Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica
Blinkered climate obsessives, from protesters to governments, need to wise up about their pet topic. Professor Ian Plimer offers some assistance to trace gas worriers.
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For more than 80 percent of the time, Earth has been a warm wet greenhouse planet with no ice, says Ian Plimer at Spectator AU (via Climate Change Dispatch.
We live in unusual times when ice occurs on continents. This did not happen overnight.
The great southern continent, Gondwanaland, formed about 550 million years ago. It occupied 20 percent of the area of our planet and included Antarctica, South America, Australia, South Africa, and the Indian subcontinent.
Gondwanaland was covered by ice when it drifted across the South Pole 360-255 million years ago. Evidence for this ice age is in the black coal districts of Australia, South Africa, and India.
The breakup of Gondwanaland started about 180 million years ago. About 140-120 million years ago, Australia was joined to Antarctica and enjoyed a temperate climate, had alpine glaciers that shed icebergs into warm seas, and plant and animal adaptations evolved to cope with the long periods of winter darkness.
If Antarctica is to lose its ice sheets to end the current ice age, plate tectonics must move the continent northwards or fragment Antarctica into smaller land masses.
Parts of Antarctica are currently being fragmented which is why there are more than 150 hot spots and volcanoes in rift valleys beneath Antarctic ice. Plate tectonics must also widen the Bering Strait to allow more warm Pacific Ocean water to enter and warm the Arctic.
Australia separated from Antarctica 100 million years ago and continues to move northwards at 7 centimeters per year. The current ice age started when South America separated from Antarctica some 34 million years ago.
Plate tectonics isolated Antarctica after South America had moved northwards and the Drake Passage formed. Circumpolar currents formed and prevented warm, southward-moving water from reaching Antarctica. As a result, the Antarctic ice sheets formed.
Arctic ice formed 2.5 million years ago when plate tectonic-driven volcanoes in central America joined North America to South America and stopped Pacific and Atlantic Ocean waters from mixing.
This was exacerbated by a supernova explosion that bombarded Earth with cosmic particles to produce cloudiness and cooling.
The Earth has been slowly cooling for the last 50 million years from times when life thrived and rapidly diversified.
In these warmer times, there were no mass extinctions due to natural warming and, if the planet is warming today, the past shows us that life will thrive and diversify even more.
Once the Antarctic ice formed, ice sheets waxed and waned depending on whether the Earth was closer or more distant from the Sun.
Within these cycles, there were smaller cycles driven by variations in energy emitted from the Sun producing many short warm spikes during long glaciations and very short cold spikes during short interglacials with average temperature rises and falls of more than 10°C a decade.
On a scale of tens of millions of years or more, the Earth’s climate is driven by plate tectonics.
On a scale of hundreds of thousands of years, the Earth’s climate is driven by orbital cycles which bring Earth closer to or more distant from the Sun.
On a scale of thousands of years to decades, the Earth’s climate is driven by variations in energy emitted from the Sun.
If governments, the UN, or climate activists want to stop the normal planetary process of climate change, then they need to stop plate tectonics, stop variations in the Earth’s orbit and stop variations in solar output. Even the omnipotent, omnipresent Kevin Rudd couldn’t manage this!
Continued here.
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I’m unconvinced the primary driver of short term variation is the sun. There’s plenty of evidence that what we see can simply be random – I’ve seen computer generated random walks that replicate “climate change”. And until we know what drives the larger cycles such as the AMO, it’s impossible to disentangle any signal of the sun.
[…] What Climate Crisis? A Primer On Earth’s Turbulent Climatic Past […]
This article by Ian Plimer contains statements that contradict head-on available data. Specifically, he says:
“On a scale of tens of millions of years or more, the Earth’s climate is driven by plate tectonics.”
There is no evidence supporting such a claim! There has been little change in the position and coastal lines of continents over the past 50 My. Yet, the Earth surface has cooled by about 15 – 20 C. The real cause of this cooling was the net loss of atmospheric mass to Space and the resulting depressurization of Earth’s surface, which reduced the adiabatic thermal enhancement.
“On a scale of hundreds of thousands of years, the Earth’s climate is driven by orbital cycles which bring Earth closer to or more distant from the Sun.”
No data or quantitative relationships exist to support this notion either! See this blog article for details: Dispelling the Milankovitch Myth.
Again, the geological evidence supports the hypothesis that periodic changes of total surface atmospheric pressure were the real driver of the Ice Ages. Watch this video for details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpUkPPtkPVc
“On a scale of thousands of years to decades, the Earth’s climate is driven by variations in energy emitted from the Sun.”
The sensitivity of Earth’s climate to changes in Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) reaching the top of Earth’s atmosphere is about 0.05 K/(W m-2). The variation of the mean annual TSI on a scale of thousands of years to decades is in the order of 0.15% or +/-2.0 W m-2. This implies that Earth’s global surface temperature varies in response to TSI changes in the amount of +/-0.1 K, which is insignificant… On a scale of decades to centuries, Earth’s climate is controlled by variations of global cloud albedo, which are directly or indirectly induced by Sun’s magnetic activity.
‘No past warming events have been driven by an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. No past cooling events were driven by a decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Six of the six most recent ice ages were initiated when the Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide was far higher than at present. Atmospheric temperature rise occurs before the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere rises.’ – Prof. Plimer
When TSI is mentioned as above,are the radiation strengths of the UV and IR w.r.t. the differential heating of the oceans,measured in any way.
I am thinking of more or less sunspots,and consequently more or less heating of the oceans to different levels,which may change weather patterns.
It’s the solar flares that can reach Earth.
‘Flares tend to occur near sunspots’
https://www.thoughtco.com/solar-flares-4137226
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