Net Zero And Other Belief-Only Mega-Trends.
According to Allister Heath in an article in the Daily Telegraph of 26/8/71, ‘we are hobbling ourselves with net zero and wokery, as others grow rich while rejecting our values’. At this point, I note for my readers that this hobbling has arisen despite our knowledge of the successive glacial and temperate cycles of the Quaternary Period in which we now live. However, his article, entitled ‘Four mega-trends that condemn the West to irreversible decline’, is similar to all other commentaries on public affairs in making no attempt to differentiate knowledge from belief. It opens by stating, ‘so that’s it then: British troops will be out within days, and the Americans shortly after’; that ‘there will be no delay, no extra time to fly out more citizens or refugees, and no pity’; that ‘this is because the Taliban say so’; and that ‘they, rather than Joe Biden are now in charge of Afghanistan’, and are ‘free to terrorise it back to the Stone Age’. His article goes on to state that ‘the West’s Kabul moment -unlike the fall of Saigon in 1975 or Jimmy Carter’s Tehran hostage crisis of 1979, scenes of previous humiliations, are no false alarms’; that ‘there will be no bounce-back, no miraculous renaissance’; that ‘this time the North American-European-Australasian model really is in trouble as the next stage of the 21st century’s great geopolitical and civilisational realignment begins in earnest’; that ‘in the coming years there will be more Afghanistans’; that ‘America may still boast the world’s most powerful army’; but that ‘the West’s 320-year hegemony, which began when the English GDP per capita overtook that of China’s Yangtze Delta in around 1700, is over’; that ‘other civilisations will become rich and powerful, and perhaps more so than ours, just as they were throughout recorded history’; that ‘they too will want their spheres of influence’; and that ‘they will want their values to prevail’;
At this point, Allister Heath’s article identifies ‘at least four mega-trends which are conspiring to break the West’s grip on the world’, these being, ‘the emergence of non-democratic capitalism, the misuse of technology, the net zero revolution, and America’s and Europe’s ideological decadence’. It then claims that ‘it used to be believed that the entire world would converge voluntarily on a western model’; that ‘we would all wear the same clothes, drive the same cars, and eat at McDonald’s’; that ‘capitalism would lead to the universal adoption of democracy’; that ‘human rights and secularism, buttressed by institutions such as the UN’ would triumph’; but that ‘this Hegelian version of history was as deluded as the Marxist nonsense it (expected) to replace’; that (all of this) ‘was based on a series of intellectual errors, not least (on) a denial of the West’s particular Jewish and Christian history and (on) a narcissistic arrogant and ahistorical downplaying of other traditions’; that ‘a corollary to this was the erroneous belief that adopting capitalism as a technology to deliver economic growth, had to mean also adopting individualism’; that ‘one couldn’t pick and choose, because both emerged together (at the same time) in England and the Netherlands’; but that ‘terrifyingly for libertarian conservatives, such as Allister Heath himself, this was wrong’; that ‘the Western Model can be disaggregated as the Chinese have proved (and as I observed for myself long since) that ‘capitalism can coexist with tyranny’; that ‘free markets don’t imply free speech’; and that ‘the 21st century will be defined by a range of clashing civilisational models’; that ‘there will be China and of course India, but also Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil and Nigeria as regional powers’; that ‘thanks to capitalism they will become rich’; but that ‘they won’t (necessarily) be Western’; that ‘some may be democracies, but in very different senses to what we understand by this term’
By way of explanation, he notes that ‘India, for example, may become far more explicitly Hindu nationalist’; that ‘the next big change is that the West is no longer putting economic growth first, while the emerging empires are still desperate to get rich’; that ‘America and Europe’s embrace of net zero is largely driven by altruism’ (I say by belief in the rtejection of knowledge); that ‘while its proponents believe the poorer countries will suffer more harm from climate change than the richer, the poorer are planning to make the most of West’s turn to greenery to reinforce their own rise’; that ‘China’s real agenda is to pick up on the cheap, the green technologies developed at great expense by the West, thus enabling it to leapfrog America and Europe without crippling its own economy’; that ‘net zero will unleash geopolitical chaos’; that ‘we don’t know how Putin will respond to the collapse in (western) demand for gas’; that he ‘could push NATO and an unprepared, semi-pacifist EU beyond destruction’; that the Gulf States are also likely to implode creating a series of Afghanistan-like scenarios for America’; that ‘by bolstering the importance of elements such as lithium and cobalt, net zero will give China a dramatic boost by cornering Afghanistan’s plentiful supplies; that ‘the misuse of technology represents the third paradigm shift’; that ‘in the West social media in particular has had a corrosive impact on attention spans, and on the ability to think freely’; that ‘bullying and hate are now the norm’; that ‘they are now squeezing out reason, kindness and freedom of speech’; that ‘tribalism and extremism have been dramatically exacerbated’; that ‘states now have more tools at their disposal than ever before to control their populations’; that ‘privacy, the best protection of the dissident, is dying’; that ‘everything we buy, read, and every trip we make can be logged’;’ that ‘for China, this is a dream come true’; that ‘when all cars are electric and networked, the state could simply shut down the vehicles of their opponents’; that ‘when all currency is digital, dictators can track, control, tax, and confiscate as they please’; that ‘combining all of this with massive progress in facial recognition and AI, we can already see that the outcome will be nightmarish’; that ‘authoritarian states will become ever harder to overthrow, further tipping the balance of power in their favour’. Again, ‘what of the West? Will we embrace a Chinese-style social credit system in the guise of fighting obesity or of saving the planet’, and to this extent, ‘converge with our authoritarian rivals’?
The Heath article concludes that ‘all of the foregoing takes us to the fourth mega-trend (now) driving the West’s decline’; that ‘we are turning our backs on the values that made us great’; that support for capitalism is dwindling at a time when every other society has embraced it’; that ‘many would rather see mob rule than the rule of law’; that ‘in the US, the young are less likely to support democratic values than the old’; that ‘there is growing scepticism about reason and the pursuit of truth’; that ‘universities are going back to their obscurantist roots, putting identity politics before knowledge’ (as yet undefined by Heath); that ‘many believe meritocracy has gone too far’; that ‘we are even seeing a resurgence of neo-Lysenkoism whereby politics trumps science; that ‘the woke ideology is the greatest threat to freedom since communism’; that ‘it is gaining ground by the day, fragmenting and dividing society and pitting group against group, the better to undermine the West’; and that ‘as Afghanistan burns, the rest of the world is looking on and laughing at our stupidity’.
However, while I agree with the conclusions of Allister Heath’s analysis, I contend that these conclusions are presented as beliefs supported by his selected facts; that he refers to knowledge only once (seventh line of the above paragraph); but that he doesn’t definitively differentiate it from belief, as I have done as the basis of this website which calls for definitive knowledge to replace definitive belief. On the basis of my differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy and with it those of wisdom/folly, truth/falsehood, right/wrong and good/bad, I hereby invite my readers to give Allister Heath the benefit of any doubt they may have as to whether or not his conclusions as set out in his article are more knowledge-only than belief-only At this point, I judge them to be re-classable as knowledge to a substantial extent; and that he himself would recognise that his adoption of my newly definitive differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy, would enable him to secure his analysis in the minds of his readership, were I to introduce it to him personally. 30/8/21.
Article 75The Need To Eliminate Parlous Consequences Of Acting On Belief -Only.
In an article in The Daily Telegraph of 19/8/21, entitled Decadence and overreach have brought down the American Empire, Allister Heath observes that ‘no empire is eternal: all eventually fall amid hubris and humiliation’; that the heart-wrenching humanitarian calamity that is the botched Afghan retreat is merely the latest sign that the American era is ending: Washington is no longer the world’s policeman, and an unsettling future of clashes between expansionist authoritarian regional powers beckons’; that ‘it is a far cry from the late 1980s/early 1990s when American global clout peaked’ with ‘the Reagan rebirth, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the termination of communism and its gulags, the rise of Silicon Valley and the invention of the internet, and the liberation of Kuwait’; that ‘these were the anni mirabiles of the US hegemon, the glory days of Pax Americana and the ending of humanity’s most turbulent century’; that ‘Hollywood held its head high and everyone wanted to be like America, vote like America, and consume like America – or so it seemed’; that the creation of the single market in 1992 was Europe’s attempt at imitating the USA’; that ‘the same year, China’s Jiang Zemin announced his epoch-defining “socialist market economy”; that ‘yet all of this, far from representing a settled consensus on the meaning of the good life and how to achieve it, was a cruel aberration, the high water mark of the American Idea’; and that ‘everything went wrong afterwards’; that ‘paradoxically, 9/11 itself didn’t take down the American empire’; that it ‘awoke a sleeping giant and triggered a ground swell of patriotism’; that ‘a different branching of history might have seen a massive retaliation culminating in the killing of Osama bin Laden’; but that this took a decade to achieve, with Pakistan, a supposed ally, harbouring bin Laden, and itself being evidence of America’s waning power’ which was further demonstrated by its long-term, half-hearted and ultimately catastrophically counterproductive attempt, at remodelling the Middle East’.
Allister Heath goes on to recall that ‘twenty years on, America’s global plan lies in ruins, its elites confounded on almost every issue’ and with its stupidity and incompetence being on display over the Afghan withdrawal confirming that it doesn’t understand the rest of the world and isn’t fit to govern itself let alone the globe’; that blinded by a simplistic universalism it no longer understands religion, tribalism, history, national differences, or why countries want to rule themselves’; that ‘wherever one looks, America’s blueprint has failed’; that to take the United States of Europe, for example, Allister Heath suggests that ‘America doesn’t understand that Brexit signalled the beginning of the end of that dystopian construct’; that others will leave the EU because of the coming migration crisis’; that ‘tens of millions will seek to move from Africa and the Middle East’; that ‘there will be toxic attempts at distributing migrants across the bloc’; and that this ‘will result in a populist uprising or economic implosion’; that ‘in the Middle East, every country touched by America is in chaos’; that ‘Afghanistan is back in the hands of the Taliban’; that Iraq is a nightmare’; that Syria was the scene of monstrous killings as the west looked on; that Libya is a calamity’; that the Clinton-backed Israel-Palestine plan failed’; that ‘the Gaza withdrawal merely emboldened anti -Semitic Hamas terrorists; that Biden’s administration is sucking up to Iran’s two-faced regime; that the former fails to see that the latter is intent on going nuclear and destroying Israel; that while the Gulf States are largely American protectorates, what will their fate be when oil demand collapses as a result of net zero; and that the Middle East woes have only just begun’.
Again, Allister Heath notes that ‘America’s retreat is equally spectacular in Asia’; that China has become rich and powerful thanks to capitalism in itself a triumph of American ideological expansionism’; but that China’s population is not clamouring for democracy’; that ‘China’s crackdown on entrepreneurs and other sources of independent power demonstrates its lethal seriousness and its intention to return to its own imperial past’; that China can no longer be contained’; that ‘it grabbed Hong Kong and will eventually turn to Taiwan’. He then asks ‘will America be dragged into a nuclear World War III? and ‘will that be how everything comes tumbling down?’, or ‘will America just walk away?’ and what about India and Pakistan?’ He concludes that ‘it is a mess’; that Pax Americana has achieved nothing of any significance bar saving Kuwait and ending conflicts in Yugoslavia over the last 30 years’ that ‘America’s internal problems are immense’; that ‘its constitution is broken’; that its predilection for second rate gerontocrats such as Biden is unrivalled’; that ‘its elites are in the grip of a bizarre “awakening” centred on a nihilistic, ungrateful self-loathing’; that it no longer has values to sell, neither capitalism, nor democracy, nor the American Dream’. Again, he asks ‘how can people who live in terror of “micro-aggressions” find it in themselves to defeat real evils?’ Yet again, he asks how can a public which doesn’t know about the rest of the world prevent the terminal decline of the US Empire’?
He then asks, could America’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have ever succeeded and as a Hayekian who believes that it is a Fatal Conceit that governments can successfully plan the world, he admits to be sceptical. However, he admits that the shock of 9/11 led him wrongly to believe that, just for once, a full-on imperialistic invasion might work and that liberal democracy and capitalism would spread through the invaded region; that America had done it in Japan with Douglas MacArthur and in Germany in World War II, so why not in Iraq?’ However, he now admits that this this would have required a massive number of ground troops far more than were thus deployed, a total take-over of society and decades of occupation, and would probably have failed anyway; and that consequently he has learned his lesson; that in practice, America should never again attempt state building; that change must be spontaneous and organic, or it is unsustainable; that threats from such as al-Qaeda or now Iran should be tacked vigorously and humanitarian interventions to prevent genocides are a must, but that full-on liberal imperialism inevitably backfires; that nonetheless, where the West has lost control, there will be mass population movements, currency wars and battles over natural resources; that the American empire at least believed in freedom and democracy; and that what replaces these won’t even pretend to be either. 24/8/21.
Article 74The Parlous Consequences Which Arise When Belief Is Mistaken For Knowledge.
At this point in the fourth section of this website, I recall for the convenience of my readers, that my definitive differentiation of the knowledge belief dichotomy and with it those of wisdom/folly, truth/falsehood, right/wrong and good/bad, is derived from my observation that reality stimulates our imaginations to rational beliefs transformable to knowledge by evaluation of their compliance or non-compliance with cause-effect reality, or to those which can only be accepted, rejected or suspended as beliefs beyond this reality-evaluation in pro tem practice or in principle, but which cannot be accepted as knowledge; that, consequently, I have shown that such reality-evaluation of specific beliefs produced the cause/effect craft- and self-knowledge which secured our group-species survival from time immemorial and the cause-effect scientific and technological knowledge which enhanced our welfare from the seventeenth century onwards, while our knowledge-based development of social cohesion was variously disrupted by conflicting religious beliefs, by knowledge-rejecting secular beliefs or by the reaction of ignored-reality in ways which belief is unable to anticipate or avert.
Again, at this point, I recall for the convenience of my readers, that religious belief in the existence of a God or gods must have been stimulated by our recognition of the need for a cause not only for our own existence but also for the reality in which we exist; but that with such beliefs being beyond reality, we cannot evaluate them by reference to this reality because any such reference is merely a circularity. However, I here recall my earlier conclusions that the Judaeo-Christian injunction to do unto others as you would have the do to you, is a statement of the behavioural knowledge without which we could not maintain the hierarchical social cohesion needed for our survival as the group-species we are; that even this knowledge does not prevent the existence of belief-only social sub-groups within distinct national sub-groups of our human species, nor does it prevent the creation of antagonistic religious subgroups respecting differing beliefs as to the nature of God and as to the details of worship, as exemplified by the past and present violence between the sub-groups of Christianity and Islam and between their respective internal sects; and that, in contrast, all herd animal species inherently recognise the need for this ‘live and let-live’ attitude without which their mutually beneficial group-life would be impossible.
Yet again, I recall that the harmonisation of political beliefs/counter-beliefs within national groups of the human species is fragile and is maintained only by the recurrence of voting for party-specific sub-groups which offer to implement policies allegedly in support of belief or its counter-belief; that nonetheless debates of opinions/counter-opinions which precede such elections, are merely the debates of beliefs/counter-beliefs supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/ counter-evidence or news/false-news, no set of which is ever debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; that consequently, the ensuing vote is merely a temporary belief-consensus pending its possible rejection in the next debate and the next election, and so on ad infinitum; and that this repetitive charade can be terminated only by the replacement of belief/counter-belief options, which can never deliver as promised in reality, with knowledge-only options either of whichwill work in reality as promised, the election then deciding which will be implemented; that this replacement of belief with knowledge and the consequent elective choice from knowledge-only alternatives is the objective of this website; and that the parlous state of current belief-only parliamentary/elective affairs can be rectified only by public demand for this replacement. The subsequent Articles of this website will now demonstrate the ubiquitous need to achieve this objective, 21/8/21.
Article 73The Transformation Of Belief In Anthropogenic Global Warming To Knowledge Of Its Existence Or Non-Existence In Reality.
Given that our knowledge of the sequence and timescales of the temperate and glacial stages of the Quaternary Period in which we now exist and which started 2.5 Ma) as cited in the closing Article 72 of the third section of this website; given that we are now in a cooling stage which will end this current temperate stage in about 5000 years; and given that we shall then enter another glacial stage, rather than another temperate stage, it seems that if we are now experiencing a period anthropogenic warming period we should welcome it as a means of delaying the onset of yet another glacial stage. However, as we approach the anti-global warming Cop 26 meeting in Glasgow, our newspapers are replete with articles which claim to show that the costs of preventing anthropogenic global warming are, quite simply, unaffordable; that the countries which emit the greatest amounts of carbon dioxide are unlikely to agree to agree to limit their emissions to the extent deemed necessary to prevent this belief-only anthropogenic global warming; and that the UK government is likely to be seriously embarrassed by hosting this meeting.
To avoid, this embarrassment, I propose that the UK government uses this meeting to openly admit that at this point in time anthropogenic global warming is only a belief; that the costs are problematical and require the knowledge of need before they are incurred; and that consequently before they are incurred, attempts should be made to convert this belief to positive or negative knowledge by the method advocated by this website; that if this is not yet possible, then it should at least be recognised that thus far this increased temperatures are merely correlated with increased emissions of carbon dioxide rather than than these parameters having been related as cause and effect, as is required by actual science; and that correlation in the absence of demonstrable cause/effect denotes non-science or pseudoscience; and that before incurring and/or imposing the costs of compliance with mere belief, governments should incur the costs of the cause/effect experimentation necessary to validate or refute the current belief in anthropogenic global warming. I would be willing to assist in ensuring that all such research proposals were properly adjudicated as to their ability to validate or refute the current belief in anthropogenic global warming.
By way of illustration, I recall listening to lecture by an FRS i in which he attributed his results on the decrease in plankton numbers in the western approaches to the English Channel, to the increase in marine pollution. While, he was circulating through his audience in the subsequent coffee break, I told him his results were merely a correlation in that he had failed to demonstrate a cause/effect relationship between his chosen parameters; and that he could equally well have shown the same correlation with the then increasing issuance of television licences. He made no response, other than to resume is circulation within the coffee group members. 17/8/21.
Article 72Knowledge As To What The Future Might Deliver.
In Chapter 14 of his timely Book, Peter Toghill has completed his study of over 2000 million years of Earth history in the British area, in the course of which his readers can see two separate portions of Britain, divided by 7000 km of ocean 500 million years ago, come together, and slowly drift north from the southern hemisphere to its present position in the northern hemisphere. In this long passage through the intervening latitudes, Britain has experienced great climatic changes from those of burning deserts, tropical seas, and rain forests, to polar glaciation. During this transit, there have been 500 million years in which two episodes of Palaeozoic mountain building caused by continental collision have produced complex fold structures over northern and western Britain, while the south and east remained relatively non-deformed and characterised by gently dipping Mesozoic and Cainozoic rocks, while the global cooling produced the Quaternary Ice Ages from which we may, or may not, be emerging. We don’t yet know what will happen next, but we do know what has happened in the past, and we ought to use the latter in considering the future.
The last major event to affect the British area was the Flandrian marine transgression, which world-wide produced a sea level rise of 120 metres between 17,000 and 7000 years ago, followed by the end of the Devensian Glaciation, the subsequent melting of which produced the isostatic bounce-back of northern Britain which is still happening with Scotland still rising by about 0.5mm per year while the rest of Britain is suffering relatively rapid tectonic subsidence at a rate of 1mm per year and even greater in the London area (2mm per year). The problem in London and south-east England is made worse because the Tertiary sediments are still consolidating and compacting in the London and Hampshire Basins. Again, the North Sea Basin is still subsiding at the same rate as in the Tertiary and early Quaternary and up to 10m of Flandrian muds have been deposited in the North Sea and Irish Sea Basins. Inland, the Quaternary glacial sediments are being stripped away by river erosion and rain wash, while coastal areas are suffering erosion of soft Tertiary and Quaternary sediments in eastern England where coasts are retreating by up to 1m per year in places. However, most of the sediments produced by this erosion finds its way into estuaries, beaches and dunes and is not deposited on the continental shelf where most of the sediment is re-worked glacial and fluvio-glacial material, while the very rapid Flandrian transgression has not yet caused the distribution pattern of continental shelf sediment to be fully established.
With Britain having just emerged from the last glaciation around 10,000 years ago, the question is, are we now in an inter-glacial period? If we are, then ice will return in a few thousand years. Alternatively, if we are not, and the Quaternary cycle of glacial/inter-glacial phases has finished completely, and eventually all traces of Quaternary glaciation on land will be eradicated by river and fluvial action in a few million years to something similar to that of the Mesozoic. However, evidence of the Quaternary glaciation would be preserved in the marine sequence of the major subsiding basins such as the North Sea. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the cold phases have finished. Indeed, a study of climatic temperature curves produced from sub-sea cores show a series of cycles with a periodicity of 20,000 to 120,000 years; that projecting these forward, and without human interference, glacial conditions should return in a few thousand years. Moreover, the effects of human activity, (however much mistakenly deplored) are unlikely to be more significant than those of natural changes of temperature of which we now have records, and which cannot have been caused by human activity, such as the 10 centigrade degree rise around 13,000 years ago, and which happened in only 100 years.
Further to non-human effects, and with respect to plate tectonics, we ought to note that all oceans eventually have to close; that there is no ocean crust anywhere in the world today that is older than 180 million years; that when the Atlantic Ocean starts to close, perhaps in 50 million years’ time, a large subduction zone will form off north-west Europe; that this could involve oceanic crust subducting under more oceanic crust, with the formation of a volcanic island arc and possibly an accretion prism as in the southern uplands during the Ordovician and the Silurian; that this subduction zone could be right against the continental margin so that an Andean-style fold mountain range would start to form with large volcanoes over Britain and widespread earthquake activity; that if the European plate started to over-ride the mid-Atlantic ridge then we would have a San Andreas transform fault and associated earthquake belt over Britain; that parts of Iceland could be welded on to the north-west of Scotland as an ophiolite; that future geologists would be hard-pressed to separate Icelandic basalts from those of Skye; that non-deformed Mesozoic and Cainozoic sediments of Britain could eventually, in say 100 million years time, form the high summits of a Himalayan-style mountain chain, with Jurassic ammonites and other fossils being found at the top of a new mount Everest, just as the present Himalayas include folded Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks with fossils formed in the now closed Tethys Ocean; and that future geologists will be comparing such fossils with those found in what we now call the recent Quaternary Period. However, in closing his book with his version of this paragraph, Peter Toghill asks the thought-provoking question: will humans be around in 200 million years’ time to study ancient rocks? After all, mass extinctions due to asteroid collisions happen every 100 million years or so.
As to the immediate future, it is my contention that the knowledge reviewed in the foregoing Articles 60 to 71 of the third section of this website, and as definitively differentiated from belief in Articles 1 to 59 of the first and second sections of this website, is sufficient to dispel all current belief in anthropogenic global warming for example; and that accordingly, the fourth section of this website will demonstrate the need for definitive knowledge to replace definitive belief in all future governmental policy-making, in all industrial responses to all such current and future policy-making, and in all current and future efforts to raise funds for the support of all such responses to all such policy-making; and that in the absence of application of my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation as clarified in this website, we will continue to debate opinion/counter-opinion which is merely the debate of belief/counter-belief respectively supported by facts/counter-facts, evidence/ counter-evidence and news/false-news, no set of which is ever debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; that while this failure of belief/counter-belief debate to reach any debate-terminating conclusions was first recognised by Socrates; and that we must now rectify this long-standing failure to recognise this inherent failure of debate, by recognising that debate per se must now be displaced by acceptance that all debate must be replaced with debate-terminating conclusive knowledge as soon as such knowledge can be be acquired and at least must be terminated until such knowledge is acquired; and that meanwhile we must now accept that the knowledge/belief dichotomy must be definitively differentiated by means advocated exemplified in the first three sections of this website together with those of of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong, and good/bad, while in its fourth section, I will show how this definitive differentiation of the knowledge/ belief dichotomy can terminate all current and future debates of belief/counter-belief as, with the assistance of Peter Toghill, they have already questioned the current belief in anthropogenic global warming by demonstrating that the knowledge which would verify this belief has yet to be acquired, while the knowledge already acquired tends to its refutation. 10/7/21
Article 71Knowledge Of Natural Cycles Of Global Warming And Cooling
Major climatic cycles in the Quaternary appear to be 40,000 years long, with subsidiary cycles of around 20,000 years. These cycles are caused by predictable changes in the Earth’s orbit round the Sun as discovered by Milankovitch in 1941. However, this is not the whole story: it explains the periodicity of temperature cycles but not why we have Ice Ages, because the latter have not been recycling throughout all of geological time. Thus, there must be another factor which has recently changed from the earlier to the later periods. However, this is not far to seek: the topographical changes in the Earth’s surface also affect its temperature distributions. Thus, the Panama Gap between North and South America closed in the Quaternary, and the Arctic Ocean became isolated when the very shallow Bering Straits became dry land at times of low global sea level in the Quaternary. In addition, these changes in ocean circulation were accompanied by changes in atmospheric circulation when the Himalayas, the Tibetan Plateau, and the western cordillera of the Americas began to rise and to cause late Tertiary cooling. Thus, the rising of these mountains could have been a major cause of change in the dominant periodicity of glaciations which led to the intensification of Quaternary glaciation in the Tertiary.
It is now time to apply Peter Toghill’s review of geological knowledge to the current belief in anthropogenic global warming. The current ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica represent frozen atmospheric water up to 0.25 million years old. Older ice has recycled back to the oceans by mass flow of the ice sheets to melt water. Thus, current ice contains air representative of the atmosphere over this recent time interval. Sampling and chemical analysis of such air samples taken from differing ice-core depths show that greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and methane) were low during glacials and high during interglacials. However, I wish to bring to the attention of my readers the knowledge that this relationship does not enable us to decide whether high concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane are the cause of the warming or the effect of the warming. Thus, we have to consider the existence of a natural mechanism for global warming which would enable us to decide which of the foregoing alternatives is operative. However, as of now, we know that studies of pollen and beetles at the end of the last glacial episode (the Devensian) around 13,000 years ago in southern Britain show remarkable temperature rises of 10 centigrade degrees in 100 years. Indeed, there appears to have been 20 of these rapid temperature surges in Britain during the last 60,000 years and all apparently due to natural causes (i.e. no anthropomorphism). To account for these changes, Peter Toghill proposes, in a subsection of Chapter 13, entitled global warming, that south moving icebergs melt into the northward moving warm/tropical/saline water of the Gulf stream; that this northwards flow of warm water is accompanied by its cooling, its increasing density, and its sinking to greater depths; that the southwards moving cold and relatively fresh water progressively lowers the density of the northward flowing water, inhibits its sinking, and thus reduces its flow; that this in turn reduces its warming effect; but that when the southward flow is thus also reduced, the Gulf Stream flow increases again; and that this oscillation has been the cause Britain’s temperature rising by up to 10 Centigrade degrees in 100 years, between cooling periods of a few thousand years. In the last 8000 years, conditions have been stable, but this is an unusual situation and may not last. At this point Peter Toghill provides Fig. 158 which gives the major divisions of the Quaternary Period and their temperate/glacial sub-divisions of which there have been eight since the Tertiary, for which he cites G.S. Boulton, in Geology of England and Wales, together with P. D. Duff and A. J. Smith, eds. Geological Society of London, 192, p.41, fig. 14.4. However, I suggest that the subsection, entitled Global Warming in Peter Toghill’s Chapter 13, is a compromise between what he wanted to write and what his publishers permitted him to write (c. f. the Publisher’s overall disclaimer, which I cited in introducing Peter Toghill’s Book.
As to anthropogenic global warming Peter Toghill goes on to state that we should not pollute the atmosphere, but it seems that natural changes are far more important than those produced by humans. However, while it has become popular to suggest that global warming has been occurring only since our industrial revolution; and that such warming is thus anthropogenic: I prefer to conclude that when two ocean currents meet head to head, at least one of them must reverse at lower depths and return from whence it came, accompanied by the other. Thus, I maintain that when the north flowing Gulf Stream encounters the south flowing Arctic current, there is a region where the warming Arctic current is of equal density with the cooling Gulf Stream; that in this region, these equally dense waters sink to to greater depths; that these now combined waters then move south at these greater depths, the Gulf Stream being the major component of the pair; that were this southern movement to cease, both surface currents would cease; that, instead of this ceassetion the encounter-region of the surface waters moves northwards in warming periods and southwards in cooling periods; but that we cannot determine from these movements the cause or the causes of the warming or of the cooling periods themselves.
However, Peter Toghill notes that the Quaternary is often equated with the Ice Age; but that this is a relative view; that though some temperatures did fall in the Tertiary by around 10 Centigrade degrees, it was still relatively warm in the tropics, and during the inter glacial periods, in the north, it was warmer than at present; and that if you asked the current inhabitants of Greenland if they thought the Ice Age had finished, they would say ‘No’, and if you asked the same question of the people of Antigua, they would say, ‘What Ice Age’. He then goes on to review the evidence for glacial and inter-glacial conditions in Britain, and to a lesser extent, in north-west Europe with reference to their names and dates (the latter derived from magnetic reversals) as set out in the Duff/Smith Table referenced above, but these details need not concern as here. It is, however, worth noting here, that there is evidence that the fossilised flora and fauna include evidence for oak and elder, warm-water shells, and elephants, lions and horses, and at Swanscombe, for the presence of scull fragments and the stone tools of early Homo sapiens in the Hoxian sub-period of the Pleistocene. Again, in the Devensian, there is evidence of a major cooling around 115,000 years ago, but with little in the way of ice-cover. However, a further marked cooling occurred 73,000 years ago and from then on, the climate oscillated to give maximum glaciation between 23,000 and 14,000 years ago, but with ice having largely disappeared by 13,000 years ago. Again, a sudden climate deterioration between 11,000 and 10,500 years ago produced the Loch Lomond re-advance, to be followed just as quickly by the climatic warming of the Holocene (Flandrian Stage) 10,000 years ago, in which we now live. But, I say, none of this identifies the cause of this re-cycling of temperatures.
Article 70Knowledge Of Ice Ages and Mammoths – The Quaternary.
In his Chapter 13, Peter Toghill notes that Northern Britain has a wealth of dramatic mountain scenery produced by ice action, in particular valley glaciers and ice sheets during the last two million years; and that there is also a great variety of lowland features formed by sands, clays and gravels left behind by melting ice sheets. As he says: it is hard to imagine that during the early nineteenth century scientists would not accept that ice had ever covered Britain in the past, and sought to explain the origin of what we now call glacial features by reference to drifting ice bergs in a sea which covered the highest mountains during the biblical flood. By as late as 1830, such “scientists” were going only so far as to accept that certain features and deposits were due to drifting icebergs from the cold north which melted and deposited sand, gravel and large boulders, but they could not yet accept the evidence for continuous ice cover of the land. Indeed, they explained the presence of marine shells in these sands and gravels by inundations of the sea to depths of around 1200m in Britain and to even greater depths to explain the presence of such shells at greater altitudes in the Alps. However, in 1837, Louis Agassiz put forward his glacial theory and eventually persuaded, such as the above, to accept that glaciation over Europe and Britain was much older and more widespread than had previously been thought (believed). He based his conclusions on the Alps where he proved the previous extent of existing glaciers by evidencing the moraine deposits exposed by their more recent retreats. It was easier to accept this for the Alps where glaciers still existed, but in Britain, it took longer to be accepted. However, now we can look at the deep U-shaped valleys in Snowdonia and the Lake District and conclude that they once had glaciers in them which scraped and polished the valley sides and over-deepened them while eroding boulders from near the mountain summits and transporting them down to lower altitudes as glacial erratics, and sand and gravel to be exposed as the glacier retreats as it melts and thus exposes them. In the Alps today, we can see such moraines many kilometres down the valleys beneath current glacier snouts, thus showing, the older more widespread extent of the ice.
In his Chapter 13, Peter Toghill presents what is now known of Quaternary climate change, Global warming, Pleistocene glaciation, Devonian glaciations, erosional features in highland regions, features of tundra areas, and Lowland glacial features, not all which sub-sections need concern us here. However, as to climate change, he notes that towards the end of the Tertiary Period repeated cycles of warm and cooler climates became established, each with periods of about 100,000 years. these became more pronounced in the last two million years, and during the cooler periods expansion of glacial ice occurred in the form of continental ice sheets, of which seventeen cycles of cold and temperate climates are recognised to have occurred in Britain during the last two million years, and ten in the last million years. However, we now have evidence of three glaciations over the whole of Britain as recently as in the last 300,000 years. Again there is evidence of possibly two earlier episodes in the North Sea basin within the last 1.5 million years. These three glacial episodes were separated by interglacials when the climate was somewhat warmer than at present.
We now live in an interglacial which started around 10,000 years ago. but now temperatures are lower than they were 2000 years ago and we may be heading towards another glaciation in about 5000 years’ time. Deep-sea cores from the North Sea, where a complete Quaternary marine sequence is available and from other oceanic areas provide for the earlier seventeen hot/cold cycles. A number of plant and animal groups occur as fossils in Quaternary sequences, and as they are often closely related to living species, they are excellent climate indicators. These include pollen, beetles and marine micro-organisms. Oxygen isotope ratios (Oxygen-18/Oxygen-16) in the calcite shells of marine organisms can reveal when oceanic water is being stored in glacial ice during a cold period and vice versa, because water molecules containing the light isotope are preferentially evaporated from sea water to be stored in rain and snow and hence is depleted in marine shells during cold episodes. These animals also have known modern temperature ranges so that sea temperatures can be estimated by this means also. By analogy with present ranges of beetles and plants we can estimate the ancient climates of glacial and interglacial sediments laid down on land. Pollen analysis is a very accurate way of recognising old climates, particularly in peat deposits.
In Britain we have good evidence for three major glacial episodes (Anglian, Wolsonian and Devensian) during the last 300,000 years, separated by interglacials. As Peter Toghill has said, we are now living in an interglacial with temperatures cooling, which started 10,000 years ago; that cyclical evidence from the past suggests it will end in about 5000 years; and that there is no evidence that this cyclical sequence is at an end. The Quaternary is divided into the Pleistocene and the Holocene which are further subdivided into stages based on climate change. The Holocene started only 10,000 years ago and is considered by many as merely the latest interglacial within the Pleistocene. The Development of continental ice sheets is relatable to atmospheric and ocean circulation, and it appears that that the first ones were formed in Antarctica during the Oligocene around 30 Ma with a well-established sheet in existence by the late Miocene, 14 Ma and those in Europe and Iceland around 2.5 Ma. In Britain, the oldest true glacial deposits are around 300,000 years old, although as we have seen, older glaciations occurred in the North Sea Basin, and it is likely that the Scottish Highlands began to be glaciated over 2 Ma when cold phases began in earnest, though no sediments or fossils occur of this age. In north-west Europe the Quaternary includes an early pre-glacial phase, 2.5 to 0.6 Ma and a later phase, 0.6 Ma to the present day. Glacial episodes in Europe and North America led to ice sheets up to 4 km thick covering many areas, though in Britain they probably did not exceed 2 km. Continental ice sheets such as in Antarctica and Greenland lock up oceanic water and sea levels fell globally during the Pleistocene glacial phases by up to 150 m compared with today. Ice around the north pole is simply frozen sea, not an ice sheet. The weight of ice on land depresses continental masses into the molten magma beneath them and in parts of northern Britain, this depression was greater than the fall in sea level, so that old beaches were taken below earlier sea levels, while with the removal such ice sheets by melting, the land has risen again (isostatic readjustment) by as much as 30m above present sea levels in north-west Scotland, total isostatic effect has been as much as 150m.
Article 69Knowledge Of An Emerging Britain – The Tertiary Period.
In his Chapter 12, Peter Toghill reports that the Tertiary period over Britain was one of remarkable contrasts. While most of the area experienced uplift and erosion to form a distribution of land forms not too dissimilar to today, the far north-west experienced widespread early Tertian volcanism, and the south-east experienced marine sedimentation. Uplift and doming of the area between Greenland and Rockall initiated volcanic activity and sea-floor spreading to commence the formation of the North Atlantic around 63 Ma. Associated volcanic and igneous activity in Scotland and Northern Ireland lasted from 63 Ma to 52 Ma and had thus finished by the early Eocene. Up to 2000 m of basalt lavas were erupted and gabbros and granite intrusions were formed. The North Sea basin subsided to receive 3000 m of marine sediments, and branches of this sea periodically flooded southern England to form a thin (c 500m) sequence of Tertiary sediments up to the Oligocene. About 2000m of sediments formed in the western approaches of the growing Atlantic and this area occasionally joined with the North Sea basin through narrow sea-ways close to the English Channel. The Tertiary sequences of southern England show a constant mixing of marine and non-marine facies as the sea transgressed and regressed.
Even though Britain moved to its present latitudes during the Tertiary, the climate was warm and humid even as far north as Scotland, where vegetation grew on laterite soils between lava flows. Folding and faulting affected southern England during the Miocene with the formation of well-known, often tight folds in Dorset, the Isle of Wight, and in the inversion fold of the Weald, as well as other areas. This episode of earth movements, often called Alpine, was probably caused by a mixture of tectonic forces, some due to sea-floor spreading in the newly forming North Atlantic, and others due to the effects of the Alpine orogeny further south. Many of the folds are steep mono-clinal structures, and together with faults may be associated with structures in the Variscan basement. Large-scale tear faulting affected south-west England and a number of offshore faults were active, many of which define the present coast-line of Britain. Fault-bounded basins in south-west England (Bovey Tracey) and Cardigan Bay received great thickness of lacustrine and fluvial Oligocene and Miocene sediments derived from nearby highlands, and scattered remnants of late Miocene sediments occur in south-east England. However, marine Pliocene sediments are only found in East Anglia where they grade up into rocks, showing the increasingly cold climate which heralded the onset of the glacial conditions of the Quaternary.
Article 68Knowledge Of Chalk Seas And The End Of Dinosaurs – The Cretaceous Period.
Peter Toghill’s Chapter 11 reports that increased plate tectonic activity in the Cretaceous led to large amounts of new ocean crust being formed at the World’s ocean ridges. This in turn, led to continuous but erratic increases and decreases in global sea levels none of which, according to Hallam (1997), have been below current levels while those above current levels are measurable in hundred of metres, while according to Vail (1977) some of these have been below current levels for relatively short times in the Cambrian, the Carboniferous, the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cainozoic. However, relative increases in sea level affected the Yorkshire Basin from the beginning of the Cretaceous while the Wessex Basin, including the Weald, experienced deltaic and fluvial conditions for 30 million years of the period. The first marine transgression produced the Lower Greensand over southern England and at the same time distant volcanoes supplied ash for Fuller’s Earth deposits. The second transgression, following mid-Cretaceous Earth movements, produced the Gault Clay and Upper Greensand which spread as far west as Devon as well as Yorkshire, where the Red Chalk was deposited near to Market Weighton. A major transgression at the base of the Upper Cretaceous produced up to 500 m of chalk over most of Britain and north-west Europe, with sea levels rising to 300m more than present levels. Sea levels fell at the end of the Cretaceous and uplift and doming affected the area.
Chalk is a unique type of limestone that is not found anywhere else in the geological column and cannot be seen forming anywhere in the world today. It was formed as a calcareous ooze of micron-sized plates of dead plankton and marine algae called coccoliths. Sponges grew on the sea bed and provided silica after death from which the well-known flint nodules of the chalk were later formed. The southern part of the North Atlantic started to widen during the Cretaceous and a new sea formed as far north as between Labrador and the Bay of Biscay. Rifting in the Rockall area did not lead to sea floor spreading in the Cretaceous, and the formation of the northern areas of the North Atlantic had to wait for the Tertiary period. Southern England lay around 40 degrees North by the end of the Tertiary. The end of the Cretaceous saw one of the greatest mass extinctions of all time with 75% of all species becoming extinct, most notably the dinosaurs and the ammonites. While it is popularly believed that collision with an asteroid or comet caused this mass extinction, it is much more likely to have been caused by a combination an asteroid collision, plate tectonic/volcanic events, and the long term decline of many animal groups and species.
Article 67Knowledge Of The Margins Of The Tethys Ocean – The Jurassic Period.
Peter Toghill’s Chapter 10 notes that the Jurassic Period, was named after the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland; and that it lasted around 60 million years from 208 Ma to 146 Ma. It saw the onset of tectonic activity in the North Sea with the establishment of a rift valley, a triple junction and associated volcanism. The Tethys Ocean spread a shallow epicontinental sea over most of Britain which laid down clays and thin limestones, the Lias, at the beginning of the period. Important chamosite and siderite ironstones formed in some areas. the early Jurassic seas were full of ammonites and marine reptiles. A mid-Jurassic uplift produced a positive area in the middle of the North Sea which fed deltaic and fluviatile sediments, the Estuarine Series, into the north of England, Scotland, and the north-east midlands during the middle of the period. Meanwhile, the south of England was covered by shallow water lagoons starved of land-derived sediment and extensive carbonates developed in the form of oolites, forming the Inferior and Great Oolites. Open marine areas only existed at this time in south-west England. Ammonites were abundant in the Lias, but were not so common in the oolites, and were absent in the deltaic sediments of the north. Mid-Jurassic earth movements led to an unconformity within the Inferior Oolite and local areas (axes) of up-lift affected Oolite sequences and thicknesses during the Lower and Middle Jurassic. A Marine transgression produced a widespread limestone, the Cornbrash, at the end of the Middle Jurassic. The Upper Jurassic saw the establishment of open marine conditions over all of Britain and thick organic-rich clays, the Oxford and Kimmeridge Clays were laid Down, separated by Corallian limestones, the Kimmeridge Clay, being an important source-rock for North Sea oil. The Upper Jurassic seas were full of ammonites, fish, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. The collapse of the North Sea uplifted area and the associated graben, led to great thicknesses of the Upper Jurassic coarse sediments in the faulted basins of the North Sea. At the end of the Jurassic, limestones, sometimes evaporitic, were restricted to Southern England due to the uplift of the northern areas and a fall in sea level, but marine conditions continued into the Cretaceous in the Yorkshire Basin.