Proved: The Current Global Warming Is the Continuation of the Great Warming Cycle Following the 5th Ice Age.

On December 8, 2022 The New York Times published a front-page article by Carl Zimmer, In DNA Two Million Years Old, A Glimpse of a Forested Arctic, with blockbuster implications. Namely, the current global warming is not primarily the result of fossil fuels. Rather, it is primarily due to natural causes, the ones that produced five ice ages pre-dating humanity, each one followed by five global warming cycles. The DNA samples, collected in northern Greenland about 600 miles south of the North Pole, indicate that the area was covered by forests and inhabited by animals large and small, its coast lapped by water having temperatures similar to Maine’s, home to horseshoe crabs, before the 5th and latest Ice Age. So, Greenland was once temperate, indeed green, and may well return to that state before the current warming cycle is over, even with fossil fuel usage ending before the end of the current century.

This discovery backs up the entirely logical minority theory that humans have little or nothing to do with major global warming and cooling cycles. Those are the result of natural forces, probably involving changes in the Earth’s axis, in its orbital distance from the Sun, and changes in the Sun’s temperature. Why would it be logical to think that the Earth’s axis and orbit have never changed over millennia, not even by a small degree? That the Sun’s temperature is always and forever constant?

When one takes a commercial flight at 35,000 feet observing the immensity of the Earth’s atmosphere, to a logical mind it seems impossible that anything produced on Earth by humans, including fossil fuels, could have any material effect on climate change. Nevertheless, it remains logical to want to eliminate air, water, and soil pollution, and therefore to limit fossil fuel development. Eliminating pollution is a very worthy policy all by itself, it does not need to be reinforced by other arguments asserting that eliminating pollution serves other goals. One wonders whether alarmist climate change arguments blaming fossil fuels for natural disasters like severe drought, devastating hurricanes and floods, enormous wild fires, and rising sea levels, have actually been propaganda by advocates of clean air, water, and soil, who think eliminating pollution is not a political winner on its own, not being dramatic.

Many object that global warming seems to have accelerated over the past few decades in tandem with increased use of fossil fuels, and conclude that fossil fuels have had a major impact. That is a possibility, however not a likely one, since mere coincidence seems a more probable and logical explanation given the five major ice ages, each followed by major global warmings which preceded humanity and dwarf the current warming. Furthermore, changes in nature are not always linear. Why should a natural warming or cooling cycle proceed at a constant pace? What logic would underpin that theory? In any case, the proponents of the fossil fuels theory have yet to explain the causes of the five ice ages and five warmings, which they must do in order to buttress their theory, reconciling it with the Earth’s geological history. On what do they base their conviction that ending fossil fuel use would arrest or even reverse the current global warming? Just on a twenty or forty-year correlation which might well be a pure coincidence, while disregarding the statistics of millions of years? Or on the belief that humans can overwhelm natural forces?

The 1970’s-1980’s ozone scare, blaming a refrigerator coolant for an observed ozone hole in the high atmosphere, was similarly based on flimsy logic. In fact, we have no record of changes in the ozone layer prior to having man-made satellites in orbit observing the atmosphere. No one knows whether changes in the ozone layer have been an ongoing natural phenomenon for millennia, indeed it would be illogical to assume that the size of the ozone layer has been a constant over millions of years prior to the 1970’s.

The danger posed by the widespread belief that curbing fossil fuels will stop global warming is that it encourages futile policies which will do nothing to avert global warming. Much time and enormous resources will be wasted, due to the mistaken belief that global warming is not a natural, cyclical phenomenon. Temperatures and sea levels will inevitably continue to rise until the next cooling cycle, even with fossil fuels no longer used. The world needs rational policies recognizing the reality of overpowering natural forces, in tandem with policies aimed at eliminating of all kinds of pollution.

The history of humanity is filled with mistaken, illogical mainstream assumptions, such as 1) the Earth was long believed to be flat, though no one ever reached an edge; 2) futile offerings have been made to gods believing they would end droughts, help win wars, and cure illnesses; 3) many of today’s athletes look up to the heavens in gratitude after scoring, believing their god favored their personal performance. Meanwhile, flying in the face of the statistical history of the past 50 years, mainstream economists (whose forecasting records have been mostly poor) believe 1) that budget deficits necessarily cause inflation and interest rates to rise; 2) that budget deficits necessarily cause trade deficits; 3) that a low unemployment rate is necessarily inflationary; 4) that strong economic growth is necessarily inflationary; 5) that inflation is necessarily linked to money supply growth; 6) that recessions are necessary to reduce inflation (due to the illogical failure to distinguish between cost-push and demand-pull inflation); 7) that gold is a good inflation hedge; 8) that the U.S. depends on foreign capital to finance its budget deficits (v. Japanese capital in the mid 1980’s and Chinese capital in the 2000’s), contrary to simple logic and the fact that the U.S. is a sovereign nation with complete control over dollar creation, and in complete disregard of the fact that the Federal Reserve financed all our budget deficits with QE following the 2009 sub-prime banking crisis and the 2020 Covid crisis; 9) that crypto is actually a currency and not simply a greater fool’s investment scheme. Since the fossil fuel global warming theory flies in the face of geological history, what are the chances it will prove to be correct?

© Edward Sonnino 2022 December 16, 2022

Addendum:

On January 12, 2023 The New York Times published an article by Kate Golembiewski, A Fossil Flower Trapped in Amber Had a Mistaken Identity for 150 Years, reinforcing the point made by Carl Zimmer’ s December 8, 2022 NYT article, In DNA Two Million Years Old, A Glimpse of a Forested Arctic. An analysis of the fossil flower preserved in amber by Eva-Maria Sadowski, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, and Christa-Charlotte Hofmann of the University of Vienna, determined that 35 million years ago northern Europe was much warmer than it has been since humans appeared.

© Edward Sonnino 2023 January 17, 2023