dunes). They are what is left behind after the softer material eroded away. http://www.eleuthera-map.com/cow-bull-eleuthera.htm
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