THE QUESTION:

If you don’t believe in climate change, how do you explain the wildfires and temperature rise? Are you concerned as a human being about any environmental crisis facing Earth? If not, why not?

MY ANSWER

In my defense I would like to plead that scientific theories are, always have been, and always should be, subject to critical evaluation. To demand that it should be accepted without critical evaluation as in a belief system, and to describe critical evaluation as something bad as in “don’t believe” or “science denier” is a misunderstanding of how science works. This kind of value system based on belief is inconsistent with scientific principles and is more like religion than science. The need to resort to villification of critical evaluation implies the absence of a rational response.

A specific issue in this case is that interglacials are not a constant temperature interval such that observed temperature trends require an external cause and effect explanation. Instead, what we find in the history of the Holocene Interglacial as well as the previous interglacial, the Eemian, is that both these interglacial periods have, over thousands of years, gone through alternating and violent warming and cooling cycles at centennial to millennial time scales. The current warming cycle was preceded by 4 warming cycles and 5 cooling cycles.

Before seeking a cause and effect explanation for the current warming cycle of the Holocene, one of five in the Holocene, any theory of glaciation cycles and interglacials that propose a cause and effect explanation for interglacial warming cycles must explain all of them. But that is not what climate science has done. They have selected only the current warming cycle to explain as a cause and effect phenomenon with human activity as the cause. Specifically, the observation that the warming began right after the Industrial Revolution in 1760 is claimed to provide the evidence that the Industrial Revolution is the cause of the current warming cycle of the Holocene with the causation described in terms of the fossil fuels of the Industrial Revolution because their combustion releases very old carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2 that is not a part of the current account of the carbon cycle.

DETAILS ON THESE ISSUES IN A RELATED POST ON HOLOCENE TEMPERATURE DYNAMICS:

LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/05/12/human-cause-in-the-anthropocene/

EXCERPT:

Similar cycles of cooling and warming are also found in the Holocene from its violent inception in the Younger Dryas event to the present. The Younger Dryas Event (YDE) shows that as soon as the Last Glacial Period had apparently ended, a series of brief but violent cycles of glaciation and deglaciation at centennial and millennial time scales intervened. The cooling period drove temperatures in Greenland down by 15C over a period of 300 years. Following that, a strong warming trend at a centennial time scale caused a warming of 17C and it seemed that the Holocene Interglacial warmth had finally arrived but the Holocene temperature chaos was not over yet.

About 9,000 years ago a strong cooling trend set in and persisted for 800 years. It is called the 8.2K cooling event because it ended 8,200 years ago. The Holocene interglacial recovered from the 8.2K cooling event and warmed to what is called “Holocene Climate Optimum” (HCO) or the “Mid Holocene Warming” (MHW) about 7000Y ago. The significance of this warming for us humans is that it is credited with the Neolithic Revolution that is thought to have created human civilization. It brought hunter gatherer humans out of the forests and caves and into a settled agricultural economy with farms and permanent homes, human society, and nation states, human innovations, and technology. Four other Holocene temperature events since the HCO are considered important in the climate history of the Holocene interglacial. These are the Bronze Age warm period ≈3000YBP, (also called the Minoan Warm Period (BAWP), the Roman warm period (RWP)≈2000YBP, the Medieval warm period (MWP) ≈1100YBP, and the Little Ice Age (LIA) ≈500YBP-100YBP.

The current warm period that followed the LIA is described as Anthropogenic {human caused} Global Warming (AGW) because it coincides with the Industrial Revolution when humans began to burn fossil fuels and therefore not a natural recovery from the LIA. This interpretation may derive from the other unique feature of the current warming cycle. The current temperature cycle of the Holocene is the first temperature excursion of the Holocene where we find a unique new feature of the surface of the earth called “climate scientists” armed with a world view called “environmentalism”. In this world view, everything bad is assumed to be a human impact that can and must be undone by identifying the human activity that COULD be causing the bad thing and then for humans to cease and desist from that anti nature activity. 

The key to understanding the logic of such environmentalism is the PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE which says in essence that we can’t prove we are right but you can’t take the chance that we are right. The precautionary principle is described in a related post: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/12/27/superstitious-humans/

This new world view of a human controlled planet, called the Anthropocene, implies that the warming cycles of the Holocene prior to the Anthropocene were natural but any temperature excursion in the Anthropocene must have been human caused and that therefore it is human controlled by definition and that therefore it can and must be moderated by humans to save the planet in the Anthropocene.

Yet, those who profess to understand interglacial temperature cycles as cause and effect phenomena should explain all of them in that way. That they picked just one of them to explain with their theory of interglacial warming excursions implies a BIAS in their methodology. That kind of science suffers from a fatal methodological error in the form of DATA SELECTION BIAS and CONFIRMATION BIAS and is therefore not credible.