The stupid, it burns. OTOH, he’s with Gore and Hansen and there’s press with him, so maybe he’s just being sociable . Get a load of this from Richard Branson’s blog, CO2 can apparently contradict solar forcing due to the Earth’s precession wobble and orbit:
Here’s the money quote:
The good news is we now know how to heat up the world. We just release an excess of carbon into it. So any time we’re heading to an ice age again that is what we can do to stop it.
Yeah, sure, that’ll go over well with the people that think Branson, Gore, and Hansen are heroes. And walking from Scotland to North Africa? Really?
But I agree with Sir Richard on one point; warmth is far preferable to an ice sheet. You can’t dodge ice sheets but you can take steps to stay cool.
If wishes were airplanes, CAGW would fly.
================
Maybe Virgin Air should stop leaving all that co2 in the atmosphere. He should ground all of his jets if he believes that crap.
How *does* he get on with Burt Rutan??
I don’t think Sir Richard is right, regarding this part of his blog comment:
“If you look at the history of the world we are normally in an ice age. Only 10,000 years ago you could walk from Scotland to North Africa on hundreds of feet of ice. When it melted sea levels rose by hundreds of feet.”
Aside from the fact that 10,000 years ago we were already out of the last ice age, let that one go, was the Mediterranean ever covered with ice, or at least the narrow passage from Gibraltar to Morocco? Perhaps I’m wrong, wouldn’t be the first time, but can someone tell us whether it is true that ice went to North Africa in the last ice age?
Well, you’ve got to admit, he and we will be long dead before he is found to be wrong, so there is little downside for him.
The graph above indicates “eccentricity” is trending down. Given Branson, Hansen and Gore’s beliefs, shouldn’t that be going up sharply? 😉
I cannot find anything showing that the ice sheets extended to North Africa. How does someone that inept become so wealthy?
Or we could get Branson, Gore, and Hansen to release a lot of hot air, that might warm the climate up.
cui bono says:
How *does* he get on with Burt Rutan??
That is a good question.
Got a map of extent of ice caps at different times in the last ice age. Bottom line: even at the height of the last ice age, not even southern England was covered with ice, and certainly the Mediterranean was not. See:
http://donsmaps.com/icemaps.html
Thus Sir Richard, in saying that you could walk from Scotland to North Africa on hundreds of feet of ice 10,000 years ago (when the ice age was already over) or indeed at any time in the last ice age, is a very uninformed statement (see my comment of 9:40 AM for what Sir Richard said)..
So Branson is a believer in Geoengineering:
“If we move quickly and get on top of this issue we could regulate the earth’s temperature so that we need never go back into another ice age. And have the best of all worlds.”
So he’s trying to resurrect Carbon Capture and Storage, but with a twist:
Kind of like “catch and release”, I suppose.
Is he serious? (and we thought biofuels for airplanes was silly idea).
Kurt in Switzerland
My area of southern England is literred with gravel pits – and as Richard Branson was almost certainly told when he was at school in southern England, these are basically massive terminal moraines dropped close to the southern extent of glaciers in recent ice ages.
North Africa? Total bollux!
John,
Actually it appears that due to the drop in sea level the Straits of Gibraltar was dry during part of the ice age. So no ice to walk over but probably dry land.
I see he purposely said carbon instead of carbon dioxide.
How in the future will this carbon be released when ancient carbon fuel sources become scarce in the future, by burning down all the forests ?
Twat Branson. He is another one with houses everywhere and aircraft to fly him there for weekends.
“Only 10,000 years ago you could walk from Scotland to North Africa on hundreds of feet of ice. “
I’m no ice-age-ologist, but I believe the European ice sheets didn’t extend much south of the latitude of London during the last ice age, save for an isolated ice sheet over the Alps. In other words, you certainly could not walk on ice all of the way to North Africa.
Branson doesn’t need to be smart. He just needs to be smarter than average.
Being a greenie is profitable, it’s happy-face PR, and it makes him feel good in side. Why would he want to look any closer than that. And once you are committed, you are committed. No going back. No saying “oops”. Just fight to prove that whatever you said last year is still true.
if idiots could fly, we would never see the sun again. It will cloudy the whole day long…
Russ in Houston says:
February 1, 2012 at 9:43 am
. . . . inept become so wealthy?”
He started by selling music. Excellent training as a climate scientist! As they say, the rest is history.
People like Branson, Gore, etc. should learn to keep their mouths shut – the stench is overwhelming.
Let us judge ahr-Richard not by what he is saying, but by what he is doing: He has an airline, a Formula 1 team, and planes that fly into outer space. Now we know why: He wants to prevent the next ice age.
Would Trenberth say Sir Richard should leave climate risk assessment to the experts?
I am reminded of the H.P. Lovecraft tale, “At the Mountains of Madness”.
From Branson’s 1st Antarctica blog:
http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/antarctica-log-1–first-24-hours-at-sea
“So at our next OceanElders meeting we will debate how the climate can be policed better and how krill can be protected.”
“OceanElders” include Branson, Jackson Browne, Neil Young and Ted Turner…
These are to be the world’s new climate “police”?
Branson’s 2nd posting included this:
http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/antarctica-log-2–no-lie-can-live-forever
“As Jim Hansen the scientist said on this ship: ‘We cannot continue to burn all the coal, oil from the tar sands without pushing the planet out of control. It’s time to stop subsidising fossil fuels. The quickest way of solving the problem is to tax all fossil fuels and distribute the taxes back to every man and woman in the country. Within 10 years we’d have a 30% reduction in fuel use and begin to get on top of this most worrying of problems.’ ”
There you have it from “Hansen the scientist” – socialistic taxes can solve climate change….end of problem….
I’m so glad he sold Virgin Music in 1992. So I can buy their records without regrets.
They did not need to travel to Antarctica for this, they knew what they were going to report before they left. I would not be surprised if they actually did not go at all, perhaps they traveled to Bransons Caribean retreat, had a few martinis, stood in front of a green-screen and acted like they were surounded by penguins.
Remind me not to buy any of Bransons Virgin products.
Branson and Gore, the Brothers Grimm.
Great bearded loon and a complete p*i*k known in the UK as a plonker.
I thought this was a science website, not more publicity for an odious, grinning, bearded see you next….
saltspringson says (February 1, 2012 at 10:08 am)
Branson’s 2nd posting included this:
The quickest way of solving the problem is to tax all fossil fuels and distribute the taxes back to every man and woman in the country.
—————
So we should increase the tax on Virgin Airlines jet fuel by 10,000% Mr. Branson? I await my share of the proceeds with eager anticipation.
And, of course, the predictable ice-free SUMMER pictures of poor helpless penguins wallowing in guano. What a crock.
Like Warren Buffet, Branson’s wealth is secure, so maybe it’s natural for him to want to keep others out of his exclusive domain in the stratosphere.
Raising carbon and other taxes (on others) will help keep all those rising young entrepeneurs off his turf.
“If you look at the history of the world we are normally in an ice age.”
If the “we” is modern humans, that is a reasonable statement. If “we” refers to life on earth, the statement is utterly wrong. The history of the world includes much more elapsed time when it was suitable to grow avocadoes here in Washington State where I live (we have the fossils to prove it!). The bit about ice between N. Africa and Scotland, that is just plain wrong any way you look at it. The relationship between glacial epochs, interglacials, ice ages, and CAGW has long been my primary interest in climate issues. For years, no one was bold/crazy enough to claim that we could stop the next ice age. Now you commonly hear it. If there was ever an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof, that would be it!
saltspringson says:
February 1, 2012 at 10:08 am
“Branson’s 2nd posting included this:
http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/antarctica-log-2–no-lie-can-live-forever
“As Jim Hansen the scientist said on this ship: ‘We cannot continue to burn all the coal, oil from the tar sands without pushing the planet out of control. It’s time to stop subsidising fossil fuels. The quickest way of solving the problem is to tax all fossil fuels and distribute the taxes back to every man and woman in the country. “”
One of the countries that subsidizes gasoline for their people down to 10 cents or so is… Iran. Good luck convincing them, Richard. You’ll need it.
David Larsen says:
February 1, 2012 at 9:32 am
Maybe Virgin Air should stop leaving all that co2 in the atmosphere. He should ground all of his jets if he believes that crap.
I have said the same many times in the past. If you truly believe that CO2 is a threat then stop doing anything that adds to the threat. Ford should stop making cars, Branson stop flying planes, Gore should move into a cave, etc. But true believers only want me to stop not them.
Doggerland: Brian Fagan, Professor of Archaeology at the University of California [says]: “Ten thousand years ago the southern North Sea was a marshy plain where elk and deer wandered… England was part of the continent until as recently as 6000 BC when rising sea levels caused by post ice age warming filled the North sea.” In:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/12/historic-variations-in-sea-levels-part-1-from-the-holocene-to-romans/
Interesting.
There are even Presidents and Ministers out there with him and Gore, in Antarctica.
I have compiled a list of the known green religious out there:
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2012/01/gore-na-antarctida.html
Still far from the 116, but everyone can help finding more of them…
Ecotretas
Oh my. Anyone with an ego less colossal than Branson’s would cringe at such a public and easily avoided error (the man has minions galore who could have vetted his statement for accuracy, eg by consulting even Wikipedia for about 30 seconds on the ice thing).
But it’s all water of a duck’s back for him – entrepreneurial businessmen are not noted for their capacity for shame or commitment to accuracy.
That’s why there is almost no overlap between the 2 subsets of humanity known as scientists and entrepreneurial businessmen.
Hansen: “The quickest way of solving the problem is to tax all fossil fuels and distribute the taxes back to every man and woman in the country.”
So, first you tax us for our fossil fuel use. Then you give us the money back. Then we can use it to buy petrol for our cars. Is this some kind of co2-cycle?
Who has a bigger carbon footprint than Branson, Gore?
Street trader propaganda par excellence. Resiiist! Resiiist!
Branson is repeating a widespread claim (which, I must confess, I believed until today) that la Gomera in the Canaries is the sole surviving subtropical forest from the Tertiary Period; that all vegetation north of la Gomera was wiped out and has subsequently regrown.
Is there a blogger out there who can pin down the truth of the matter and the source of the Gomera myth if that’s what it is?
ddpalmer:
The Mediterranean Sea *was* once dry, but it refilled itself 5.3 million years ago. You may be confounding this with the Isthmus of Dover (featuring an ice bridge from Kent to Artois) , which was breached by the English Channel Flood about 400,000 years ago – still long before humans arrived.
Branson tweeted the title of him 2nd blog – “no lie can last forever”
My reply? “Like Jim Hansens”
Branson’s Formula One team finished dead last two years running, beaten even by a Spanish squad with barely any funds. Branson’s team soley used computer simulations to design the car and measure its performance. The team recently announced they are buying a windtunnel because the computer simulations are just not working out.
“So any time we’re heading to an ice age again that is what we can do to stop it.”
Whoa! So Branson is a man after my own heart! I, too, believe we should liberate more of our imprisoned CO2 into the atmosphere!
“And walking from Scotland to North Africa? Really?”
Well, you can’t do it on ice, but in principle that can be done today: Scotland to England to France (via Channel Tunnel) across Europe to Turkey and across the Bosphorus Bridge (I had to Google that one) south to the Sinai and across the Suez Canal Bridge (had to Google that one, too) to Africa. Easy peasy.
Branson is a famous dyslexic. Bet he has trouble with fellow travelers Tokyo Sexwale, Yao Tandong and Rosina Bierbaum come blog time.
Quaternary glaciation in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa
http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/geography/staff/documents/Morocco_Glaciation_Hughes_et_al_2004.pdf
To a still lesser extent glaciers existed in Africa, for example in the High Atlas, the mountains of Morocco, the Mount Atakor massif in southern Algeria, and several mountains in Ethiopia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_glacial_period
So there must have been glaciers in the north of Africa. Did they close the Straits of Gibraltar , I don’t know but I don’t think so .
The Straits of Gibraltar is now 700m deep so a sea level drop of 120m would not be enough to create dry land.
Russ in Houston says:
February 1, 2012 at 9:43 am
I cannot find anything showing that the ice sheets extended to North Africa. How does someone that inept become so wealthy?
He is clearly very successful at one thing – amassing money. Just like Al Gore and Bono, adept at parting people from their money whilst making sure that said people feel good about it, so that he can return later to further rummage around in their trouser pockets for any loose change he may have missed the first time. It’s marketing, and I agree with the late, great Bill Hicks on the subject of marketing.
Uh oh…whenever they make a bold pronouncement like this, usually the EXACT OPPOSITE is what occurs. I guess we’re headed for another Ice Age 🙁
It’s summer down there. I wonder if Hansen and Branson (nice rhyme) are running around in their Speedos roasting to death. I hope they remembered to take the Coppertone suntan oil.
“If you look at the history of the world we are normally in an ice age”
Making the suggestion that our planets natural state is a ball of ice to lay the blame of the observed interglacial warming on anthropogenic carbon dioxide is a dishonest and very transparent publicity stunt, I wasn’t convinced by the first 30 years of lies promoting the weak idea of AGW, changing the parameters of the argument every year is very reveling of how weak their position is, we’ll be decades into an ice age before the hard core element of AGW admits that they are wrong.
The rest of the world (frozen or not) will have moved on!
The sad thing is that these guys have so much influence on politics and media.
Ultra liberal moviemaker Camerron will now move to and settle in New Zealand as the US is falling apart after 2 decades of big money, big philantrophists, big hollywood and big government.
Poor New Zealand, these people should stay where they are and contributed so much to change for the worse with their gigantic political footprints.
Breathing all that rarified air at the top of the global entrepreneurial mountain has left Sir Richard seeking new challenges. Despot, deity or crusader? Only the latter remains acceptable these days, so sadly we’re stuck with his grandstanding nonsense, and that of his successors
From the above link to his web site.
“The bad news is that we’re are in danger of releasing so much carbon that we could fry our beautiful earth and our great-grandchildren too.”
Ah yes, fried grandchildren! Personally, I prefer bacon. 🙂
Branson is a capo di tutti of the biofuels mob whose quest for bio-jetfuel has aided in worldwide starvation, deforestation and the deaths and land confiscation of farmers trying to grow food instead of biofuels. Here we see him hard at work researching and advocating for the end of global warming.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/04/20/article-1171739-04888F37000005DC-717_470x419.jpg
He certainly seems to fit right in with others that are enriching themselves (Al Gore) while enjoying an excessive wealth driven standard of living from occupations that spew thousands of tons of CO2. The only “bit_h slapping” of Mother Earth that is comparable to Branson’s fleets of CO2 spewing jets, would be if Branson set of the Amazon Forest on fire. What morons in the global warming movement looked at Branson and thought, “Hey this guy would be the perfect choice to represent a movement to reduce CO2”?
Andy says.
Branson doesn’t need to be smart. He just needs to be smarter than average.
Being a greenie is profitable, it’s happy-face PR, and it makes him feel good in side. Why would he want to look any closer than that. And once you are committed, you are committed. No going back. No saying “oops”. Just fight to prove that whatever you said last year is still true.
Thats it really, You’ve got to think about what make sense.Imagine if he was a denier!! He’d have a lot more enemies accusing him of polluting world with all his carbon burning aircraft.
As for not grounding them all, he was asked that recently and his response was, “BA would simply take up the slack!
I was that kind of greeny once, but with no financial interest in it, I’m free to consider the evidence.
Repent, Richard! Sell your evil tar sands burning airplanes, boats and cars! Swear off the big tar sands burning cruise liner that is taking you to the paradise of cold! REPENT!
I just don’t get it. It is ok for them to do, not us.
More Richard please…keep on message…keep the messages coming.
Given the widespread and intense loathing of Richard Branson (have you ‘ever’ met anyone who says they like him?) and the fact that he is a shameless self publicist and noted hypocrite….every time he opens that odious hole of a mouth – the Global Warming scare dies off a little faster!
From Maggie L. Fox’s blog:
‘We have just listened to an inspiring talk from Jill Bolte-Taylor, who speaks of tending the garden of the mind. Jill says, “I care about the climate crisis because I care about mental health.”
She sees the climate crisis as a projection of our mental health. “If we can help shift our society to being more in the present and focusing on the relationship between things,” she says, “then we can communicate at a different level and work toward solutions.”’
—
BS psychobabble as well as climatebabble. Are there any sane normal fare-paying passengers on this cruise? If so, has anyone jumped overboard yet?
“Come back, I want to tend the garden of your mind!” Pompous simpleton.
I think Branson has a valid point — According to two recent survey articles by Dana Royer, during most of the past 550 million (not thousand) years, CO2 was in the range 1000-3000 ppm. During only two episodes — the past few million years and the late Carboniferous-early Permian period — did it fall below 500 ppm, and according to Royer, both of these were periods of repeated ice ages.
It’s hard to say whether low CO2 is causing coolness through a reduced GHG effect or whether coolness is causing low CO2 through oceanic absorption (or both). However, Royerestimates that less than 500 ppm is required for glaciation, and that below 1000 is relatively cool.
This suggests that if we can CO2 above 500 ppm, it might stave off or at least delay the next glaciation. There may be a solar trigger as Anthony suggests, but clearly a warmer earth will be less susceptible.
Unlike a little warming that makes present-day wastelands like Siberia and Minnesota actually habitable, 😉 having a KM or more of ice over N Am and N Europe would be a true environmental disaster.
Of course, it may be that no matter how hard we pump out CO2, the biosphere and oceans will eventually start gobbling it up, but it sounds like it’s worth a shot to try to “correct” the current (past few million years) abnormally low CO2.
Of course the solution is not government action to encourage CO2 production, but rather government inaction to allow people to use the cheapest fuel they can find. I’d be concerned if CO2 threatened to pass 1000 ppm, but we’ll be out of fossil fuels long before then.
Note that CO2 in the geohistorically normal range 1000-3000 ppm is perfectly consistent with healthy corals, planktons and mollusks, since most of that limestone we see everwhere was laid down under these conditions. Some species may move north if the oceans warm, but life will go on.
Richard: Only 10,000 years ago you could walk from Scotland to North Africa on hundreds of feet of ice.!
Al: Yes, then the rocks under the surface of the Earth were warmed to 10 million degrees!
Richard: The good news is we now know how to heat up the world.
Al: Yes, we can convert carbon credits to degrees and inject them in the Earth!
Richard: If we move quickly and get on top of this issue we could regulate the earth’s temperature so that we need never go back into another ice age.
Al: Yes, purchase and dontate some carbon credits to Redi-Heat at http://www.redi-heat.com/fleeceme
Richard: Work to do!
Al: Yes, Act Now!!! Visa, Master Card and Paypal are accepted.
O M G ! ! ! What-was-that ! ! !
A communist?
A nazzi?
A fascist?
No, just another kind of paradoxical socialist extremist fundamentalist, Sir Environmentalist to the rescue: Save the planet b(u)y rocket fuel to the stars!
Stock photography proves that ice is a thing of the past and that women like to laugh while eating salad alone: http://thehairpin.com/2011/01/women-laughing-alone-with-salad
Al: Yes, purchase and dontate some carbon credits to Redi-Heat at
Andrew, don’t worry about the mis-spell Branson is not only niave but also dislexic
Charles Gerard Nelson says:
February 1, 2012 at 11:33 am
His children are just as self-centred and arrogant.
I’ll say it again: “Al Gore, Richard Branson and Jim Hansen go to Antarctica…” sounds like the setup for a joke… because it is.
From Nature mag
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101022/full/news.2010.558.html?s=news_rss
“Climate change caused by black carbon, also known as soot, emitted during a decade of commercial space flight would be comparable to that from current global aviation, researchers estimate. The findings, reported in a paper in press in Geophysical Research Letters, suggest that emissions from 1,000 private rocket launches a year would persist high in the stratosphere, potentially altering global atmospheric circulation and distributions of ozone. The simulations show that the changes to Earth’s climate could increase polar surface temperatures by 1 deg C, and reduce polar sea ice by 5-15%.”
Whah! Better ground your tourist spacecraft as well as your airplanes, Richard, before you Destroy The Planet!
I think Sir Richard is confusing history with movie…
“…everything from 30° north and south of the equator turns to absolute zero (–273°C) turning the Southern United States, Mexico, Central America, north of South America, and Africa into an ice desert…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Zero_%28film%29
A good flick for the cruise.
Branson Hansen and Gore
(Oh my!)
http://s158.photobucket.com/albums/t81/thatsanicepicture/CAGW/?action=view¤t=BransonHansenandGore.jpg
John:
Yes we can tell that ice did NOT extend to Africa at the last glacial MAXIMUM. You could have walked from Scotland to North Africa on dry land, but not on ice. There is a map of sea level in my post at http://suspectterrane.blogspot.com/2010/04/neanderthal.html
at the end of the post. You can see that lowered sea level allowed one to make that trek. What we must understand however, is that 10,000 years ago was NOT glacial maximum for the Wisconsin glacial epoch. Glacial maximum occurred about 18,000 years ago and ablation reached what we now consider an interglacial stage (the Holocene – see http://suspectterrane.blogspot.com/2011/10/anthrop-obscene.html) at 11,500 years ago.
He is wrong, but we have to chalk it up to the usual sloppy, loose, sound-bite, headline grabbing hyperbole typical of Gore and his ilke.Remeber that according to St Gore the Earth is several million degrees hot just a few kilometers below its surface.
A little true story about Richard:
Many years ago when Richard was planning to fly across the Pacific as a passenger in a balloon, he approached a mate of mine who worked for him at his airline. Richard wanted to find an aeroplane and pilot who could fly up to the balloon, fly alongside it and resupply it in flight. Ah well!
The moral of the story is, if you suspect the oncoming of another ice age, then it would be good to get yourself a set of skates.
R. Shearer says:
February 1, 2012 at 10:43 am
Bigfoot. And people take him just as serious.
The ignorant/stupid wealthy, how society loves to associate wealth/popularity with the property of some sort of knowledge and insight. Branson is one of many where society confuses wealth with intelligence, keeping in mind some very high IQ types can say and do some incredibly ignorant unwise things.
@Brent Hargreaves:
Well, a moment of web searching shows it’s easy to find lots of remnants of the prior forest type outside the Islands:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauroide
You might also want to look through:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_forest
which covers more global forests of the same type (but various species) for a list of overlapping species to asses just how MUCH of the Lauroide is compose of unique species and how much is just an isolate of a broad type…
As to where rumors start, well, I suggest checking at the UN and WWF…
OT
SIDC Sunspot number for January is down at 58 from Dec 73 and Nov 96
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC7a.htm
It is highly unlikely ice came further south than 40 degrees N during ice ages and probably less in the southern hemisphere.
I can find no reference to glaciers reaching N Africa – It seems that glaciers did not extend into southern England and half of Germany remained ice free.
So walking to Africa ??
I don’t know what “god complex” Sir Richard suffers from but I doubt he can walk on water.
Another alarmist pronouncementeasily debunked a simple search.
Here’s a link to a website with all kinds of Ice Age material
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercEUROPE.html
formerpilot says:
February 1, 2012 at 12:09 pm
Richard wanted to find an aeroplane and pilot who could fly up to the balloon, fly alongside it and resupply it in flight.
—————————————————————
That might work with a nicely executed hammerhead stall… for a brief second….
Although, the balloon would probably get sucked into the engines, along with the gondola.
bye bye resupply.
The English channel and strait of Gibraltar where probably dry during the last glacial. I think that’s what he means. 🙂
Oh, my bad. He actually wrote ice! 😀
Why isn’t Dick heading over with his mate Burt Rutan, so Burt can hammer some sense into him ?
Another “Sir” who should be stripped of his knighthood, on the grounds that he’s too stoopid to be a knight of the realm.
They do breed em thick as the proverbial in the warmist camp.
He’s a business man, hunting for opportunities: geoVIRGINeering could become another big thing
At last I can take a stand against this corrupt cartel! I can’t stop funds getting to Hansen, or Gore, but I can boycott Virgin, and so can you!
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/StopVirginMedia/
just cancelled Virgin as my mobile (that would be “cell” to some of you) provider, I will encourage all my friends and family to do the same.
one way or another the message will get through, I think it more likely the message will get through easier if I withdraw my financial support for them wherever possible.
With all the silly comments about USA being somewhat abnormally warm this winter (the average from COLA looks like its about normal when you add the west, is it not time to point out the EXTREME COLD in ALL of Europe and Russia etc (which also occurs from time to time and is “normal”
I am flabbergasted about the fact that Branson trusts Burt Rutan for the development of all the hardware that’s going to be used by Virgin Galactic but obviously doesn’t trust Rutan’s view about CAGW which he regards to be a scam.
That’s where Sir Richard is making an ass out of himself.
On the other hand Rutan now know he’s dealing with a scam artist.
You can’t be picky in his line of business.
Brent Hargreaves wrote:
“Is there a blogger out there who can pin down the truth of the matter and the source of the Gomera myth if that’s what it is?”
Can you link to what Branson said? I could not find it on his webpage.
He must be referring to the Laurisilva, see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurisilva
La Gomera has one of the best remaining examples, but there are more, including in Portugal and Spain. There are plenty of floras that were vastly changed, nearly eliminated, etc., during the Pliocene and Pleistocene, so I would be curious what Branson thought was so interesting about the Laurisiliva.
“We just release an excess of carbon into it. So any time we’re heading to an ice age again that is what we can do to stop it.”
Wouldn’t it be ironic .. if the world ended because people like these three stooges, Hanson, Branson & Gore, advocated interfering with the climate to try and stop an ice age … resulting in some (unintended of course) catastrophic climate reaction that causes a mass extinction? I can her them now .. “But we were just trying to do the right thing”
Richard Sharpe says:
February 1, 2012 at 9:40 am
Well, you’ve got to admit, he and we will be long dead before he is found to be wrong, so there is little downside for him.
Well – I hope that I won’t live to experience an ice-age. But I don’t have the trusting faith in the new god CO2 that seems to have swept the AGW community. Just an O/D or Bond event would be a little unsettling to say the least. The world _has_ entered ice-ages with much more CO2 in the atmosphere than at present, so what makes todays’ CO2 different?
Britain is in debt 10 times GDP and the royal family was so desperate and ill-equipped to manage anything in this day and age that they hired ‘D’ Gore and just(to be on the safe side) propped up Sir Richard “drugs? me?” to use their faded star power to push this hoax. Breivik and Norway, and now this. It doesn’t look good.
Eimear says:
February 1, 2012 at 9:45 am
cui bono says:
How *does* he get on with Burt Rutan??
That is a good question.
Errrrm could it be cui bono?
She don’t lie. She don’t lie. She don’t lie. Cocaine.
The three stooges on blow. Al ‘D in Natural History’ Gore, Sir Richard “punk rockers don’t do heroine” Branston, and Hansen signing on as ‘anchor man’ with God knows what to live down.
I can’t see any parallel with the issue of smoking, the fact is for the last ten years AGW has controlled all science and governments but their theory is so weak that it is falling apart anyway.
I’m with Dick, at least in this sense: the world is indeed heading into another Ice Age glacial period. Neoglaciation has been ongoing for over 6,000 years.
Note also that the Wisconsin Glaciation was the coldest glacial period of the Pleistocene (commonly referred to as the Ice Ages), and that the Pleistocene (the last 1.8 million years) is the coldest epoch since the Karoo Ice Age of 250 million years ago.
In other words, a mere 20,000 years ago during the Older Dryas was the coldest point that Mother Earth has experienced in the last quarter of a billion years. And we are slip-sliding back in that direction.
I submit to you all that the climate of the Pleistocene is NOT the normative condition of our planet, nor is it the desirable future condition. Whether bumping up atmospheric CO2 can avert the impending crisis is another question, but it’s worth a try.
WARMER IS BETTER — FIGHT THE ICE
PS — if you need some confirmation of the above, may I suggest
Graham, Alan (1999) Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic History of North American Vegetation: North of Mexico. Oxford University Press.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019511342X
This book synthesizes the history of NA vegetation over the last 70 million years, including the boreo-tropical rainforest on island arcs off the coast of proto-Alaska in the Eocene, the polar broad-leaved deciduous forest, and the crushing blows to Life Itself of multiple Pleistocene glaciations. BTW, Graham’s book is plastered with thousands of scientific references.
Branson is the new Gore.
“hundreds of feet of ice from Scotland to N. Africa” is the new “several million degrees 2 kilometers down”
Are we missing the obvious…
Hansen has always wanted NASA to be the head honcho in charge of Billions of Climate Geoengineering tax dollars. Branson is the clever “useful idiot” testing, stretching, greening the framing of the debate, with a whole host of invitee’s to sell the glorious “green good” message we can fix climate, for the new world order. The start of a new Al Gore enrichment bandwagon strategy?
I work for a Virgin company and for anyone who is not a naiive school leaver, the environment is as oppressive as Stalin’s Russia. We have effective re-education of attitudes, there is the propaganda about how you should be yourself but to get your bonus or payrise you have to show you have complied with specific behaviours. We have the redistribution of wealth from the staff to the shareholders (I have lost many hundreds of pounds a month due to the unilateral changes to my contractual terms and conditions.
He is certainly the embodiment of a champagne socialist where he thinks we should give up our standards of living whilst his companies provide him with great wealth and together have probably one of the biggest carbon footprints per worker in the world.
The movie I mentioned above:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Zero_%28film%29
Sounds like more like Branson and his Group than I first realized….
“David Koch…, a climatologist employed by Inter Sci, proposes a theory… and he is sent to Antarctica to find out what is happening.
Once there, he discovers a frozen body of a human which is at least 10,000 years old. What is interesting is his appearance—he looks as if he was instantly frozen in place… A sudden blizzard then destroys a base camp and kills some members of his team.
When the weather in Miami starts getting colder and colder,… in a couple of hours, everything from 30° north and south of the equator turns to absolute zero (–273°C) turning the Southern United States, Mexico, Central America, north of South America, and Africa into an ice desert.”
———————————-
Now that really sounds like the Al Gore Effect !!! Watch out Antarctica and Florida too !!
(Hey, it’s only a movie….)
Excellent example of impaired logic… me, I’d use the redistributed taxes to…. buy more fuel.
The Gilbratar Strait was narrowed by a few miles, but nobody walked across it! Oh by the way, Richard, the LGM terminated 18kya.
“Let us judge ahr-Richard not by what he is saying, but by what he is doing: He has an airline, a Formula 1 team, and planes that fly into outer space. ”
Hence the saying.. I’ll believe CAGW is a catastrophe, when the people telling me CAGW is a catastrophe, staring behaving like it’s a catastrophe.
Sir Richard Brazen, as journo and blogger Andrew Bolt calls him.
If we are ever going to use geoengineering we should try it out on Mars first. If it all goes wrong nobody will be harmed and if it goes right we will have another planet to colonise.
Buying “carbon credits” at US$ 3.- per hectare of amazon jungle and selling it at US$127,500.- it was such a promising business until those bad guys “sceptic”, in special WUWT, ruined it all !
Let´s go to Antarctica to fix it!
And walking from Scotland to North Africa. Really.
————
Depends on how you parse the original sentence. If it means you, could walk from Scotland to north Africa and for part a large part of the journey you would be walking on ice: then that would be fine. The map seems to be saying the sea level fall has allowed a land bridge at Gibraltar.
Dr. Jim’s obviously there as a technical adviser. I hadn’t realized unitl now that the twit Olympics were moved to Antartica.
Seems more like you could walk from Scotland to errr Dunstable on ice.
Not quite the same ring to it, and certainly not worth the walk.
Maybe he meant you could walk on ice to Dunstable, catch a bus to Luton airport and FLY to Africa?
Makes sense now…
The Older Dryas was not 20 ka. As I mentioned above, the last glacial max was 18 ka. The Older Dryas has a range of dates, all about 13-15 ka. The Younger Dryas was the last gasp of the REAL cold which brought us in the current interglacial – 11.5. ka.
Our good friends at klimaforskning.com
http://klimaforskning.com/forum/index.php/topic,540.0.html
have found two more rich involved, and how much it costs:
http://www.nationalgeographicexpeditions.com/expeditions/antarctica-cruise/detail
10580 + 1390 + 690 = 12660 USD
seems to be the absolute minimum per person…
Gosh, if Al Gore is taking a hundred, than it will cost him more than a million dollars… Probably a little discount for Al…
Interesting quote. I thought that at the end of the Ordovician period the Earth went into an ice age when CO2 levels were were far, far higher than today. Natural co2 must behave differently to man’s co2. Co2, the magical gas.
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/2005-08-18/dioxide_files/image002.gif
H/t Bomber_the_Cat
Interesting quote. I thought that at the end of the Ordovician period the Earth went into an ice age when CO2 levels were were 10 times higher than today. Natural co2 must behave differently to man’s co2. Co2, the magical gas.
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/2005-08-18/dioxide_files/image002.gif
H/t Bomber_the_Cat
It’s insane to believe we should be in an ice age right now. We might be going into one though and regardless of how much CO2 is in the atmosphere, it will come. This will be the day when humanity will be happy to burn what ever it can in order to have heat, electricity and to grow food in greenhouses. The extra CO2 won’t do a damn thing to get the planet warmer.
Then he should blame volcanoes, bacteria, forest and grassland fires and decay of organic material… oh noooo, based on the major CO2 emission sources, earth should never get out of an ice age, except with the even of a major volcanic activity… but then you have all that sulfate in the air… we are doomed. / sarc
Russ in Houston says:
February 1, 2012 at 9:43 am
Serendipity.
Brent Hargreaves says:
February 1, 2012 at 10:47 am
“Branson is repeating a widespread claim … that la Gomera in the Canaries is the sole surviving subtropical forest from the Tertiary Period; that all vegetation north of la Gomera was wiped out and has subsequently regrown.”
Wait, what?
<b?Is he flipping stoned? La Gomera is about 12 million years old. It didn’t even exist in the Tertiary Period. The only Jurassic thing about the Canary Islands is the few kilometer thick Jurassic era sediment that the islands erupted through and then formed on top of.
Hansen and Branson… Tweedledee and Tweedledum…
What I fail to understand here is that Burt Rutand who only in the last couple of days has a story here on WUWT concerning his AGW sceptics credentials, has worked very closely with Branson on his Space Flight project. Surely Branson and Burt must have broached this issue on numerous occassions?
The world will neveer have anothere Ice Age
And how is this a bad thing?
Oh my,
113 comments, and you all fell for it.
)c:f
A not so subtle mission for the AGW religion is to defile the term ‘ice age’
Just like the medieval warm period was inconvenient to the IPCC, the fact that we are currently in an ice age is also a thorn in the side of any thermagedon fanatic.
The implicit assertion in the title ‘ Antarctica 3 : The world will never have another ice age ‘ is that we are not in an ice age now.
This is false.
No one so far has spotted it.
Check the encyclopaedias for the definition.
The sub-goal of the AGW is to defile the accepted definition by redefining the current ‘ice age interglacial ‘ as not part of the 13.5 million year ice age.
So long as there’s large fields of permanent ice in Greenland and Antarctica, the the world is in an ice age.
I hope Anthony gives this point more prominence soon in his blog.
Richard deSousa says:
“Hansen and Branson… Tweedledee and Tweedledum…”
Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.☺
[SNIP: No, that is something we are NOT going to discuss. Please stay on the topic of the thread. -REP]
So – looking at the penguin pictures – it’s summer in Antarctica in February. Quelle surprise.
saltspringson said:
February 1, 2012 at 9:42 am
The graph above indicates “eccentricity” is trending down. Given Branson, Hansen and Gore’s beliefs, shouldn’t that be going up sharply? 😉
———————————
Like a hockey stick!
“Ecotretas says: February 1, 2012 at 2:39 pm
http://www.nationalgeographicexpeditions.com/expeditions/antarctica-cruise/detail”
First I note, at that website, the map of the cruise http://www.nationalgeographicexpeditions.com/assets/images/1838/master.jpg shows it isn’t even making its way past the Antarctic Circle…that’s the equivalent of taking a trip to Iceland to visit the Arctic…while its close to the Arctic Circle, its just not part of the Arctic.
Secondly, does anyone know how many carbon offsets will be required to offset the fuel of two, 3200 diesel electric horsepower engines over this 14 day, non-Antarctic cruise?
It realy scares me when they say things like “The world will never have another ice age”.
The Gore affect is all too real; as is bad luck comes in threes ect. Stop telling us it can’t happen guys.
I live on the Southern Glacial Line, runs about 60 miles south of adelaide. If the ice age is hemispherically even then the northern glacial line wouldn’t extened further than the southern. Someone shoudl really ask the aborigines about all of this because they have some very interesting tales about how they fought of the Ice Spirits – they followed Bransons advice and set fire to the bushland. This is all true and recorded
From Article: “The bad news is that we’re are in danger of releasing so much carbon that we could fry our beautiful earth and our great-grandchildren too. ”
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/images/co2-levels-over-time_thumb.png
Go back around 500+ Million years and the CO2 level was about 7,000 PPM; oddly enough, the Earth didn’t fry to a crisp back then.
I have never been religious but this Antarctica escapade reminds me of an old saying:-
“If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at those he gives it to. “
Somehow seems apt.
[SNIP: Policy…. and it adds nothing to the discussion on this thread. -REP]
Oh boy, he’s really flipped out this time, I can buy islands, I can put people into space, I can make poor people pay more taxes, I can stop global warming, I can stop global cooling, I can control world weather, the Messiah complex in action.
READ CAREFULLY:
Furthermore, 10,000 years ago we were in the warmer Holocene. Give it up!
I thought we were still in an ice age. We just happen to be in an interglacial period.
Jimbo, when LazyTeenager said “Depends on how you parse the original sentence” he obviously meant “Depends on which words you ignore in the original sentence.”
Mark
@SNIP: Sorry if I my commentary had to be snipped. I just could not help laughing. Recently, in my country, there has been a rally in favor of saving “water”, as it is supposed that it will disappear by “global warming”. The funny thing is that the rally was literally flooded by rains, as if nature itself wanted to make them a joke. Sometimes nature has a special sense of humor. Let us see what happens this time.
I am going to start my car and run it in my garage for the next 3 months to make more C02 too warm up sydney as we are having the coldest summer for 30 years
Is there any way to add those Milankovitch Cycles to form one curve, the movements of which would give a better picture of how they relate to the glacial stages?
MrX says:
February 1, 2012 at 5:45 pm
Bingo. And it will take a lot more than a little CO2 to change the modus operandi which has put this Earth through a deep freeze cycle up to 50 times in the last 5 million years.
Some people think they’re so important and all-powerful they can change the times and seasons–and since Daylight Savings Time was invented they can obviously start adjusting and controlling megaclimate cycles like Ice Ages and Interglacials.
Astounding! Simply astounding!
“Greg Cavanagh says:
February 1, 2012 at 4:37 pm
It realy scares me when they say things like “The world will never have another ice age”.
It scares me too.
DO WE really want another ice age?
Now we’ll be really in for mass starvation and mass extinction then. Far worse than the grossly exaggerated tripe a few degrees of warming is suppossed to do according to the CO2 AGW/CC Global Warming mass extinction propaganda claims!
Clearly they are in the Antarctic Peninsula where there is some local warming, despite the other 90%+ of the continent cooling. That is what they will use to represent the entire continent and the media will suck it up and spew it to the world! You are warned!
Sir Richard Branson goes full on stupid in Antarctica
____________________________
No Virgin Airlines discounts and frequent flyer miles for you!
Robert of Ottawa says:
February 1, 2012 at 3:51 pm
Avoiding the next Ice Age would be the best thing we could do, believe you me–it ranks right up there with avoiding a nuclear winter. However, unlike those examples, an Ice Age last 100,000 years and would be about as devastating as an Armageddon asteroid.
GeoLurking:
“?Is he flipping stoned? La Gomera is about 12 million years old. It didn’t even exist in the Tertiary Period. The only Jurassic thing about the Canary Islands is the few kilometer thick Jurassic era sediment that the islands erupted through and then formed on top of.”
The Tertiary extended to the Quarternary, which began with the Pleistocene only 1.8 m.a.
You lost me when you brought the Jurassic into the discussion. How is that relevant to the Teriary? Confused.
Tom
The terminology “ice age” is open to misinterpretation. I wish this WUWT site (in the interests of being seen as having a desire for accuracy) would just refer to glaciation – the last maximum being 20,000 years ago: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070801173805.htm
[SNIP: Policy. And it’s not funny. -REP]
“And walking from Scotland to North Africa? Really?”
Perhaps it was meant as “Northumbria”, but automatic spelling interfered. 🙂
Maybe I’m just cantankerous tonight, but I’m getting fed up with Paleohistory plots that put TODAY on the LEFT of the X-Axis and go BACKWARD in time to the right.
Al ‘D’ Gore is a has-been now resting on past good luck handed down from his father, the Tennesee senator and a ‘D’ in his only collegiate science class. ‘Sir’ Richard (has-been) Branson, resting on his taxed contribution to the English empire from exploiting ignorant youths’ abilities to get in trouble with heroine and bad music, and ‘global warming eremite-hasbeen Jim Hansen, all banded together for the purpose of creating a crowd of ill-prepared hasbeens around the queen lizard, who hopes this ruse to deflect some of the ugly will be of benefit to her efforts to project strength and wisdom instead of the universal bliss to come from her and her progeny fading into the mediocrity they so richly deserve.
From the conclusions of http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/30/the-antithesis/
Sole, Turiel and Llebot writing in Physics Letters A (366 [2007] 184–189) identified three classes of D-O oscillations in the Greenland GISP2 ice cores A (brief), B (medium) and C (long), reflecting the speed at which the warming relaxes back to the cold glacial state:
“In this work ice-core CO2 time evolution in the period going from 20 to 60 kyr BP [15] has been qualitatively compared to our temperature cycles, according to the class they belong to. It can be observed in Fig. 6 that class A cycles are completely unrelated to changes in CO2 concentration. We have observed some correlation between B and C cycles and CO2 concentration, but of the opposite sign to the one expected: maxima in atmospheric CO2 concentration tend to correspond to the middle part or the end the cooling period. The role of CO2 in the oscillation phenomena seems to be more related to extend the duration of the cooling phase than to trigger warming. This could explain why cycles not coincident in time with maxima of CO2 (A cycles) rapidly decay back to the cold state. ”
“Nor CO2 concentration either the astronomical cycle change the way in which the warming phase takes place. The coincidence in this phase is strong among all the characterized cycles; also, we have been able to recognize the presence of a similar warming phase in the early stages of the transition from glacial to interglacial age. Our analysis of the warming phase seems to indicate a universal triggering mechanism, what has been related with the possible existence of stochastic resonance [1,13, 21]. It has also been argued that a possible cause for the repetitive sequence of D/O events could be found in the change in the thermohaline Atlantic circulation [2,8,22,25]. However, a cause for this regular arrangement of cycles, together with a justification on the abruptness of the warming phase, is still absent in the scientific literature.”
In their work, at least 13 of the 24 D-O oscillations (indeed other workers suggest the same for them all), CO2 was not the agent provocateur of the warmings but served to ameliorate the relaxation back to the cold glacial state, something which might have import whenever we finally do reach the end Holocene. Instead of triggering the abrupt warmings it appears to function as somewhat of a climate “security blanket”, if you will.
Therefore in constructing the antithesis, and taking into consideration the precautionary principle, we are left to ponder if reducing CO2’s concentration in the late Holocene atmosphere might actually be the wrong thing to do.
The possibility consequently exists that at perhaps precisely the right moment near the end-Holocene, the latest iteration of the genus Homo unwittingly stumbled on the correct atmospheric GHG recipe to perhaps ease or delay the transition into the next glacial. Under the antithesis “Skeptics” and “Warmists” thus find themselves on the mutual, chaotic climate ground where the efficacy of CO2 as a GHG had better be right.
The Space Shuttle and Richard Branson are proof that all it takes to make bricks/pigs fly is sufficient money. Preferably, somebody else’s.
Those photos of penguins and seals on the on the rocks in the Antactica trying to prove Global Warming is another Typical Al Gore Style Global Warming Scam.
There’s parts of the Antarctic Peninsular which are naturaly very rocky and Penquins and seals are doing what penquins and seals do. One such place is Rocky Beach. NO Proof of Global Warming. Just typical summer in parts of the Antarctica!.
steveta_uk says:
February 1, 2012 at 9:54 am
“My area of southern England is littered with gravel pits – as Richard Branson was almost certainly told when he was at school in southern England,”
Branson was educated at Scaitcliffe School (now Bishopsgate School) until the age of thirteen. He then attended Stowe School until the age of sixteen. Branson has dyslexia and had poor academic performance as a student.
He just did not understand the lesson Syeveta! Still, he has made a few bob since though he appears to still not listen to real people!
“But I agree with Sir Richard on one point; warmth is far preferable to an ice sheet. You can’t dodge ice sheets but you can take steps to stay cool.”
I disagree with that, and have reserved my name for future glacier removal or ice-sheet removal services. Investors welcomed, gullible investors moreso. The UK has already started planning for re-glaciation. We have installed large fans around our coastline and on many hills. In the event of ice accumulation, we’ll just add heating elements to those fans and set them to blow, melting the ice and saving the UK from cAGC. Power might be expensive, but if the public is willing to pay more to prevent warmth, I’m sure they’ll happily pay to prevent being cold. Or in the UK, it’s not as though the public has any choice but to pay more.
JimF says:
February 1, 2012 at 6:13 pm
Is there any way to add those Milankovitch Cycles to form one curve, the movements of which would give a better picture of how they relate to the glacial stages?
First, note that the image is from here:
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Milankovitch_Variations_png
. . . and would not be accepted if one follows the standards of Mrs. Henninger, Willis E.’s high school science teacher.
But, do have a go at these two things:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-defense-of-milankovitch-by-gerard.html
The above is Luboš Motl (trf) ‘The Reference Frame’ on July 6, 2010 (and a bit more on 1/9/212) comments on this paper . . .
In defense of Milankovitch, Geophysical Research Letters (backup), Vol. 33, L24703, doi:10.1029/2006GL027817, 2006 (full text PDF)
Find here:
http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/roe/GerardWeb/Publications_files/Roe_Milankovitch_GRL06.pdf
What’s to come? Well, that remains to be seen…..
The Eemian (MIS-5e) ended with quite a bang. As may have MIS-11, the Holsteinian, the most recent post-MPT interglacial also occurring during an eccentricity minimum. It remains to be observed if the recent grand solar maxima was the “last gasp” of the Holocene. Solar cycle 25 occurring within the negative shifts of the AMDO/PDO….a tipping point?
What might also participate in such a thing one can only imagine…….
Russ in Houston says: “How does someone that inept become so wealthy?”
Oh, that one is easy. As you know, Power = Work/Time. As you also know, Time is Money, and Knowledge is Power. Substituting and doing the maths you get Money = Work / Knowledge. As knowledge approaches zero etc., you get the picture. In Bransons case, being “stupid rich” is thus a proven fact.
This is the guy that discovered VAT carousel fraud as a means of underpricing his competitors. So it’s really not surprising that he would be involved in the CAGW fraud.
Lazy Teenager says:
Depends on how you parse the original sentence. If it means you, could walk from Scotland to north Africa and for part a large part of the journey you would be walking on ice: then that would be fine. The map seems to be saying the sea level fall has allowed a land bridge at Gibraltar.
Apart from tha fact that 10,000 years ago was right in the middle of the warmest part of the Holocene, no , not even at the Glacial Maximum 20000 years ago could one walk on ice “a large part of the way” to North Africa, not even in winter. If one includes snow as ice it would probably have been possible to get as far as southern Spain, but there most certain was no land-bridge at Gibraltar, and hasn’t been for 5 million years. If you headed east around the Mediterranean instead you could have stayed on snow (not ice) as far as northern Syria, but then it would be desert sands the rest of the way. Incidentally you could walk on snow from the English Channel to northern Syria today, February 2 2012:
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_gif/DATA/cursnow_asiaeurope.gif
Shame he’s not in Ukraine right now…….
Richard, that funny taste is the dog doo you stepped in yesterday.
Matt Skaggs: Branson’s statement about ice extending to North Africa appears above, below the penguin picture. He didn’t refer explicitly to La Gomera, and I apologise for suggesting that he did. I surmise that he’s regurgitating the claim that the icecap extended to North Africa at the end of the Tertiary (1.8m years ago) which appears here and elsewhere:
http://www.gomeralive.com/gomera-regions/the-centre/garajonay.html
GeoLurking: You say that La Gomera didn’t even exist at the end of the Tertiary. If, as you say, La Gomera is 12m years old and the Tertiary ended 1.8m years ago, maybe the Gomera-on-the-fringe claim is valid.
Branson’s claim that the icecap extended to N. Africa 10ky ago would still be wrong.
I surmise that he’s regurgitating the claim that the icecap extended to North Africa at the end of the Tertiary (1.8m years ago)
The last time there was an icecap in North Africa was in the Ordovician 440 million years ago (while there was 10-20 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as today).
Hiring the three stooges, Gore, Branson, and Hansen to pump the ‘global warming and CO2 rackets for queen lizard would be like the internet universally accepting a has-been cocaine addicted Bart Simpson to push education with emphasis on high tech and esoterica concerning the world’s main religions and those exploiting the texts to control large bodies of people. Utter gibberish when you get right down to it.
All the talk about ice bridges aside, the man is an idiot. He could show the courage of his convictions tomorrow by shutting down his airlines and converting all of the media/radio/tv/film to broadcasting Ommmm. But he won’t. Chances of that happening lower than the land bridge reappearing in the next 200 years.
Am I the only one that felt that he was being snide and sarcastic to get his point in sideways… “under the radar” as it were? Just a different tact to say, “You people are causing global warming!” Because if his statement is true, then the converse, we somehow have to stop putting out CO2, is true also.
It’s strange how the almighty CO2 can trump ice ages etc, yet cannot seem to stop whatever has stopped the warming in the last 15 yrs.
I hope Branson is alright, that blog entry was just a lot more incoherent than I’d expect from a businessman of his stature; stroking out in Antarctica is probably a very bad thing.
Rhys Jaggar said February 2, 2012 at 12:47 am
“….Shame he’s not in Ukraine right now…….”
I am here, keeping an eye out for Richard!
Minus 15 to 19 for the last week ….. locals (in Kiev) don’t seem to think it is too unusual though…
If only the famous Green warriors Gore, Branson, and Hansen could be permanently encased in Antarctica ice. One must have dreams.
Let us suppose for a moment that a ribbon of ice did survive the last glacial termination c.10,000 years ago,and that it stretched all the way from Scotland to North Africa.This imaginary ice-sheet would get thinner and thinner towards the warmer south,so that our intrepid long-distance walker would,on reaching the African coast, be walking on very thin ice indeed.Thin as this ice would be, it is not nearly as thin as the ice that Branson is now walking on( no,not the thick Antarctic ice-sheet) but the metaphoric thin one,when he seems to suggest that just the correct dose of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere would keep the Earth a bit like Goldilock’s porridge : not too hot and not too cold,but a perfect lukewarm.
I wonder; is J. Hansen going to chain himself to a penguin and wait for someone to arrest him? Getting arrested seems to be his new hobby. Just because you’re away in Antarctica doesn’t mean you have to give up the activities you love.
Clearly Sir Richard Branson was Knighted for being a complete Stupid – there can be no other reason!
Reblogged this on riversmoon416.
It takes a Nobel Prize winner to round up a group of some of the largest consumers of fossil fuels, to take a fossil fueled trip to some far away remote area to promote the idea that everyone else should not be allowed to use fossil fuels. Skeptics need to emulate such intelligent Nobel winning thought if they hope to ever be taken seriously.
These three give concientious environmental consideration the brush off. I hear Branson donated a hefty chunk to some great groups who have cognitive skills above these three. They should stick to donating money and not buying the podium for social dominance.
@Tom G(ologist) says:
February 1, 2012 at 6:41 pm
Response to GeoLurking
It was a quick read, you are rightly confused. Even with the error it still amounts to over 70% of the period occurring before La Gomera even existed. The whole region is Jurassic era sediment overlain by the islands as each formed.
My bad.