By Vijay Jayaraj
News reports of summer heatwaves often perversely misrepresent a modern climate favorable to human flourishing in order to fearmonger the false narrative of catastrophic global warming.
The geological epoch of the Holocene, which roughly corresponds to the last 11,700 years, is a time of warmth that has been vital in fostering the diversity and adaptability of life on our planet – not a curse as popularly portrayed. The relevance of the Holocene interglacial period to humanity’s survival cannot be overstated.
The development and maintenance of life on Earth have been greatly aided by the Holocene – sometimes called the age of man.
Nearly 12 millennia back, the Holocene ended glacial stages known as the Wisconsin in North America and Weichselian in Europe, which had begun between 75,000 and 100,00 years ago. As previously ice-covered regions became accessible for colonization, plant and animal species expanded their geographical range and the Earth’s overall biodiversity.
This period saw the rise of ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley and China, each of which made contributions to the advancement of human culture and numbers. There were a mere 170 million people on earth at the end of the first century, about half the population of the U.S. in 2023. Today the world has more than 8 billion people.
The Holocene’s stable climate allowed people to raise animals and grow crops in a predictable and conducive setting and to transition from a hunter-gatherer existence. Food surpluses produced by agriculture freed up time for government, science, literature, art, music and other endeavors. Trade networks and economic systems arose, allowing for the flow of goods, innovative concepts and cultural practices between locations.
The period’s relatively constant sea levels of the past 7,000 years have fostered growth and prosperity of coastal ecosystems, including diverse marine life, coral reefs and estuaries.
The Holocene’s climate stability also had an impact on precipitation patterns, which helps to explain why rainfall in many locations has been quite consistent. This dependability has facilitated the development of a variety of habitats, including wetlands, grasslands and forests.
Despite all this, much of the public today has been led to believe that warming is dangerous. Many do not know of the Little Ice Age’s threats to human existence.
In Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Little Ice Age wreaked havoc on agriculture. Widespread food scarcity, economic unrest, and societal difficulties were brought on by the extreme cooling, shorter growing seasons and crop failures. Those troubled times underscore how crucial climate stability is to sustaining human civilization.
The lessons from the Little Ice Age are pertinent today as we grapple with the confused narrative of global warming. Rather than vilifying life-saving warmth, policy makers should be taking advantage of today’s friendly climate by focusing on rational development of agriculture and industry, including the proper exploitation of fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
Teaching our youth about Earth’s long climatic history would provide the right context for such an approach. Sadly, much of today’s education, particularly in some public schools, has been corrupted by the pseudoscience of the global warming scare.
However, attempts to correct such lapses in critical thinking and scientific discipline are being made. One is a newly launched CO2 Learning Center offering to both students and educators books, videos and lesson plans that present science free of a political agenda. It may be only a start, but it is an important one.
This commentary was first published at [Your] News, July 14, 2023, and can be accessed here.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK and resides in India.
The most pressing question is…
How long until this current interglacial period plunges back into a deeper, colder ice age again.
Warmth, moisture, plant growth… have always been a blessing to mankind.
Cold is inhospitable, harsh and unforgiving.
Heat, you can cope with, so long as you have water.
And fossil fuels to power air conditioning
Salute!
The thing is, William, humans have done pretty well once the ice sheets went away. And we did it without electricity or HVAC’s in our adobe huts or log cabins.
Nevertheless, the modern comforts of the “industrial age” are super. OTOH, a few billion humans survive today without HVAC’s or even electricity. We are pretty tough critters and very resourceful.
So I always question how harsh a 2 C degree warm spell could be except on the weak and infirm that now survive due to the wonders of electricity and ability to move to favorable climates.
Gums sends…
There ARE alternate ‘construction’ methods to reduce the use of air-conditioning.
For the rich , maybe. Even those historic constructions were for the wealthy of the time.
There were reasons why the poor staff used to live in the garrets of grand houses /apartment buildings , freezing in winter and boiling hot in summer . Now of course penthouse with AC are very desirable
People survived for all of history until about 100 years ago without so much as a single fan for their entire lives.
Heat, you can cope with, so long as you have water.
…and the modern ability to manage its variability-
Outback waters bring new life to far west Qld’s Channel Country | Watch (msn.com)
The land of drought and flooding rains.
“How long until this current interglacial period plunges back into a deeper, colder ice age again.”
I’ve penciled it in for February 2031. This is not a Prime but it is a centered pentagonal number. More importantly, I will likely check-out before then and miss the excitement. Just my luck.
That’s less than 8 years John. You can do it. Hopefully you will still be here with us, laughing at another set of ridiculous climate predictions that fail miserably (but will get replaced with new, equally bad, predictions of doom. DOOM!
CO2 Leaning Centre link doesn’t work for me
The link is working, try this: On a PC, right click on the link and open in new tab or window. Don’t know if that works on Macs, tablets or phones.
Seems to be a rather slow server.
probably caused by the climate emergency 🙂
. . . or increased drag from increased CO2.
What ? CO2 causes drag?
Could explain the recent “trans” fetish ! 😉
Yeah, that’s what I normally do – it’s working now
Cheers RHS
So suggested – so done. It came right up. MS -OS
Works fine on Linux
Thanks Vijay, for a bit of rationality and some facts.
It will take another ice age to wake these wokies back to reality.
I bet once the next ice age rolls around, the warmunist crowd will claim Humans caused it, strong government controls will fix it, and they predicted it all along.
More rain is not a problem.
More arable land is not a problem.
Warmer weather is not a problem.
Longer growing seasons is not a problem.
CO2 greening of the Earth is not a problem.
There isn’t any climate emergency.
“Untold Story of Climate’s Holocene Gift to Humanity”
Will not be told. At least not by politicians, bureaucrats, the media and state institutions etc.
It’s [allegedly] 125,000 years since Og the prehistoric climate sooth sayer declared such a hot day using hi-tech bone rolling, entrails and tree rings in the model.
“The Fourth of July was the hottest day on Earth in as many as 125,000 years—breaking a record set the day before”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/07/05/july-4-was-earths-hottest-day-in-over-100000-years-breaking-record-for-2nd-day-in-a-row/?sh=4208717267dd
In this paradigm just invert what they say: hot weather = climate doom; hot weather = climate benefit.
The thing about the current Holocene is that human beings – the subspecies homo sapiens sapiens – have only existed for about 90,000 to 160,000 years. Most of that period has been within the state of glaciation prior to the Holocene, what is referred to as the “stone age” when no civilization existed, and humans lived in caves and wandered the grasslands and forests with little shelter, and little food other than what they killed or dug up
Yet, of that timeframe of 90,000 to 160,000 years, human civilization, largely made possible by the development of agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle, as opposed to migratory hunter gatherer societies, has only been extant within the last 10,000 years or so
It is no coincidence.
Civilization as we know it – agriculture capable of supporting much larger populations living in towns and cities, technology, especially metal tools rather than stone tools, political organization, religion, science and learning – all of that was only possible during an interglacial period.
Therefore the human subspecies is entirely adapted to and dependent upon a relatively warm climate. Some humans can survive during a glacial period, but nowhere near the 8 billion now living will be able to survive. And life will be hellish for most of those who manage to survive the cold and the disappearance of food crops.
Now the warmunists claim that, well, that may be true, but we are now in a Goldilocks condition, and any variation whatsoever from today’s climate will be disastrous. But a slight warming will NOT cause a disaster, as was proven at the end of the Little Ice Age. But a slight cooling WILL be disastrous, again as demonstrated by the privations of the Little Ice Age, when mass starvation, disease epidemics worsened by starvation-induced weakness, political upheaval, and all the rest were predominant.
By the way, the origin of homo sapiens sapiens is well established as being “born” in the savannas of east Africa, who gradually, in spurts, migrated northward, eastward, and westward into Eurasia and, via the land bridge in “Beringia” to the Americas a few thousand years before the Holocene began. Then rising sea levels isolated those aboriginal Americans and ended contact with other humans outside the Americas. Once those first Americans entered the Americas, within a short period they extended their range all the way down through the temperate, subtropical and tropical climate zones of the Americas, while the sub-arctic zone of North America never developed a large population.
It is also obvious that the “great civilizations” that developed around the Earth were all centered in the temperate and subtropical climate zones. Including the Hittites and Persians of Asia Minor, the Greeks and Romans and Egyptians around the Mediterranean Sea, the Mayans and Aztecs and Incas of the Americas. Yet those peoples that lived in the zones least adapted to agriculture, the subarctic and tropical, all remained the least civilized through the millennia until contact with civilized societies changed them.
It is no accident that humans evolved best, to our current subspecies, in a warm climate, and did not originate in Europe or northern Asia, or develop in very cold regions not well adapted to agriculture.
Researchers are still uncovering human remains of older and older “Homo sapiens”… I am more comfortable with the qualifier “discovered to date”, than with a statement portraying “certainty”.
lol
Yes . The species that survived the glacial periods were in then temperate zones.
One of the cold zone adaptations might have been Neanderthals, who were out adapted by the Sapiens who came from the savannahs
From “Oldest human remains”etc… “”The new date estimate, de facto, makes it the oldest unchallenged Homo sapiens in Africa,” Mounier said.
Vidal said she was “really excited” to find out the remains are much older than thought – from the late Middle Pleistocene time period, before Homo sapiens began to spread out of Africa.
Although the findings in Ethiopia give the fossils an estimated age, it is possible the remains are much older than 230,000 years.
Parasitic humans who make a living out of the work of other people are also the result of the Holocene, and they have proliferated enormously, so not everything was positive.
Aka ‘The State’.
https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state
Unfortunately, after a too brief period when ‘classical liberalism’ provided an alternative to absolutism, the State has been making inroads into every aspect of human activity.
“The Holocene’s stable climate allowed people to raise animals and grow crops in a predictable and conducive setting and to transition from a hunter-gatherer existence. Food surpluses produced by agriculture freed up time for government, science, literature, art, music and other endeavors. Trade networks and economic systems arose, allowing for the flow of goods, innovative concepts and cultural practices between locations.”
Anthropologists have found that the most “primitive” societies still existing on earth spend less time securing what they need to survive than the most advanced current ones. They spend more time goofing off, playing with their children and generally enjoying life. As Joseph Tainter explained in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies”, it’s possible for a society to become so arcane and sophisticated that the members can no longer afford it and move on. The increasing interference of the legal profession and their cousins the bureaucracy, non-productive drones, in the day-to-day life of the ordinary can’t go on forever. At some point modern bandit capitalism and the all-powerful mega-state will be abandoned, just as the Egyptian, Babylonian and Roman Empires were.
‘Anthropologists have found…’
Therein lies a problem, as anthropology was one of the first areas of academia to go full goofball on ‘PoMo’ – it’s not much of a journey to go from extolling the virtues of primitive cultures to Rousseau to Marxism – all of which underlie the current narrative of climate alarmism.
So it doesn’t make any sense to study and analyze culture and society and how people interact with their fellows and strangers, right? Because the more they study the more they’re likely to become Marxists? I feel sorry for you.
yes . he doesnt realise that his train of thought is exactly how the marxists operate- everything is viewed as the class struggle, but instead hes the anti marxist still fighting the class struggle
You generalize too much. If humans lived in an area with abundant, easily accessible food sources, yes, they have the luxury of not working very hard to survive. But humans living in more marginal areas of food production, such as in dense forests, or in grasslands where game are far dispersed, hunting food, and all the work that goes into preparing to hunt (making stone weapons and tools), and preparing the game after a kill, and particularly when having to store food for harsh winters when almost no food was otherwise available, then life was very difficult … and short and brutal. Living hand to mouth, so to speak.
Salute!
Thanks Duane. As before, you are making my point, and I feel that humanity got to where we are today because we had some folks in tough climates and others not so tough.
The Egyptian and Greek and Mayan astronomers did amazing things at great accuracy without Cray computers and had dinner because some others were able to nurture crops or slaughter cattle or build roads or….. Called “civilization”, I guess.
I simply cannot imagination life as we know it perishing because average global temperatude goes up a degree or two, regardless of the reason.
Gums sends…
They dont need Cray computers to do what the Ancients could do?
Astrolabe is a clever but analogue instrument which dated back to ancient Greece
Simulate the atomic bomb in its first milliseconds is a modern requirement, or predict the weather (accurately ?) a week or so out
That is true for sub-arctic ecosystems. It should be noted that there was never an advanced civilization in the Arctic, and despite humans expanding across the Pacific Ocean, as far south as New Zealand, and the southern tip of South America, no humans existed in Antarctica until modern times with the aid of technology and fossil fuels.
Only crazy Europeans have ever been interested in living near either pole. The Eskimos were astonished that anyone would care to journey to a place as inhospitable as the north polar region. And it was just a journey. Even today no so-called advanced civilization could survive, much less prosper, without transplanting the basics of their technology and more to the poles. If anthropology is a waste of gray matter how does hanging around the Antarctic further civilized man’s required knowledge?
While it may be true that they have more time while conditions are good, it is also true that as soon as conditions deteriorate, they die off in large numbers.
Considering the rabble we have at the top of the food chain, perhaps we should welcome some deteriorating conditions.
“The increasing interference of the legal profession and their cousins the bureaucracy, non-productive drones, in the day-to-day life of the ordinary”.
Winner!
I’m currently reading H. G. Wells’ ‘Outline of History’ (It’s on Gutenberg, so it’s free). It’s about 100 years old, so it doesn’t cover anything about radiocarbon dating etc., and very little was known then about the Aztecs, Maya and Incas, but it does a very good job of linking all the other civilisations. Highly recommended.
Wells was a long time socialist and an advocate of a single world government. If alive today he would be a pal of Klaus Schwab.
We should also consider that 20,000 years ago, at the height of the last glacial maximum, sea level were approximately 120 metres lower than today. Dividing 120,000 mm by 20,000, we get an average rate of sea level rise of 6mm per year. The current rate of SLR is around 3mm per year. Very alarming, and unprecedented. (sarc)
And, that 3mm per year is about 10% of the rate of movement of tectonic plates.
yes. Some have that movement in a few weeks
Or a few seconds, which is a bit of a shaker!
Mr. Jayaraj,
With all due respect . . . OK, I’ll go so far as to accept “largely unrecognized story”, but “untold story”?
I think not. Perhaps, as they say, something was lost in translation?
There’s a good chance that, if we had not finished evolving into Homo Sapiens sapiens during the Holocene, our species would just be another interesting bunch of bones for the intelligent life that developed in the next warm cycle. DNA analysis seems to show that we came THAT close to extinction while we were still in Africa.
Stupid woke spell check. Doesn’t want to let me use “homo.”
And, apparently it doesn’t like the 4th word in the acronym NAACP. When writing a comment elsewhere, it terminated the suggested text at “Co.” Voltaire must be spinning in his grave.
Vijay. well said. Thank you!
I will ensure that each of my grandchildren read it, as well as “show-and-tell” it in their science classes, as a bottoms-up approach to complement the CO2 Coalition’s top-down learning center.
It is crucial that impressionable children know that they do not need to be afraid of climate change. They should study it, adapt to it, and most important of all–enjoy our amazing, normal, and ever-changing weather and climate. Your article nicely promotes this.
The attempt should be made, tho’ home-schooling is likely the only place where it won’t be squelched.
We’re repeating warmth similar to the previous warmings that, before climate science was hijacked were known as climate OPTIMUMS for life that flourished because of them.
Medieval Warm Period~1,000 years ago
Roman Warm Period~2,000 years ago
Minoan Warm Period.~3,500 years ago
However, we have a ways to go in order to warm the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere up to Holocene Climate OPTIMUM temperatures between 9,000-5,000 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum
“Of 140 sites across the western Arctic, there is clear evidence for conditions that were warmer than now at 120 sites. At 16 sites for which quantitative estimates have been obtained, local temperatures were on average 1.6±0.8 °C higher during the optimum than now. Northwestern North America reached peak warmth first, from 11,000 to 9,000 years ago, but the Laurentide Ice Sheet still chilled eastern Canada. Northeastern North America experienced peak warming 4,000 years later. Along the Arctic Coastal Plain in Alaska, there are indications of summer temperatures 2–3 °C warmer than now.[9] Research indicates that the Arctic had less sea ice than now.[10]“
Study: Cold kills 20 times more people than heat
https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2015/05/20/cold-weather-deaths/27657269/
And
Save lives, give us global warming: Even in cities, cold kills ten times as many people — « JoNova (joannenova.com.au)
Humans have done tremendous environmental damage to the planet and are gobbling up natural resources at an unsustainable rate.
However, the best thing we’ve ever done is gift the planet massive amounts of the beneficial gas, CO2.
Rescuing life from dangerously low amounts of CO2.
There are many dozens of pollutants which humans are responsible for and need to limit.
However, CO2 is still only half of the optimal level. Most plants do best when CO2 is enriched to around 900 parts per million.
If we want to discuss the negatives with greenhouse gas warming of 1 Deg. C and the potential increase of 7% in atmospheric moisture,, meaning that heat waves are a tiny bit hotter and some rain events, 7% wetter……….why ignore the massive benefits of CO2 on our greening planet which greatly outweigh those negatives?
Answer: Because it’s not objective science. It’s biased politics.
This would be like calling H2O pollution.Only telling us that it causes numerous drowning deaths every year. Property damage from flooding. It’s 95% of the greenhouse warming effect.
Never mind that life would not exist on earth without it and the many positives associated with water.