Month: December 2019

Some people think that we are living in the hottest period in the last 100,000 years. This is simply not the case and the evidence comes from research by a very distinguished Swiss scientist, Dr. Christian Schlüchter, who discovered 4,000-year-old tree stumps lying underneath a retreating Swiss glacier.

This finding indicated that the Alps were pretty nearly glacier-free at that time, disproving accepted theories that they only began retreating after the end of the little ice age in the mid-19th century. As he concluded, the region had once been much warmer than today.

Dr. Schlüchter has a distinguished reputation as a giant in the field of geology and paleoclimatology and has authored/co-authored more than 250 papers and is a professor emeritus at the University of Bern in Switzerland. However following the ancient forest discovery some scientists tried to undermine its significance. As he observes in a recent interview, “I wasn’t supposed to find that chunk of wood because I didn’t belong to the close-knit circle of Holocene and climate researchers. My findings thus caught many experts off guard."

Other evidence exists that there is really nothing new about dramatic glacier advances and retreats. In fact the Alps were nearly glacier-free again about 2,000 years ago. Schlüchter points out that “the forest line was much higher than it is today; there were hardly any glaciers. Nowhere in the detailed travel accounts from Roman times are glaciers mentioned.” His studies and analyses of a Rhone glacier area reveal that “the rock surface had [previously] been ice-free in 5,800 of the last 10,000 years."

Such changes can occur very rapidly. His research team was stunned to find trunks of huge trees near the edge of Mont Miné Glacier which had all died in just a single year. They determined that time to be 8,200 years ago based upon oxygen isotopes in the Greenland ice which indicated marked cooling.

Clearly these discoveries leave some interesting questions about what caused the glaciers to grow and then retreat over the past 10,000 years. There must be important mechanisms at work that we are at present unable to understand.

This article is an abridged version of a longer piece that can be found online at this link (inGerman):https://www.derbund.ch/wissen/natur/Unsere-Gesellschaft-ist-grundsaetzlich-unehrlich/story/24948853%3C/a

via climate science

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December 31, 2019 at 01:30AM

Daily News 31 Dec 2019

Climate Change Trans Counselling’ by Will Franken (inspired by Greta Thunberg)

Live at London’s free-thinking comedy club, Comedy Unleashed. Join the mailing list https://ift.tt/2Ossbs8 Gigs every month: https://ift.tt/2LwhuDI Comedy Unleashed – The Home of Free-Thinking Comedy!

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December 31, 2019 at 12:16AM

Daily News 30 Dec 2019

Aboriginals didn’t need a water bomber God to save them from Government nurtured firestorms

There is no lake, no dam large enough to put out the firestorms we have created.

A great article by Viv Forbes on just how radically different fire management was in ancient times. Management was almost like non stop arson. The main rule, apparently, was to light a lot and never extinguish. — Jo

_______________________________________ Fighting Fires with Fire

by Viv Forbes

The Power of the Torch “There can be few if any races who for so long were able to practice the delights of incendiarism.” Geoffrey Blainey “Triumph of the Nomads – A History of Ancient Australia.” Macmillan 1975.

The Fire-lighter was the most powerful tool that early humans brought to Australia.

Fires lit by aboriginal men and women created the landscape of Australia. They used fire to create and fertilise fresh new grass for the grazing animals that they hunted, to trap and roast grass dwelling reptiles and rodents, to fight enemies, to send smoke signals, to fell dead trees for camp fires, to ward off frosts and biting insects, and for religious and cultural ceremonies. Their fires created and maintained grasslands and open forests and extinguished all flora and fauna unable to cope with […]