Yes, humans have changed the planet. That’s obvious. Where’s the Dodo? Where’s the Pleistocene megafauna population? And what’s up with all these carbon emissions? Did we cook the large animals into extinction on our way to baking ourselves in an oven of runaway global warming? As four young women called BlackPink, tell us, “We can still save our planet.” * That’s good. I’m glad they are concerned about “our planet.” I’m not happy they show no concern for other planets. Seems a bit self-centered, but then aren’t we humans always the self-obsessed species? Aren’t we the ones who excessively store food and toilet paper when we think there’s a chance of a shortage?
If BlackPink lived 12,000 years ago, they would have addressed the world not because of global warming, but rather because of global cooling: “We can still save our planet.” Ah! The young and innocent! What better time to comment on the Younger Dryas than this cool November morning in southwestern Pennsylvania. Thousands of miles away the attendees at COP26 awoke in similar weather. In fact, a blindfolded person would have difficulty sensing the difference in locations today, the rural area where I live matches almost perfectly the weather today in Glasgow. Yet, I’m sitting at 40 degrees north, whereas the Scottish city lies at 56 degrees north. How can cities removed by so many degrees latitude have the same temperature profile on the same fall day? Coincidence? I think not. But maybe the stars are aligned? Should I buy a lottery ticket under such coincidental weather conditions?
If you studied climatology, you know of climate controls. Latitude is the chief control, of course. The other controls have offsetting effects that have the COP26 attendees waking up under conditions similar to mine. Ocean currents play a significant role in shaping climate. One need only look at the average southern extent of sea ice in the Atlantic to see how the Gulf Stream carries warm water toward Iceland and the UK while the Labrador Current, hugging the North American coast, sends cooler water southward. And then, there’s that great pick-up line to use in a bar: “Hey, Babe [or Big Fella], did you know that where there are cold currents on the western sides of continents, there are deserts on the continents?”
Altitude, also serves as a control, thus the snows of Kilimanjaro lie high above the warm Serengeti. One can usually subtract about three degrees Fahrenheit for every 1,000 feet of elevation though that’s an approximation that varies with weather conditions like inversions and windward or lee positions. I happen to be writing this at 1,000 feet above sea level on the windward side of a 2,700-foot ridge; maybe only by coincidence, my temperatures and Glasgow’s temperatures at the 100-foot elevation differ by about three degrees today in spite of our latitudinal difference. My elevation does seem to mirror the effects of higher latitude a bit.
Land-water distribution, or continentality, is another control since land has a lower specific heat than water, that is, it heats up and cools off faster than water. Both my home and Glasgow lie in the Prevailing Westerlies, but Southwestern Pennsylvania is landlocked—though Lake Erie lies only a three-hour drive away and a source of “lake snows.” Glasgow, by contrast, isn’t far from ocean waters, so the city could hardly be called by its position on the British Isles a “landlocked” place. Of course, one can’t forget the effect of albedo on climate. Some surfaces reflect more solar energy than others. Ice reflects a bunch of sunlight; light-colored sands in the Sahara or in White Sands do the same. Dark forests absorb a bunch, just like asphalt. Possibly a minor influence occurs where rivers flow: Both my home and Glasgow sit on rivers that might have a small very local effect, the Monongahela here, the Clyde there.
It’s about noon there now, so Glasgow’s temperatures have advanced to the predicted highs I believe I’ll experience some five hours after Glasgow reaches the lower 50s. As I wrote above, a blindfolded person would be hard pressed to know which location’s weather enveloped him.
Lots of complexity in climate, but there can be overriding phenomena that make for general trends, such as the assumed anthropogenic warming that has the COP26 attendees in a dither. It does make sense to say that adding carbon to the atmosphere in the form of methane and carbon dioxide will raise worldwide temperatures though the complexity of carbon “sinks” makes modeling difficult. Adding some other greenhouse gases will also alter temperatures, but when and to what extent is still debatable. At this time and regardless of the extensive modeling and research, regardless of the extensive record-keeping, and regardless of the studies that cite droughts here and floods there as proof, storms here and fires there as proof, there really hasn’t been the predicted change that every IPCC report has forecast.
Certainly, there can be trends. Heck, we’ve been in a general warming trend more or less since the Younger Dryas, that cool period of about 12,000 years ago. We know that fluctuations in temperatures, even in averaged world temperatures, have been a fact since Earth became a planet. And we also know that we haven’t had the most reliable witnesses what with all the widely scattered thermometers, the thermometers placed where heat island effects affected them, and the disagreements between satellite and ground based records. And then, of course, there’s been a bit of documented fudging and data tampering to support ideological assumptions.
Speaking of the Younger Dryas that 1,300-year period of cooling, I want to mention two reports that caught my eye this morning. The first centered on “widespread slabs of silicate glass” in the Atacama Desert of Chile. ** In short, the “glass” was the apparent result of a massive fireball over the desert some 12,000 years ago. Hmmnnn. Isn’t that contemporaneous to the Younger Dryas, a period of cooling? And as if by planned timing, is it a coincidence that a similar event seems to have occurred over North America at about the same time? The second report centered on nanodiamonds found in sediments from Murray Springs, Arizona to Topper, South Carolina, and north to Lake Hind, Manitoba and Chobot, Alberta. *** These nanodiamonds appear to be artifacts of an impact larger than the one that leveled Tunguska in Siberia in 1908. Is it a coincidence that big mammals suffered a big die-off at the time the glasses and nanodiamonds formed? Is it possible that the Younger Dryas might have had an extraterrestrial boost?
I don’t know. Maybe. It seems reasonable to suggest that a meteoric impact might have done what the famous Chicxulub Crater comet did 65 million years earlier: Caused both extinctions and climate change. One of the problems in dealing with any events for which there is no direct and reliable written record by witnesses, is that there is no direct and reliable written record by witnesses. There are glasses and bones. And there’s the seeming big die-off of large Pleistocene mammals in both North and South America that might or might not have been solely the work of humans. We do seem to have a penchant for overkill, so maybe the extinction of so many species is unrelated to a bolide, but an impact could have worked in concert with humans to eliminate the megafauna.
Those glasses and nanodiamonds are found in sediments contemporaneous with the arrival of humans in the Americas, making conclusion about megafauna extinction dubious. But then, there’s that temperature thing, the plunging of an interglacial warming into a deep freeze called the Younger Dryas, a cooling that is linked to the extinction if not by causal relation then by timing of the occurrences of glasses and nanodiamonds. Humans weren’t extensively burning fossil fuels at the time to cook mammals and heat their multi-room abodes.
Imagine the horror of the COP26 attendees and BlackPink, who are currently bemoaning a temperature change of about 0.2 degrees per decade, if they were to experience an almost instantaneous climate change like that of 12,000 years ago. Imagine the scrambling to pump carbon into the atmosphere to stave off the cold, advancing snows, and the resultant famines. I can see the headlines: “Europe Races to Increase Emissions”; “Greenies in America Cry ‘Global Cooling’ Destroying Biomes”; “China, the Leader in Mitigating Cooling”; “IPCC Rewrites Predictions”; “Oil and Coal Industries Revitalized as the West Abandons Wind Power for Dirty Carbon,” “Do Your Part: Trade Your Electric Car for an Internal Combustion Engine”; “CO106 To Distribute Funding for Drilling”; and “BlackPink Says It’s Not Too Late to Save the Planet.”
And all that coming overnight because of an unpredicted extraterrestrial phenomenon’s influence on Earth’s climates! Somewhere out there, an as yet undetected comet or asteroid is headed our way. At some unknown time some Chicken Little is going to yell, “The sky is falling! The temperatures are dropping!” It will be consistently cold in southwestern Pennsylvania and Scotland. An event such as that which apparently played a role in killing Pleistocene megafauna will override all the normal climate controls. That moment might arrive just when we think we have mastery over the planet. “We can save our planet” will still be on the lips of BlackPink as, dressed in heavy coats, they address their Twitter followers.
Notes:
*BlackPink on Twitter and on the COP26 website: https://twitter.com/COP26/status/1455810187617574912
**Schultz, Peter H.,R. Scott Harris, Sebastián Perroud, Nicolas Blanco, and Andrew J. Tomlinson. 2 Nov 2021. Widespread glasses generated by cometary fireballs during the late Pleistocene in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Geology. https://doi.org/10.1130/G49426.1 Online at https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/doi/10.1130/G49426.1/609354/Widespread-glasses-generated-by-cometary-fireballs See PDF at
https://watermark.silverchair.com/g49426.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAqMwggKfBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKQMIICjAIBADCCAoUGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQM5XkXiv4tCzucRoQGAgEQgIICVqvxeuBk-LBocvNit1lfalZpwCDoh6Y0pS5fKe5fElP_Z6Gsc5x96L7SWtjbQ3wn7SVTdfewKa4rAzuPB8tv--wTuVud3Mh9GfgT6fbJrDIkN7P3qFs3pZN_aDB-s5MIfpI48PTH82dO_3CvS-1uv7qdggkKukAc-RblZ9y-dDWKFs1QfQOAoUOcZU8nPDwSmG8J_PH_7Tag35Fn0GSCX8KN9AeZUl3etN82BT1sEbjchGlL0l56YOZ7YnynSppjvNXfhETXnBLTLnls4KF5PJY6UAU-R6-q-MhHK_tuvobT4qYVtNNTP7VxmA8nPKzjSRaHxLm8C0OoGfgtTZkCqEgMjICWISQM_oNzOLgfTcGHwFaVFuaXbHsVsiFGroGQJm9PBGntUoHR0VZHT4ZJyIAEq4ZzGBPPilvduG-h20sYk5nXoKapXma3Gv7thy7vtoS95sWLUTwz6dL6EHscxqfBx3h8gCEk7K6z7K9RYZG4bG9dvDU4h0XTEYG-xcnAFTreXzVU_Q0UKq6byAgDExni4ix-ftTTe99zAyXxz5z0gozgi5372DspISlR6juGrondPxcJAP7DAawhST_2VrgqFrWwyo-jLqtAuZ5MYiThVdkEt1PQq149xiZnnZBGYQ77kS4xSDXtJW2KsFlvl6Q_QGqvTOmY0FTxKkl0EfLyht7bgmNjwEHg05CqZun1diGu-cahnVjdyH09EiEwsjuIroJTrBKgBfd-0F_Ldi-TpeRbB7Dw6cx5QD2DXbTv0DAds5x3aN-YUbnpH-ZpKbCh00cH1GA
Accessed November 2, 2021.
***Biello, David. 2 Jan 2009. Did a Comet Hit Earth 12,000 Years Ago? Scientific American. Online at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-a-comet-hit-earth-12900-years-ago/ Accessed November 2, 2021.
If BlackPink lived 12,000 years ago, they would have addressed the world not because of global warming, but rather because of global cooling: “We can still save our planet.” Ah! The young and innocent! What better time to comment on the Younger Dryas than this cool November morning in southwestern Pennsylvania. Thousands of miles away the attendees at COP26 awoke in similar weather. In fact, a blindfolded person would have difficulty sensing the difference in locations today, the rural area where I live matches almost perfectly the weather today in Glasgow. Yet, I’m sitting at 40 degrees north, whereas the Scottish city lies at 56 degrees north. How can cities removed by so many degrees latitude have the same temperature profile on the same fall day? Coincidence? I think not. But maybe the stars are aligned? Should I buy a lottery ticket under such coincidental weather conditions?
If you studied climatology, you know of climate controls. Latitude is the chief control, of course. The other controls have offsetting effects that have the COP26 attendees waking up under conditions similar to mine. Ocean currents play a significant role in shaping climate. One need only look at the average southern extent of sea ice in the Atlantic to see how the Gulf Stream carries warm water toward Iceland and the UK while the Labrador Current, hugging the North American coast, sends cooler water southward. And then, there’s that great pick-up line to use in a bar: “Hey, Babe [or Big Fella], did you know that where there are cold currents on the western sides of continents, there are deserts on the continents?”
Altitude, also serves as a control, thus the snows of Kilimanjaro lie high above the warm Serengeti. One can usually subtract about three degrees Fahrenheit for every 1,000 feet of elevation though that’s an approximation that varies with weather conditions like inversions and windward or lee positions. I happen to be writing this at 1,000 feet above sea level on the windward side of a 2,700-foot ridge; maybe only by coincidence, my temperatures and Glasgow’s temperatures at the 100-foot elevation differ by about three degrees today in spite of our latitudinal difference. My elevation does seem to mirror the effects of higher latitude a bit.
Land-water distribution, or continentality, is another control since land has a lower specific heat than water, that is, it heats up and cools off faster than water. Both my home and Glasgow lie in the Prevailing Westerlies, but Southwestern Pennsylvania is landlocked—though Lake Erie lies only a three-hour drive away and a source of “lake snows.” Glasgow, by contrast, isn’t far from ocean waters, so the city could hardly be called by its position on the British Isles a “landlocked” place. Of course, one can’t forget the effect of albedo on climate. Some surfaces reflect more solar energy than others. Ice reflects a bunch of sunlight; light-colored sands in the Sahara or in White Sands do the same. Dark forests absorb a bunch, just like asphalt. Possibly a minor influence occurs where rivers flow: Both my home and Glasgow sit on rivers that might have a small very local effect, the Monongahela here, the Clyde there.
It’s about noon there now, so Glasgow’s temperatures have advanced to the predicted highs I believe I’ll experience some five hours after Glasgow reaches the lower 50s. As I wrote above, a blindfolded person would be hard pressed to know which location’s weather enveloped him.
Lots of complexity in climate, but there can be overriding phenomena that make for general trends, such as the assumed anthropogenic warming that has the COP26 attendees in a dither. It does make sense to say that adding carbon to the atmosphere in the form of methane and carbon dioxide will raise worldwide temperatures though the complexity of carbon “sinks” makes modeling difficult. Adding some other greenhouse gases will also alter temperatures, but when and to what extent is still debatable. At this time and regardless of the extensive modeling and research, regardless of the extensive record-keeping, and regardless of the studies that cite droughts here and floods there as proof, storms here and fires there as proof, there really hasn’t been the predicted change that every IPCC report has forecast.
Certainly, there can be trends. Heck, we’ve been in a general warming trend more or less since the Younger Dryas, that cool period of about 12,000 years ago. We know that fluctuations in temperatures, even in averaged world temperatures, have been a fact since Earth became a planet. And we also know that we haven’t had the most reliable witnesses what with all the widely scattered thermometers, the thermometers placed where heat island effects affected them, and the disagreements between satellite and ground based records. And then, of course, there’s been a bit of documented fudging and data tampering to support ideological assumptions.
Speaking of the Younger Dryas that 1,300-year period of cooling, I want to mention two reports that caught my eye this morning. The first centered on “widespread slabs of silicate glass” in the Atacama Desert of Chile. ** In short, the “glass” was the apparent result of a massive fireball over the desert some 12,000 years ago. Hmmnnn. Isn’t that contemporaneous to the Younger Dryas, a period of cooling? And as if by planned timing, is it a coincidence that a similar event seems to have occurred over North America at about the same time? The second report centered on nanodiamonds found in sediments from Murray Springs, Arizona to Topper, South Carolina, and north to Lake Hind, Manitoba and Chobot, Alberta. *** These nanodiamonds appear to be artifacts of an impact larger than the one that leveled Tunguska in Siberia in 1908. Is it a coincidence that big mammals suffered a big die-off at the time the glasses and nanodiamonds formed? Is it possible that the Younger Dryas might have had an extraterrestrial boost?
I don’t know. Maybe. It seems reasonable to suggest that a meteoric impact might have done what the famous Chicxulub Crater comet did 65 million years earlier: Caused both extinctions and climate change. One of the problems in dealing with any events for which there is no direct and reliable written record by witnesses, is that there is no direct and reliable written record by witnesses. There are glasses and bones. And there’s the seeming big die-off of large Pleistocene mammals in both North and South America that might or might not have been solely the work of humans. We do seem to have a penchant for overkill, so maybe the extinction of so many species is unrelated to a bolide, but an impact could have worked in concert with humans to eliminate the megafauna.
Those glasses and nanodiamonds are found in sediments contemporaneous with the arrival of humans in the Americas, making conclusion about megafauna extinction dubious. But then, there’s that temperature thing, the plunging of an interglacial warming into a deep freeze called the Younger Dryas, a cooling that is linked to the extinction if not by causal relation then by timing of the occurrences of glasses and nanodiamonds. Humans weren’t extensively burning fossil fuels at the time to cook mammals and heat their multi-room abodes.
Imagine the horror of the COP26 attendees and BlackPink, who are currently bemoaning a temperature change of about 0.2 degrees per decade, if they were to experience an almost instantaneous climate change like that of 12,000 years ago. Imagine the scrambling to pump carbon into the atmosphere to stave off the cold, advancing snows, and the resultant famines. I can see the headlines: “Europe Races to Increase Emissions”; “Greenies in America Cry ‘Global Cooling’ Destroying Biomes”; “China, the Leader in Mitigating Cooling”; “IPCC Rewrites Predictions”; “Oil and Coal Industries Revitalized as the West Abandons Wind Power for Dirty Carbon,” “Do Your Part: Trade Your Electric Car for an Internal Combustion Engine”; “CO106 To Distribute Funding for Drilling”; and “BlackPink Says It’s Not Too Late to Save the Planet.”
And all that coming overnight because of an unpredicted extraterrestrial phenomenon’s influence on Earth’s climates! Somewhere out there, an as yet undetected comet or asteroid is headed our way. At some unknown time some Chicken Little is going to yell, “The sky is falling! The temperatures are dropping!” It will be consistently cold in southwestern Pennsylvania and Scotland. An event such as that which apparently played a role in killing Pleistocene megafauna will override all the normal climate controls. That moment might arrive just when we think we have mastery over the planet. “We can save our planet” will still be on the lips of BlackPink as, dressed in heavy coats, they address their Twitter followers.
Notes:
*BlackPink on Twitter and on the COP26 website: https://twitter.com/COP26/status/1455810187617574912
**Schultz, Peter H.,R. Scott Harris, Sebastián Perroud, Nicolas Blanco, and Andrew J. Tomlinson. 2 Nov 2021. Widespread glasses generated by cometary fireballs during the late Pleistocene in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Geology. https://doi.org/10.1130/G49426.1 Online at https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/doi/10.1130/G49426.1/609354/Widespread-glasses-generated-by-cometary-fireballs See PDF at
https://watermark.silverchair.com/g49426.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAqMwggKfBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKQMIICjAIBADCCAoUGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQM5XkXiv4tCzucRoQGAgEQgIICVqvxeuBk-LBocvNit1lfalZpwCDoh6Y0pS5fKe5fElP_Z6Gsc5x96L7SWtjbQ3wn7SVTdfewKa4rAzuPB8tv--wTuVud3Mh9GfgT6fbJrDIkN7P3qFs3pZN_aDB-s5MIfpI48PTH82dO_3CvS-1uv7qdggkKukAc-RblZ9y-dDWKFs1QfQOAoUOcZU8nPDwSmG8J_PH_7Tag35Fn0GSCX8KN9AeZUl3etN82BT1sEbjchGlL0l56YOZ7YnynSppjvNXfhETXnBLTLnls4KF5PJY6UAU-R6-q-MhHK_tuvobT4qYVtNNTP7VxmA8nPKzjSRaHxLm8C0OoGfgtTZkCqEgMjICWISQM_oNzOLgfTcGHwFaVFuaXbHsVsiFGroGQJm9PBGntUoHR0VZHT4ZJyIAEq4ZzGBPPilvduG-h20sYk5nXoKapXma3Gv7thy7vtoS95sWLUTwz6dL6EHscxqfBx3h8gCEk7K6z7K9RYZG4bG9dvDU4h0XTEYG-xcnAFTreXzVU_Q0UKq6byAgDExni4ix-ftTTe99zAyXxz5z0gozgi5372DspISlR6juGrondPxcJAP7DAawhST_2VrgqFrWwyo-jLqtAuZ5MYiThVdkEt1PQq149xiZnnZBGYQ77kS4xSDXtJW2KsFlvl6Q_QGqvTOmY0FTxKkl0EfLyht7bgmNjwEHg05CqZun1diGu-cahnVjdyH09EiEwsjuIroJTrBKgBfd-0F_Ldi-TpeRbB7Dw6cx5QD2DXbTv0DAds5x3aN-YUbnpH-ZpKbCh00cH1GA
Accessed November 2, 2021.
***Biello, David. 2 Jan 2009. Did a Comet Hit Earth 12,000 Years Ago? Scientific American. Online at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-a-comet-hit-earth-12900-years-ago/ Accessed November 2, 2021.
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