WEBVTT
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In the last segment, I spoke about what carbon dioxide levels were in the ancient, ancient past, and this is coming from information from the geologic record.
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Now, I'm not super qualified to speak on that, but there is at least one man who is.
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The following recording I pulled from a video, I've turned it down a bit.
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But this is a man's name is uh Professor Ian Climber.
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He's an Australian geologist and a professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne, author of 25 books, many published peer-reviewed papers.
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He's also received a number of academic awards throughout his career.
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And I imagine he's a professor emeritus.
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And emeritus means retired but retaining the title.
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And that's significant here because he can't have his uh funding pulled by speaking out.
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That's uh something to think about.
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Without any further ado, let's give a listen to uh Professor Ianer in his presentation to the British House of Lords.
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Well, thank you for coming.
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I'm a geologist, and the one thing that we miss out on in looking at climate change is the past.
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Climates have always changed.
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Climate changes in the past have been greater and faster than anything we experience in our lifetime.
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And if we look back in the history of time, the atmosphere once had a very large amount of carbon dioxide in it.
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It's now got less than 0.04%.
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Where did that carbon dioxide go to?
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It went into chalk, limestone, shells, and life.
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And we've been sequestering carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for 2,000 to 500 million years.
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This planet has been degassing carbon dioxide since it first formed.
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Carbon dioxide is a natural gas.
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And we now are at a dangerously low level.
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If we halved the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we would have no terrestrial planes.
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Carbon dioxide is plant food.
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It is not a pollutant.
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To use words like pollution with carbon dioxide is misleading and deceptive.
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But the past gives us a wonderful story.
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In the past, we've had six major ice ages.
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We've had periods of glaciation and interglacial.
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We are currently in interglacial.
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And during that 34 million years, we have refrigerated the earth.
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But for less than 20% of time, we have had ice on planet Earth.
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The rest of the time, it's been warmer and wetter.
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And there's been more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
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And what did life do?
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It thrived.
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Six of the six great ice ages were initiated when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was higher than now.
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In fact, up to a thousand times higher.
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So we have from the geological evidence absolutely no evidence that carbon dioxide has driven climate.
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For some odd reason, the major driver of climate is that great ball of heat in the sky, which we call the sun.
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And we change our distance from the sun.
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Every 100,000 years our orbit changes from elliptical to circular.
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And we have a cycle of 90,000 years of cold and 10,000 years of warm.
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We're in one of those warm cycles now.
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And every 43,000 years the axis of the Earth changes a little bit.
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And every 21,000 years we get a bit of a wobble.
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Each of those orbital events puts further from the Sun.
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Every now and then we get bombarded by cosmic rays coming from a supernova eruption somewhere out there.
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And if the sun's magnetic field cannot drive these away, we start to form low-level clouds.
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We've got extremely good evidence that this process has been going on for a very long period of time.
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We see 1,500 terrestrial volcanoes on planet Earth.
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We only measure 20 of them, and very few of those measurements are really accurate, but they tell us that a little bit of carbon dioxide leaks out of those volcanoes.
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But what we don't hear is that there are at least 3.47 million volcanoes on the sea floor, which leak out huge amounts of carbon dioxide.
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We have got pools of liquid carbon dioxide on the sea floor.
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So early Earth's carbon dioxide, where did it go?
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It went into rocks.
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Where did it come from?
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It came from rocks.
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What did it do to the planet?
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We did not fry and die.
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We didn't have runaway greenhouse.
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Well, that's just geology.
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That's not important.
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So let's let's look in more modern times.
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In more modern times, we have drill cores that have gone through the ice sheets.
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Snow, when it falls, captures some air.
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That air is then trapped in the ice.
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We can later extract it from drill core and measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.
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And we can see with our cycles of glaciation and interglacials that when we finish an interglacial event, then we release carbon dioxide some 800 years later.
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So what's that telling us?
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It's telling us that temperature is driving carbon dioxide, not that carbon dioxide is driving temperature.
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Oh yes, but that's only hundreds of thousands of years ago, forget that.
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Well, let's go to more modern times.
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We've been measuring temperatures accurately since 1850, and the accuracy is plus or minus one degree Celsius for those ancient measurements.
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We are being told that this 0.7 degrees Celsius rise is going to create a disaster.
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Where do you people go for your summer holidays?
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You go to a warmer climate.
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We are creatures from the Rift Valley.
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We like warm climates.
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If someone from Helsinki moves to Singapore, there's an average temperature rise of 22 degrees Celsius.
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Singaporeans don't drop dead in the streets from the temperature.
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So we are creatures of warm climates.
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And we've been measuring temperature, and we have seen a slight warming from 1860 to 1890, and then a slight cooling until 1910, then a warming until 1940, so much so that the Northwest Passage was open, then a cooling until 1977, and then a warming until the end of the century.
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So we've had these cycles of warming and cooling.
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Strange that these cycles are actually related to changes in the heat balance in the oceans.
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So we have these 60-year cycles over a long warming event.
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We are in a period of global warming.
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It has been warming since the Maud minimum, 330 years ago.
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These were the times when you had the ice fares on the Thames.
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These are the times when the Dutch masters painted hoarfrosts and bitterly cold conditions.
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That was the time when the sun was a bit inactive and we had no sunspot activity.
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So we're in a long period of warming.
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And one of the questions that I ask in this book is which part of the last 330 years of warming is due to human activity?
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And which part is natural?
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These are questions that kids should ask their school teachers, and they're deliberately unanswerable questions.
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Because I am of the view that many children are getting fed environmental propaganda in the schools and are not being given the critical and analytical facilities to be able to dissect an argument.
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So we're in a period of warming.
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What's the worry?
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It's quite normal.
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And let's just look at history.
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The one thing that the climate industry, which it is, ignores is history.
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In Roman times it was warm.
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It was considerably warmer than now.
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And we know that.
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They kept good records.
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They grew olives up the Rhine River as far as Bourne.
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They had wine grapes in Yorkshire.
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We know from their clothing that it was warm.
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And that warming suddenly stopped in 535 AD.
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And we entered the dark ages.
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And in 535 AD, we had Krakatawa fill the atmosphere with aerosols.
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We had two volcanoes, one in Rabaul and one in Krakatawa in Indonesia in 535, 536.
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We went into the dark ages.
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It was cool.
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What happened?
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Crops failed.
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We starved.
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We had civil unrest.
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We had cannibalism.
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We broke out of that into the medieval warming.
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First to feel it was a Vikings.
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The seas became calmer.
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They could go further fishing.
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They actually went to Newfoundland, which they called Vinland.
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In Greenland, grapes and barley were growing.
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In Greenland, the graves were deep because there was no permafrost.
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It was a wonderful, benign climate, five degrees warmer than now.
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Eric the Red was saying, come to Greenland, it's a wonderful climate.
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And it was.
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And then we went through a period of solar inactivity.
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And in 23 years, we went from the medieval warming into the Little Ice Age.
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And that was where Ice Age ended 330 years ago.
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So what do you think would happen after a little ice age?
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Do you think it'd get colder or do you think it'd get warmer?
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The only reason that the arguments of science have got any traction in society is that they have been related to the last 30 years or 40 years of temperature measurements.
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I see with great interest the Met Office is telling us that this is the hottest year on record, but you might be on a different calendar to me.
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But I don't think this year's finished yet.
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And this time last year I was in London, as I was the time before, the year before, and it was miserable.
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It was cold, it was very cold.
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So those sort of predictions made just before a big climate conference, one has to be very skeptical of.
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So in science, skepticism is not a pejorative word.
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In science, there is no consensus.
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In science, there are constant battles.
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A good example, we all knew that we got ulcers from an acid stomach and from stress.
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So we took pills and rubbed our bellies and hoped the ulcers would go away until two scientists who were not following the mainstream, who were not following the consensus, were arguing that this was due to a bacterium and no enlistment.
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Ultimately, one of them took the bacterium, developed ulcers, took the antidote, and for that they get a Nobel Prize.
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I believe we've had an enormous corruption of science and the scientific method.
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I believe that the monies that are floating around for climate research, which is a current fad and fashion, are quite perverse.
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I believe we're putting science backwards.
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So this, for me, this climate industry has been a huge attack on the scientific method.
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It has been an attack on my science and history, and things fortunately are changing.
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I finish with one last point.
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You got your Climate Change Act.
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We've just had a carbon tax in Australia.
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Nineteen bills went through Parliament.
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And our carbon tax is to lower the emissions of carbon dioxide from our employment-generating industries in Australia.
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And it's wonderful.
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We've led the world in suicide.
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And our carbon tax is to knock down our emissions by 5%.
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Now you can do the sums.
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And the sums are very simple.
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The IPCC says that 3% of annual emissions are from humans.
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Why is it that that 3% drive climate change is beyond me and not the other 97%, but that's another matter.
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Australia puts out 1.5% of the world's CO2 emissions.
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You can do the calculations, and by Australia knocking back their emissions by 5%, we will, by the year 2050, have lowered global temperatures by 0.00007 degrees Celsius.
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So I do hope you enjoy our sacrifice in giving you a warmer climate here in England.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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And that again was uh Professor Ian Plymer from the University of Melbourne in Australia.
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I've put a link to the original video in the show notes.
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You've been listening to the This Light Shines podcast.
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Thank you for listening.
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And as always.
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In the last segment, I spoke about what carbon dioxide levels were in the ancient, ancient past, and this is coming from information from the geologic record.
00:00:13.759 --> 00:00:20.960
Now, I'm not super qualified to speak on that, but there is at least one man who is.
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The following recording I pulled from a video, I've turned it down a bit.
00:00:27.839 --> 00:00:32.079
But this is a man's name is uh Professor Ian Climber.
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He's an Australian geologist and a professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne, author of 25 books, many published peer-reviewed papers.
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He's also received a number of academic awards throughout his career.
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And I imagine he's a professor emeritus.
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And emeritus means retired but retaining the title.
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And that's significant here because he can't have his uh funding pulled by speaking out.
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That's uh something to think about.
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Without any further ado, let's give a listen to uh Professor Ianer in his presentation to the British House of Lords.
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Well, thank you for coming.
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I'm a geologist, and the one thing that we miss out on in looking at climate change is the past.
00:01:32.719 --> 00:01:35.760
Climates have always changed.
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Climate changes in the past have been greater and faster than anything we experience in our lifetime.
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And if we look back in the history of time, the atmosphere once had a very large amount of carbon dioxide in it.
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It's now got less than 0.04%.
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Where did that carbon dioxide go to?
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It went into chalk, limestone, shells, and life.
00:02:03.519 --> 00:02:12.080
And we've been sequestering carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for 2,000 to 500 million years.
00:02:12.719 --> 00:02:17.759
This planet has been degassing carbon dioxide since it first formed.
00:02:17.919 --> 00:02:21.199
Carbon dioxide is a natural gas.
00:02:21.840 --> 00:02:25.840
And we now are at a dangerously low level.
00:02:26.080 --> 00:02:32.560
If we halved the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we would have no terrestrial planes.
00:02:33.039 --> 00:02:35.439
Carbon dioxide is plant food.
00:02:35.680 --> 00:02:37.520
It is not a pollutant.
00:02:37.759 --> 00:02:43.520
To use words like pollution with carbon dioxide is misleading and deceptive.
00:02:44.159 --> 00:02:46.960
But the past gives us a wonderful story.
00:02:47.840 --> 00:02:51.919
In the past, we've had six major ice ages.
00:02:52.159 --> 00:02:55.599
We've had periods of glaciation and interglacial.
00:02:55.919 --> 00:02:57.759
We are currently in interglacial.
00:02:58.159 --> 00:03:02.879
And during that 34 million years, we have refrigerated the earth.
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But for less than 20% of time, we have had ice on planet Earth.
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The rest of the time, it's been warmer and wetter.
00:03:11.680 --> 00:03:14.800
And there's been more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
00:03:14.960 --> 00:03:16.319
And what did life do?
00:03:16.560 --> 00:03:17.759
It thrived.
00:03:18.800 --> 00:03:27.840
Six of the six great ice ages were initiated when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was higher than now.
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In fact, up to a thousand times higher.
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So we have from the geological evidence absolutely no evidence that carbon dioxide has driven climate.
00:03:38.639 --> 00:03:47.280
For some odd reason, the major driver of climate is that great ball of heat in the sky, which we call the sun.
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And we change our distance from the sun.
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Every 100,000 years our orbit changes from elliptical to circular.
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And we have a cycle of 90,000 years of cold and 10,000 years of warm.
00:04:00.319 --> 00:04:02.159
We're in one of those warm cycles now.
00:04:02.319 --> 00:04:05.919
And every 43,000 years the axis of the Earth changes a little bit.
00:04:06.000 --> 00:04:08.800
And every 21,000 years we get a bit of a wobble.
00:04:08.960 --> 00:04:12.560
Each of those orbital events puts further from the Sun.
00:04:12.879 --> 00:04:20.319
Every now and then we get bombarded by cosmic rays coming from a supernova eruption somewhere out there.
00:04:20.480 --> 00:04:27.279
And if the sun's magnetic field cannot drive these away, we start to form low-level clouds.
00:04:27.439 --> 00:04:34.399
We've got extremely good evidence that this process has been going on for a very long period of time.
00:04:34.720 --> 00:04:38.560
We see 1,500 terrestrial volcanoes on planet Earth.
00:04:38.639 --> 00:04:49.040
We only measure 20 of them, and very few of those measurements are really accurate, but they tell us that a little bit of carbon dioxide leaks out of those volcanoes.
00:04:49.600 --> 00:05:00.480
But what we don't hear is that there are at least 3.47 million volcanoes on the sea floor, which leak out huge amounts of carbon dioxide.
00:05:00.639 --> 00:05:04.959
We have got pools of liquid carbon dioxide on the sea floor.
00:05:05.279 --> 00:05:09.360
So early Earth's carbon dioxide, where did it go?
00:05:09.519 --> 00:05:10.560
It went into rocks.
00:05:10.720 --> 00:05:11.759
Where did it come from?
00:05:12.000 --> 00:05:13.199
It came from rocks.
00:05:13.439 --> 00:05:15.040
What did it do to the planet?
00:05:15.360 --> 00:05:17.279
We did not fry and die.
00:05:17.439 --> 00:05:19.759
We didn't have runaway greenhouse.
00:05:20.240 --> 00:05:21.759
Well, that's just geology.
00:05:22.160 --> 00:05:22.879
That's not important.
00:05:23.120 --> 00:05:25.439
So let's let's look in more modern times.
00:05:25.600 --> 00:05:31.120
In more modern times, we have drill cores that have gone through the ice sheets.
00:05:31.439 --> 00:05:34.399
Snow, when it falls, captures some air.
00:05:34.720 --> 00:05:37.040
That air is then trapped in the ice.
00:05:37.120 --> 00:05:42.079
We can later extract it from drill core and measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.
00:05:42.319 --> 00:05:54.240
And we can see with our cycles of glaciation and interglacials that when we finish an interglacial event, then we release carbon dioxide some 800 years later.
00:05:54.560 --> 00:05:56.240
So what's that telling us?
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It's telling us that temperature is driving carbon dioxide, not that carbon dioxide is driving temperature.
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Oh yes, but that's only hundreds of thousands of years ago, forget that.
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Well, let's go to more modern times.
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We've been measuring temperatures accurately since 1850, and the accuracy is plus or minus one degree Celsius for those ancient measurements.
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We are being told that this 0.7 degrees Celsius rise is going to create a disaster.
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Where do you people go for your summer holidays?
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You go to a warmer climate.
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We are creatures from the Rift Valley.
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We like warm climates.
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If someone from Helsinki moves to Singapore, there's an average temperature rise of 22 degrees Celsius.
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Singaporeans don't drop dead in the streets from the temperature.
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So we are creatures of warm climates.
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And we've been measuring temperature, and we have seen a slight warming from 1860 to 1890, and then a slight cooling until 1910, then a warming until 1940, so much so that the Northwest Passage was open, then a cooling until 1977, and then a warming until the end of the century.
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So we've had these cycles of warming and cooling.
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Strange that these cycles are actually related to changes in the heat balance in the oceans.
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So we have these 60-year cycles over a long warming event.
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We are in a period of global warming.
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It has been warming since the Maud minimum, 330 years ago.
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These were the times when you had the ice fares on the Thames.
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These are the times when the Dutch masters painted hoarfrosts and bitterly cold conditions.
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That was the time when the sun was a bit inactive and we had no sunspot activity.
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So we're in a long period of warming.
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And one of the questions that I ask in this book is which part of the last 330 years of warming is due to human activity?
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And which part is natural?
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These are questions that kids should ask their school teachers, and they're deliberately unanswerable questions.
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Because I am of the view that many children are getting fed environmental propaganda in the schools and are not being given the critical and analytical facilities to be able to dissect an argument.
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So we're in a period of warming.
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What's the worry?
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It's quite normal.
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And let's just look at history.
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The one thing that the climate industry, which it is, ignores is history.
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In Roman times it was warm.
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It was considerably warmer than now.
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And we know that.
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They kept good records.
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They grew olives up the Rhine River as far as Bourne.
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They had wine grapes in Yorkshire.
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We know from their clothing that it was warm.
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And that warming suddenly stopped in 535 AD.
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And we entered the dark ages.
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And in 535 AD, we had Krakatawa fill the atmosphere with aerosols.
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We had two volcanoes, one in Rabaul and one in Krakatawa in Indonesia in 535, 536.
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We went into the dark ages.
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It was cool.
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What happened?
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Crops failed.
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We starved.
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We had civil unrest.
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We had cannibalism.
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We broke out of that into the medieval warming.
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First to feel it was a Vikings.
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The seas became calmer.
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They could go further fishing.
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They actually went to Newfoundland, which they called Vinland.
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In Greenland, grapes and barley were growing.
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In Greenland, the graves were deep because there was no permafrost.
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It was a wonderful, benign climate, five degrees warmer than now.
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Eric the Red was saying, come to Greenland, it's a wonderful climate.
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And it was.
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And then we went through a period of solar inactivity.
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And in 23 years, we went from the medieval warming into the Little Ice Age.
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And that was where Ice Age ended 330 years ago.
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So what do you think would happen after a little ice age?
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Do you think it'd get colder or do you think it'd get warmer?
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The only reason that the arguments of science have got any traction in society is that they have been related to the last 30 years or 40 years of temperature measurements.
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I see with great interest the Met Office is telling us that this is the hottest year on record, but you might be on a different calendar to me.
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But I don't think this year's finished yet.
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And this time last year I was in London, as I was the time before, the year before, and it was miserable.
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It was cold, it was very cold.
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So those sort of predictions made just before a big climate conference, one has to be very skeptical of.
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So in science, skepticism is not a pejorative word.
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In science, there is no consensus.
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In science, there are constant battles.
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A good example, we all knew that we got ulcers from an acid stomach and from stress.
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So we took pills and rubbed our bellies and hoped the ulcers would go away until two scientists who were not following the mainstream, who were not following the consensus, were arguing that this was due to a bacterium and no enlistment.
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Ultimately, one of them took the bacterium, developed ulcers, took the antidote, and for that they get a Nobel Prize.
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I believe we've had an enormous corruption of science and the scientific method.
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I believe that the monies that are floating around for climate research, which is a current fad and fashion, are quite perverse.
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I believe we're putting science backwards.
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So this, for me, this climate industry has been a huge attack on the scientific method.
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It has been an attack on my science and history, and things fortunately are changing.
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I finish with one last point.
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You got your Climate Change Act.
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We've just had a carbon tax in Australia.
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Nineteen bills went through Parliament.
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And our carbon tax is to lower the emissions of carbon dioxide from our employment-generating industries in Australia.
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And it's wonderful.
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We've led the world in suicide.
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And our carbon tax is to knock down our emissions by 5%.
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Now you can do the sums.
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And the sums are very simple.
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The IPCC says that 3% of annual emissions are from humans.
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Why is it that that 3% drive climate change is beyond me and not the other 97%, but that's another matter.
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Australia puts out 1.5% of the world's CO2 emissions.
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You can do the calculations, and by Australia knocking back their emissions by 5%, we will, by the year 2050, have lowered global temperatures by 0.00007 degrees Celsius.
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So I do hope you enjoy our sacrifice in giving you a warmer climate here in England.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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And that again was uh Professor Ian Plymer from the University of Melbourne in Australia.
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I've put a link to the original video in the show notes.
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You've been listening to the This Light Shines podcast.
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Thank you for listening.
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And as always.
