This is a follow up posting to Younger Dryas -The Rest of the Story!
Guest post by Don J. Easterbrook
Dept. of Geology, Western Washington University.
The Younger Dryas was a period of rapid cooling in the late Pleistocene 12,800 to 11,500 calendar years ago. It followed closely on the heels of a dramatically abrupt warming that brought the last Ice Age to a close (17,500 calendar years ago), lasted for about 1,300 years, then ended as abruptly as it started. The cause of these remarkably sudden climate changes has puzzled geologists and climatologists for decades and despite much effort to find the answer, can still only be considered enigmatic.
The Younger Dryas interruption of the global warming that resulted in the abrupt, wholesale melting of the huge late Pleistocene ice sheets was first discovered in European pollen studies about 75 years ago. Terrestrial plants and pollen indicate that arboreal forests were replaced by tundra vegetation during a cool climate. This cool period was named after the pale yellow flower Dryas octopetella, an arctic wildflower typical of cold, open, Arctic environments. The Younger Dryas return to a cold, glacial climate was first considered to be a regional event restricted to Europe, but later studies have shown that it was a world-wide event. The problem became even more complicated when oxygen isotope data from ice cores in Antarctica and Greenland showed not only the Younger Dryas cooling, but several other shorter cooling/warming events, now known as Dansgaard-Oerscher events.
The Younger Dryas is the longest and coldest of several very abrupt climatic changes that took place near the end of the late Pleistocene. Among these abrupt changes in climate were: (1) sudden global warming 14,500 years ago (Fig. 1) that sent the immense Pleistocene ice sheets into rapid retreat, (2) several episodes of climatic warming and cooling between ~14,400 and 12,800 years ago, (3) sudden cooling 12,800 years ago at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, and (4) ~11,500 years ago, abrupt climatic warming of up to 10º C in just a few decades. Perhaps the most precise record of late Pleistocene climate changes is found in the ice core stratigraphy of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP) and the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP). The GRIP ice core is especially important because the ages of the ice at various levels in the core has been determined by the counting down of annual layers in the ice, giving a very accurate chronolgoy, and climatic fluctuations have been determined by measurement of oxygen isotope ratios. Isotope data from the GISP2 Greenland ice core suggests that Greenland was more than~10°C colder during the Younger Dryas and that the sudden warming of 10° ±4°C that ended the Younger Dryas occurred in only about 40 to 50. years.
Figure 1. Temperature fluctuations over the past 17,000 years showing the abrupt cooling during the Younger Dryas. The late Pleistocene cold glacial climate that built immense ice sheets terminated suddenly about 14,500 years ago (1), causing glaciers to melt dramatically. About 12,800 years ago, after about 2000 years of fluctuating climate (2-4), temperatures plunged suddenly (5) and remained cool for 1300 years (6). About 11,500 years ago, the climate again warmed suddenly and the Younger Dryas ended (7).
Radiocarbon and cosmogenic dating of glacial moraines in regions all over the world and abrupt changes in oxygen isotope ratios in ice cores indicate that the Younger Dryas cooling was globally synchronous. Evidence of Younger Dryas advance of continental ice sheets is reported from the Scandinavian ice sheet, the Laurentide ice sheet in eastern North America, the Cordilleran ice sheet in western North America, and the Siberian ice sheet in Russia. Alpine and ice cap glaciers also responded to the abrupt Younger Dryas cooling in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, e.g., many places in the Rocky Mts. of the U.S. and Canada, the Cascade Mts. of Washington, the European Alps, the Southern Alps of New Zealand, and the Andes Mts. in Patagonia of South America.
Figure 2. Temperature fluctuations over the past 15,000 years showing the abrupt cooling during the Younger Dryas and other warming and cooling periods, the Oldest Dryas (cool), Bölllng (warm), Older Dryas (cool), Allerød (warm), InterAllerød (cool), and Younger Dryas (cool).
Figure 3. Oxygen isotope record from the Greenland ice core showing an abrupt temperature drop 12,800 years ago, 1300 years of cool climate, and sudden warming 11,500 years ago.
The Younger Dryas had multiple glacial advances and retreats
The Younger Dryas was not just a single climatic event. Late Pleistocene climatic warming and cooling not only occurred before and after the YD, but also within it. All three major Pleistocene ice sheets, the Scandinavian, Laurentide, and Cordilleran, experienced double moraine-building episodes, as did a large number of alpine glaciers. Multiple YD moraines of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet have long been documented and a vast literature exists. The Scandinavian Ice Sheet readvanced during the YD and built two extensive end moraines across southern Finland, the central Swedish moraines, and the Ra moraines of southwestern Norway(Fig. 4). 14C dates indicate they were separated by about 500 years.
Figure 4. Double Younger Dryas moraines of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet.
Among the first multiple YD moraines to be recognized were the Loch Lomond moraines of the Scotish Highlands. Alpine glaciers and icefields in Britain readvanced or re-formed during the YD and built extensive moraines at the glacier margins. The largest YD icefield at this time was the Scotish Highland glacier complex, but smaller alpine glaciers occurred in the Hebrides and Cairngorms of Scotland, in the English Lake District, and in Ireland. The Loch Lomond moraines consist of multiple moraines. Radiocarbon dates constrain the age of the Loch Lomond moraines between 12.9 and 11.5 calendar years ago.
Multiple Younger Dryas moraines of alpine glaciers also occur throughout the world, e.g., the European Alps, the Rocky Mts., Alaska, the Cascade Range, the Andes, the New Zealand Alps, and elsewhere.
Figure 5. Double Younger Dryas moraines at Titcomb Lakes in the Wind River Range of Wyoming.
Implications
The multiple nature of YD moraines in widely separated areas of the world and in both hemispheres indicates that the YD consisted of more than a single climatic event and these occurred virtually simultaneously worldwide. Both ice sheets and alpine glaciers were sensitive to the multiple YD phases. The GISP2 ice core shows two peaks within the YD that match the glacial record. The absence of a time lag between the N and S Hemispheres glacial fluctuations precludes an ocean cause and is not consistent with the North Atlantic Deep Ocean Water hypothesis for the cause of the Younger Dryas, nor with a cosmic impact or volcanic origin.
Both 14C and 10Be production rates in the upper atmosphere changed during the YD. 14C and 10Be are isotopes produced by collision of incoming radiation with atoms in the upper atmosphere. The change in their production rates means that the Younger Dryas was associated with changes in the amount of radiation entering the Earth’s atmosphere, leading to the intriguing possibility that the YD was caused by solar fluctuations.
Why the Younger Dryas is important
What can we learn from all this? The ice core isotope data were hugely significant because they showed that the Younger Dryas, as well as the other late Pleistocene warming and cooling events could not possibly have been caused by slow, Croll-Milankovitch orbital forcing, which occurs over many tens of thousands of years. The ice core isotope data thus essentially killed the Croll-Milankovitch theory as the cause of the Ice Ages.
In an attempt to save the Croll-Milankovitch theory, Broecker and Dention (1990) published a paper postulating that large amounts of fresh water discharged into the north Atlantic about 12,800 years ago when retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet allowed drainage of glacial Lake Agassiz to spill eastward into the Atlantic Ocean. They proposed that this large influx of fresh water might have stopped the formation of descending, higher-density water in the North Atlantic, thereby interrupting deep-water currents that distribute large amounts of heat globally and initiating a short-term return to glacial conditions. If indeed that was the case, then the Younger Dryas would have been initiated in the North Atlantic and propagated from there to the Southern Hemisphere and the rest of the world. Since that would take time, it means that the YD should be 400-1000 years younger in the Southern Hemisphere and Pacific areas than in the Northern Hemisphere. However, numerous radiocarbon and cosmogenic dates of the Younger Dryas all over the world indicate the cooling was globally synchronous. Thus, the North Atlantic deep current theory is not consistent with the chronology of the Younger Dryas.
The climatic fluctuations before and after the Younger Dryas, as well as the fluctuations within it, and the duration of these changes are not consistent with a single event cause of the YD. Neither cosmic impact or volcanic eruptions could produce the abrupt, multiple climatic changes that occurred during the late Pleistocene.
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Related articles
- Younger Dryas -The Rest of the Story! (wattsupwiththat.com)
- New evidence of Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Catching up with the Younger Dryas: do mass-extinctions always need impacts? (skepticalscience.com)
- Study Finds New Evidence Supporting Theory of Extraterrestrial Impact (sott.net)
- The Great Ice Meltdown and Rising Seas: Lessons for Tomorrow (giss.nasa.gov)
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Milankovic cycles explain the longer term trends and snow and ice albedo changes explain the rapid transitions. They even explain the NH SH timing difference. Although the timing difference may be a dating problem with some of the Antarctic cores.
New snow and ice has an a higher albedo than old snow/ice, because as snow/ice melts embedded dust accumulates on the surface decreasing the albedo.
An increased in new snow/ice will trigger a positive (cooling) feedback. Similarly, an increase in snow/ice melt will trigger a positive (warming) feedback. Likely both are limited by solar insolation.
These effects are much stronger in the NH because of the greater land area at the lattitudes they occur and would take a considerable period to warm/cool the SH perhaps needing ocean transport.
Re the double lake caused by two moraine dams in Fig 5., I think I have seen rather a lot of these double lakes in glacial valleys: eg. Lake Neuchatel and Lake Biel at Neuchatel, the Thunenesee and Lake Brienz at Interlaken (both Switzerland), and possibly Loch Longy and Loch Ness (Scotland).
Re the investigation of extra-terrestrial causes for such short-lived, dramatic climate variations: obviously we should be collecting comparable polar ice cores from ice caps on neighbouring planets or moons, eg. polar Mars. As I am sure we will be doing in due course. In fact one might even be able to raise sufficient funds now with a suitably worded proposal to a politically-sensitive agency..
“We just need to invoke other factors for some episodes that deviate from the right Milankovitch model.”
Again problem is we overlook solar-magnetic/geomagnetic influence on the climate because we irrationally decouple those perturbations from the gravitationally-derived kinetic energy within the atmosphere..AKA circulatory mechanisms. Pumping mechanisms control the thermal-spatial profile from the tropics to the poles hence everything…ENSO lags change in the walker cell by 12-15 months, the walker cell lags changes in the polar annular modes by 1-2yrs. Many scientists ignore the QBO and polar annular modes as solar-magnetic driven (in the long run and short term via different mechanisms). What happened during the YD is clearly an excursion in the Earth’s geomagnetic field.
Interglacial periods begin and end due to fluctuations in global pumping mechanisms that are operated externally via magnetic and kinetic forcings. Decrease the efficiency of global pumps and you:
1) Tighten the lattitude based thermal gradient
2) rapidly cool the polar regions
3) Send the tropical thermal-spatial profile into overload hence erupt potent convection re flectingcoming light photons and increasing atmospheric charge seperation causing stagnation.
This is how highly rapid climate changes occur naturally and it is induced externally on a cyclinic basis. I’ll leave the ‘cyclinic’ issue up for discussion as it is a very controversial topic. Eventually the truth will come out, though.
Dennis Cox
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Since childhood (50 ya), I have been unable to look at our own moon and think that Earth escaped the sources of all those impacts. Or what might be the shotgun effect of thousands of objects like ones that seem to just be missing us lately? Can you model the effect of a thousand 500 meter rock or nickle-iron objects striking in one pass? Los Alamos would seem well suited for such.
The Younger Dryas is one of the circumstantial evidence that supports the Cosmic Ray Flux (CRF) theory as a possible influence on climate. Just imagine the earth going through a bit of cosmic ray turbulence on our solar systems journey around the galaxy and voila you have a sudden cold period.
Of course Milankovoch and many other things no doubt play a role too but CRF looks like a promising candidate (hypothesis) until someone comes up with something more plausible. I don’t buy ocean current theories and large releases of fresh water, as it all sounds so utterly contrived. CRF theory is neat and simple even if it remains only a mere hypothesis.
There is a paper about this: Variations of Younger Dryas atmospheric radiocarbon explicable without ocean circulation changes Nature 403, 877-880 (24 February 2000) | doi:10.1038/35002547; Received 23 April 1999; Accepted 21 December 1999
Tomasz Goslar, Maurice Arnold, Nadine Tisnerat-Laborde, Justyna Czernik & Kazimierz Wie cedilckowski
BTW the Milankovic eccentricity pulses do not explain anything whether it be the termination rate or the timing…and must be discarded before it is too late to acknowledge the real mechanism, via the Milankovic eccentricity theory, the warming from the end of the LIA to the 1940s could not have taken place given insolation at the pole was already below 8 out of the last 11 interglacial terminations and albedo was certainly high enough to warrant a return to glaciation. Precession is the indirect governing factor here, and while precession is paced by eccentricity you have all the mechanisms relating to something we have been ignoring for too long..if it weren’t for the IPCC we’d probably be aware of what to do when we enter the next rapid global cooling period around 2017.
In a uniformitarian-only world, this conclusion is warranted. But as Stephen J Gould determined in paleontology, evolution isn’t one big slow, creeping gradualism. Instead, a punctuated equilibrium shows up in the record. Punctuated equilibrium MUST also apply to geology, no matter how much geologists resist.
Paleontology cannot stand isolated and floating free in its stutterings; the stutterings must have causes. To pretend that the stutterings in the animal changes came about “just because” is to live in a magical garden. That animal changes – extinctions and new species – came about 65Mya is a given now, and it was due to the dinosaur killer at Xixcalub. But some argue that it never happened except that time. Iridium and nanodiamonds be damned, when the geologists don’t WANT it to be true. When they don’t like what it does to their paradigms and careers, they keep raising the bar and adding more and more hoops to jump through.
“You found Iridium? That’s was good enough for Alvarez, but not good enough for Firestone or Kennett.”
“You found nanodiamonds and Lonsdaelite, too? Piffle! Your super-experienced labs must have screwed up!” When this was later replicated by other labs, the response was, “But no never mind, because we have the ONE paper that we can keep referring to, so test all you want to, but our lab results will always trump yours! Mwah ha ha!”)
The mammoths lived and thrived through the earlier ups and downs – some more severe than the YD onset – so cold alone did not kill them. The standard line of geologists answers nothing about the mammoths and dire wolves and sabre-toothed tigers. But come what may, SOMETHING caused those extinctions, and it happened just before that black mat was laid down. Yes, mammoths died earlier. Whoop de doo. Of course they did. But many died at the YDB and the standard line doesn’t explain it.
Claiming that an impact could not cause instant changes – Don isn’t making sense on that one. An impact is one of the few processes that has the capacity to cause instant changes. Asserting it out of the blue, without explanation, is not science, it is science by declaration. The WUWT community has seen a lot of that in other areas of inquiry and won’t fall for that.
Why geologists insist that Xixcalub was a catastrophe but there hadn’t been one since makes little sense. It is not as if they haven’t seen a comet cause monumental fireballs on a planet before – in the time of man. In the time of video, even. Was there an impact at the YD onset? Evidence keeps accruing that it did.
Since it is controversial, the old guard will – of course – continue to pull up the uniformitarian spiel and argue that nothing could possibly have happened in the time of Man. That mind set was set in stone the minute Lyell latched onto Agassiz’ ice ages: Nothing happens that isn’t happening in their 19th century micro-moment in time. Framed within uniformitarian perception, all evidence will, OF COURSE, be seen by the old guard to support their gradualistic memes. What’s new? Science has ever been thus. New ideas are rebutted as long as possible by old frameworks – until the day comes when the old guard dies off – and new blood sees that the new framework answers more questions than did the old.
Steve Garcia
LazyTeenager says:
June 19, 2012 at 3:23 pm
It must have been CO2 surely?
Steven Mosher-Was there some point you were attempting to make by merely quoting me with no commentary?
If you are attempting to suggest this is an absurd statement, it is clear that most of the variability of the rate of change of global ice volume of the last few hundreds of thousands of years is correlated with the summer insolation near the Arctic Circle. When the Milankovitch theory can explain the vast majority of the variability, and it can, it makes no sense to suggest we should not include it in explaining the variability because there are a relatively small number of instances were the data deviation from the Milankovitch model, if we use the right model for it’s effects.
See figure 2 here:
http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/roe/GerardWeb/Publications_files/Roe_Milankovitch_GRL06.pdf
The Milankovitch theory is too successful to justify throwing it out completely.
Nanodiamonds are not necessarily a product of cosmic intrusion.
The YD cooling cannot be explained by cosmic intrusion..you have zero hemispheric lag, a change in upper atmospheric chemistry ongoing for thousands of years, and a little gift in the NATL ridge outlining a method for geomagnetic reconstruction that reveals numerous large excursions during the time of the YD where the field went from potentially quadro-polar to bi-polar on numerous occasions WITHOUT a flip.
These sort of excursions are evident throughout geologic history and appear to correlate well to precession. Hypothesis are abound.
For those who keep bringing in Milankovitch cycles, those are part of the gradualistic POV. Those who invoke it for sudden changes have to explain how a gravitational or cosmic ray change down at the eleventeenth decimal point can cause a sudden change to occur within a ten-year span (and some papers argue that the YD happened within ONE year). Don is correct in arguing Milankovitch cannot be hauled out to explain the onset of the YD.
On a take-off of the “extraordinary claims” truism: Sudden changes require sudden causes.
No one in the YDIH community argues that gradual causes don’t exist or that they don’t continue through a catastrophic event. But while the event is occurring, the gradualism is like a gnat on an elephant’s back. When sudden 10° changes occur, to look for explanations in extremely gradual causes (and the Milankovitch is, if anything, über gradual) does not make logical sense.
Analogy: When one sees a dead body by a road with a crashed car next to it, one does not start taking blood samples looking for a disease as the cause of death.
It is not necessary – or useful – to drag in gradualist causes. All it can do is impede the inquiry. If YDIH opponents were arguing some other sudden cause, then we’d have a real discussion going. But instead, in order to try to EXPLAIN sudden effects, gradualist terrestrial processes are dragged in and contorted all out of shape – and everyone jumps up and says, “Yeah! It must have been an ice dam breaking! (anything gradualist!)”
But Rodney Chilton catalogs the flaws in that ice dam guess (and it was just a guess), and it brings the gradualists out of the walls. Folks, the flaws do exist; the Laurentide Ice Sheet was not connected with the YD onset. At 12.9kya, the simple fact is that the LIS was still too far south to drain down the St Lawrence. But to make matters sillier, the gradualists then changed tunes and said the drainage was out to the NORTH – right into the teeth of the Ice Age frozen Arctic in the far west of Canada. One wonders just how the icebergs rafting stones around Greenland battled with the fresh water (that somehow didn’t freeze before getting to the N Atlantic). How convoluted can a Rube Goldberg (no pun intended) hypothesis get?
Even those Dansgaard-Oescher and Heinrich Events are NOT necessarily icebergs rafting stones. That is only the INTERPRETATION given – another contorting of gradualism to explain sudden events. Ice bergs are gradualism, and dropping stones on the ocean bottom is merely a speculation to make gradualism sudden – just like the ice dams were. The evidence is the existence of stones on the ocean bottom, plus the climatic dips, in sudden dips. No one saw the icebergs. They are inferred.. No one has actually shown that those icebergs existed and did what they are claimed to have done. It is only an explanation that happens to fit in (by extraordinary contortions) with gradualism – and since it does fit in, it is generally accepted. A catastrophic event – in spite the evidence of their own eyes in July 1994 – of a comet hitting the Earth does not fit into gradualism – therefore it has to be denied at all costs, no matter how convoluted the alternative gradualistic explanation gets.
At least in AGW the skeptics don’t invent extremely contorted processes to prop up our “denial.” We try to go with the solidest interpretations we can find.
Steve Garcia
Since the only other global layer in the stratigraphic record that contains the same assemblage of impact markers as the Younger Dryas Boundary layer is the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary layer that marks the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago your claim of “scores of similar magnitude events all over the Quaternary” doesn’t hold up.
To assume that all sudden and major climate changes during the Quaternary are the result of the same causative mechanism is begging the question.
But the evolution of the Taurid complex, and the progressive disintegration of the Taurid progenitor during the Quaternary also describes massive quantities of dust in the Zodiacal Cloud, and inner solar system that would have had a dramatic and variable effect on the amount of solar energy available to the climate system during the Quaternary. To assume that such quantities of dust didn’t play a significant part as well would be to ignore a huge piece of the puzzle.
As for impact scars, the supercomputer simulations done at Sandia Labs on the Tunguska event, and the event that produced the Libyan desert glass have shown that very large airburst events can melt, and efficiently ablate, significant amounts of terrestrial materials without producing any shock metamorphic effects at all. So before you go looking for “impact scars” you should note also that the current state of the science does not assume the direct kinetic impact of solid objects. From the Sandia simulations it is recognized that very large airburst events are capable of significant planetary scarring in the form efficient stripping, and ablation of melted materials. And without making anything that resembles what we thought an “impact scar” should look like.
While there are a few good theories out there. They remain untested at this time. So the exact nature of the planetary scarring resulting from a very large cluster airburst event remains a mystery. We’re not even sure what to look for yet; much less where. But the answer to the tired old question of “Where’s the crater?” is simply that there doesn’t have to be one.
The thing is, the specific argument of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis isn’t that the YD cooling was triggered by an impact event. But simply that 12,900 years ago a cosmic event different from anything that’s ever been studied before emplaced high-energy, and high-temperature blast-effected materials into the stratigraphic record on a global scale that hasn’t been seen in 65 million years. The fact of the YD boundary as a global impact layer, has now been confirmed many times over. What remains is to unravel the consequences of the event.
And ain’t it funny that the timing of that global catastrophic event just so happens to coincide with the start of the Younger Dryas Cooling? And that 35 genera in the northern hemisphere seem to disappear from the fossil record at just about the same dang time?
snarkmania says:
June 19, 2012 at 8:00 pm
… Your argument implies an awful lot of cosmic events. Such events leave other signatures as well, iridium possibly, impact scars as well. Where are they all?
“Where are they all?”
Dunno… show me the impact crater for those two meteorites.
In the paper linked earlier by Dennis Cox (June 19, 2012 at 2:03 pm), “Paleolithic Extinctions and the Taurid Complex” you might take a look at the discussion on page one.
For Dennis Cox, thank you for those two papers!
“Nice article. In response to some other comments, I don’t see how anyone can claim to see a correlation between Milankovitch and past glacial oscillations. There are many intervals of time over the past several 100K glacial cycles where orbital forcing is the opposite of the global temperature trend. It’s no surprise that Principal Component Analyses applied to Milankovitch don’t match up with PCA applied to O18. I have seen a paper by Roe which shows a better match of these, but only when some nonlinear cause and effect assumptions are applied. When you invoke nonlinear causation, you can prove anything.
Also amusing how people don’t seem to worry about squaring Milankovitch with pre Quaternary climate patterns, going back hundreds of millions of years, where no ice ages have been identified. Orbital cycling likely persisted throughout that period, but for some reason that no scientist has been able to explain, or has bothered to try to explain, Milankovitch impacts were apparently nil.
I think the description of the sudden warming period (over decades) should by itself ‘kill’ any claims that current warming and sea level rise rates are unprecendented. And that should ‘kill’ any certainty about anthropogenic catastrophic climate change. But for some reason it won’t.”
The last 27-30 million years the global climate has become gradual colder. In the last 5 million years it became both colder and more unstable. Ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png
To Me it seams that a warm Earth gives a stable robust climate and that a cold Earth gives a unstable climate that is easily affected by small input? And when you have a lot of possible factors you know you know, and factors you know you don’t know, and factors you don’t know you don’t know it’s a mess. Because anybody’s idea is as good as the rest.
I think the only thing we can agree on is that the last 27 million years the global climate has gotten steadily colder. And as it gets colder it gets steadily unstable.
?
timetochooseagain says:
June 19, 2012 at 3:19 pm
Amazing how climate disaster didn’t ensue due to the Holocene Optimum. Despite all the claims that big warming in the Arctic is the scariest thing ever.
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The biggest climate disaster of all time took place during the Holocene Optimum. Humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and the rest is history. We need to switch back to a sustainable lifestyle as hunters and gatherers. Cut human population from 7 billion back to a more sustainable 7 million. Otherwise, we are all doomed to die within the next 100 years.
I am glad to hear from Don Easterbrook again. I wonder what he says about my results which show that it is already getting colder on earth. For those of you who think that earth is still warming: you are wrong. From a sample of 45 weather stations taken randomly from all over the world, I find that earth has started cooling down from about 1994. Note that my sample of weather stations is well balanced by latitude and 70/30 sea – inland
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
As I said before, the story of Noah is related in various forms in many peoples all over the world. Not only from the bible. It tells that at some stage 12000 BC the whole atmosphere fell down. This suggests people lived under much higher (water vapor) pressure before. Noah reports seeing a rainbow for the first time after the big flood. That means a different kind of moisturizing must have existed before, probably coming from the bottom (boiling at low temps.) , rather then from the top as rain.
Dennis Cox says:
June 19, 2012 at 10:24 pm
But the answer to the tired old question of “Where’s the crater?” is simply that there doesn’t have to be one.
===================
The Tunguska event of 1908 is irrefutable evidence of this. It also shows these cosmic events are likely much more common than previously believed. Apart from the destruction, they leave no record to suggest a cosmic origin. As if the hand of god reached out and smote them.
“The biggest climate disaster of all time took place during the Holocene Optimum. Humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and the rest is history. We need to switch back to a sustainable lifestyle as hunters and gatherers. Cut human population from 7 billion back to a more sustainable 7 million. Otherwise, we are all doomed to die within the next 100 years.”
I will be dead long before 2112. But how on Earth can you say or mean that and at the same time go on living?
Because what you actually say is that you knowingly kill the Earth by allowing yourself to live?
“Then the Lord rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the Lord out of the heavens” Genesis 19:24. “Turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them an example to those who afterward would live ungodly” II Peter 2:6.
Substitute “Unknown” for “Lord”
ferd berple says:
So what’s your preferred method of mass murder to accomplish the culling of a few billion people without ruining the environment for those who remain? And who decides who get’s taken out?
crosspatch says:
June 19, 2012 at 2:50 pm
Hey! That’s a good idea.
Hoser says:
March 4, 2012 at 10:12 am
Hoser says:
August 25, 2011 at 12:53 pm
Hoser says:
January 12, 2011 at 9:50 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/12/earths-changing-atmosphere/
Hoser says:
January 1, 2011 at 11:35 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/01/time-magazine-and-global-warming/
Jon says:
June 19, 2012 at 11:32 pm
Because what you actually say is that you knowingly kill the Earth by allowing yourself to live?
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One can create any sort of nonsenses through words. For example:
Nature will kill 99.99999% of everyone alive today by 2112. We call it old age. The law permits you to kill in self defense to prevent your own death. Thus, it is lawful to kill Nature to prevent your own death.
Dennis Cox says:
And who decides who get’s taken out?
[SNIP: Sorry, Henry, but this is straying into areas removed from the thread and where we don’t want to go – they seldom end well. Sorry. -REP]
Dennis Cox says:
June 19, 2012 at 11:38 pm
So what’s your preferred method of mass murder to accomplish the culling of a few billion people without ruining the environment for those who remain? And who decides who get’s taken out?
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What I said was if we didn’t take action “we are all doomed to die within the next 100 years.”
How many times have you seen the same message as justification for extreme action?
What happens if we do take action? we are all doomed to die within the next 100 years.