By the final programme of his five-part Earth series, broadcast last year by the BBC, Chris Packham had perfected the art of taking imprecise proxy data from the geological record and comparing it to more accurate modern measurements to draw dubious conclusions about imminent climate collapse. One sudden spike in temperatures about 56 million years ago over “just a few thousand years” is said to be “incredible but sobering”. Scientists, he says, regard this as “analogous” to what is happening today. Some might, but a lot of others are more circumspect about relying on geological data that has a resolution of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and comparing it with today’s measurements.
Packham draws conclusions from events in the PETM, or Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a warming period that began sometime around 56.3 million to 55.9 million years ago. Briefly, it appears global temperatures shot up to around 25 or 26°C, compared with about 14.5°C today. In a published essay, science writer Andy May studied the evidence around the PETM and noted the proxy temperature measurements with lengthy resolutions “are not comparable to today’s monthly averages”.
But this lack of temporal precision does not stop Packham waxing lyrically about the PETM. “Violent storms ravaged the planet with flash floods and protracted drought,” he says. “What is scary is how it happened – each event triggering the next until it pushed the Earth past some serious tipping points,” he claims.
The ‘tipping point’ trope is the go-to climate-modelled message for today’s Armageddonists. Alas, there doesn’t appear to have been time in the programme to state what these ancient tipping points were, but in case the viewer doesn’t pick up on this current fashionable scare, Packham claims “and that is our nightmare”. Towards the end of the programme, he doubles down on his own claimed scientific precision and states: “Today, climate is changing faster than at any time in the last 66 million years.” This might what Packham understands ‘the science’ to say, but there is no way that anyone can know this, let alone prove it. He later told the Guardian that he hoped the “terror factor” generated by the series would “spur us to do something about the environment crisis”.
So what caused this spike in temperatures in the PETM? Since this is a propaganda film aimed at persuading the viewer that burning hydrocarbons and releasing ‘greenhouse’ gases like carbon dioxide into the air is potentially catastrophic, the answer Packham provides is simple. In this case methane, which he says started venting from deep within the Atlantic ocean. Again, the lack of precision around dates is a problem when it comes to attributing a rise in temperature over an imprecise period to a gas that has warming properties but stays in the atmosphere as briefly as 84 months. Marine geophysicist Professor Tim Minshull is less sure that methane release was the main cause of the global warming at this time. In a study published in 2016, he suggested methane release was slower and more modest than some researchers have hypothesised.
About 40 million years ago, ‘hothouse’ Earth, when alligators basked under palm trees in the Arctic, started to cool, a process that Packham attributes to falling levels of CO2. The rocks in newly-formed mountain ranges started to weather and react with the air to remove the gas from the atmosphere – or something. There are a number of problems with this hypothesis, not least the fact that CO2 levels had already been falling steadily for 150 million years from the end of the Jurassic, while temperatures remained as high as they had ever been in the geological record going back 600 million years. As the graph below shows, temperatures remained high, while CO2 levels began their long descent to the low, near denudation, levels seen today.
Meanwhile, scientists dispute the notion that rock weathering only acts as a carbon sink, suggesting that the process also releases amounts of CO2 to rival volcanoes. In a paper published last year, a group of Oxford University scientists led by Dr. Jesse Zondervan said their work on the carbon release had important implications for modelling climate scenarios. At the moment, the CO2 released from rock weathering is not included in the modelled work. Neither it seems are such inconvenient findings included in the Net Zero promotional work of Chris Packham.
The Earth presenter is a green activist and naturalist who holds the view that eight billion humans are wrecking the natural world in their attempts to sustain life on a difficult, dangerous planet. Some of his efforts to draw attention to the fragility of natural habitats are laudable. But as we have seen, he uses something called ‘the Science’ to promote the view that humans should stop industrial progress and return to a mythical natural state. The fact that the unexploited natural world could not sustain anything like eight billion souls is just one of the many reasons why his fantasies will never be adopted. His science starts with a pre-determined narrative, unlike the scientific process which draws conclusions after a ruthless examination of all the available evidence. Mainstream media such as the BBC have largely given up on the scientific process when it comes to climate change, and simply promote political messaging around the Net Zero project. In doing so, they ignore large swaths of scientific knowledge that are likely to trouble the ‘settled’ opinion. But then, this knowledge lacks the “terror factor” so beloved by Packham.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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Wow!!!
Who would have thunk
Yes quite amazing, less productivity and more mental illness. Things going to plan.
Build Back Better = You Own Nothing
Build Back Better = Davos Elite Get Richer
Build Back Better = Bio-Security State
Build Back Better = Rolling Lockdowns Forever
Build Back Better = Travel Restrictions
Build Back Better = Increasing Isolation
Build Back Better = Protein Intake Reductions
Build Back Better = Digital Currencies
Build Back Better = Social Credit Score Control
Build Back Better = Master Slave Societies
Build Back Better = Rules For Thee… None For Me
The NEW NORMAL that nobody sane voted for…
https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1411522589923569667?s=20
Brainwash Back Better = Total Surveillance and Totalitarianism
All hail corporate fascism!
Yeah , but these fuckers will own everything, you know nice shiny things, paintings ,fine wines, big cars, big houses, gated obviously let them eat cake.. go figure.
Well, quite – but it does show the cognitive dissonance in the locktivist camp – the Guardian/Observer are pretty much the bedwetters’ journal, and on the one hand they are occasionally publishing sensible (albeit very obvious) articles like this, but at the same time they are continuing with the scaremongering approach – e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/03/fears-of-summer-chaos-in-schools-and-offices-as-covid-restrictions-are-swept-away
As I’m sure most on here know, the weasel phrase “provide clarity” is normally locktivist-speak for “impose / enforce / continue with restrictions”.
The readers of these newspapers make me sick. I wonder who they think is emptying their bins, keeping the utilities flowing to and from their homes, picking, packing and delivering their internet orders? Do these essential workers ever cross their minds?
Only as a comfortable abstraction.It’s cheap and easy to declare your solidarity with an abstraction. It’s a bloody nuisance when the abstraction turns into a real person.
Especially when they decide to not follow the voting “advice” you hectored them with those thick gamons, and now I’ll have to pay more for the cleaner!
If seems contradictory but the usual line is that the remedy is more support for the afflicted rather than removing the root cause
SAGE “experts”? In what? Destroying economies, mental and physical health, society, education, any and all forms of ethics and morals, for starters. Granted, they are experts in manipulating politicians, instilling terror and lying, which is possibly a line of expertise and wisdom roughly on a par with “Rillington Place” Christie’s skills in murdering women.
Russel Grant should start calling himself a modeller.
In fact I think the COVID pre-dick-shuns should be broken down by sign of the zodiac…
Taurans face additional lockdowns this summer due to a worrying uptick in predicted cases, Librans to be allowed on holidays to Octarine list destinations.
Russell Grant is a male model in the same way SAGE are scientists
15 months later someone noticed !
Radical Evil | PBS America | UK
“Stefan Ruzowitzky asks why normal people become mass murderers in this sobering film about the Nazi death squads, who ruthlessly gunned down about two million Jewish civilians in Eastern Europe. In the words of author Primo Levi, ‘Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men.”
They believed they were doing it for the common good.
Did they? More likely because they were murdering thugs.
No, they believed in what they were doing, thuggery was taught as a virtue by German philosophy
The Germans who actually pulled the triggers were almost certainly murderous thugs, but they were relatively few in number. Far more numerous were their local helpers (Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians) whom the Nazis had duped into believing that the Jews were responsible for Communist atrocities.
For many, one of the advantages of work is that it gets you away from the family.
It was always a reason why so many married male teachers came in early and left late – to avoid having to deal with their own dear little ones!
ABSOLUTELY.
I reckon loneliness and mental distress are caused by listening to too much BBC propaganda whilst working at home.
Getting people back into the workplace is fine as long as the employer doesn’t demand all employees must be vaccinated in order to attend. Such a scenario poses problems for the unvaxed (I know several who are very nervous about this, two especially have major concerns about conflict between the injection and the meds they’re already taking). It could mean they work from home permanently (fine) but would be invariably passed over for promotion (because hardly anyone sees them) and excluded from the working society.
Knowing the ghastly adverse reactions from these things, it’s asking them to take a major chance with their health and life.
We say that employers can’t demand these things; but it seems to me that all our rights are being destroyed lately, so I trust nothing and no-one.
Remembering the elderly who were denied seeing their loved ones before they died, despite the fact that the staff or carers could.
And the lockdown zealots call us heartless
I imagine a single parent living in a small appartment, must find WFH an absolute joy.
I bet Matt Hancock wished that he could’ve worked from home away from those pesky security cameras.
Daily reminder that Branch Covidians were already mentalists
People are drained by the constant bad news, confinement, loneliness, the lack of holidays; they have put on weight, they have lost fitness, those who got Covid lost fitness, and now many have what appear to be side effects from the “vaccines” too, strange flare ups in osteoarthritis, tinnitus, arrhythmias, etc. Generally, much of the nation is feeling older and tireder.
Sage don’t care.
Turkeys sell well at Christmas.
Actually, yes. Commuting in subhuman conditions also causes stress and misery for many. Nothing wrong with giving people flexibility to work from home where possible. It also frees up capacity on the infrastructure for those who cannot work from home. It will be especially beneficial where I live (Tokyo) where trains used to run everyday at 200% capacity. It’s like being herded like an animal. The problem arises when it is enforced and you have to spend 16 months at home with no entertainment outlets as all the restaurants, pubs, museums, stadiums, music venues are shut.
As for productivity, I’m working harder now (in terms of desk job hard) than I ever have. It’s not as hard as labouring or scaffolding of course, before anyone accuses me of not knowing what real work is.
I work from home but don’t live alone, and I hated lockdown so much. It was lonely and terribly depressing. My housemate believes every word the government tells her, so suddenly there was a tremendous divide between us. I would love to discuss my views with her, but she doesn’t want to discuss the subject because she says it upsets her. This really increased my loneliness – living with somebody who used to be a good friend but has become an alien from another planet, and we can’t even talk our differences through. With us both working from home, she feels the need to talk through her work with me. I’m happy to listen to her in the evening but it is irritating in working hours when I’m trying to get on with my work, mostly because I can’t also discuss my work with her because she doesn’t understand what I do at all. Then there was the feeling like I was living with the enemy, and I had to hide from her if I travelled outside our area or met more than one friend or even when I had work out of the home she interrogated me as to why I was allowed to do this. The whole situation added up to a very lonely and very depressing time. I would rather live alone than live through lockdown with a lockdown fanatic.