We live in the Cenozoic - the Age of Mammals - and we call ourselves Homo Sapiens, or Wise Man: Are we?
As a recent species, our entire body of cultural achievement took place in only the last 5,000 years. How should we manage the intellectual roadblock of climate, without failing? The real threat to our industrial, high-tech civilisation isn't necessarily a natural reversion to nomadism, but rather the deliberate dismantling of reliable energy architectures by central planners.
Climate should not be so complex. This sharply blue-green planet was designed for us. We evolved to live here. We've had the benefit of 11,700 years of ideal climate during the warm Holocene interglacial. During the most recent glacial period, life was incredibly harsh and brutal, but we survived - while our roughhouse closest cousins, the Neanderthals, went extinct. Glaciers up to two miles deep covered much of north America and Eurasia and glacier movements deeply eroded the landscape. Survival was incredibly difficult.
Yet one thing should now be abundantly clear from the geological record, the climate never stands still. It never has. The Quaternary ice ages of alternating glacial and warm cycles mirror the orbital anomalies of earth's orbital journey around the sun, known as the Milankovitch cycles. Throughout these cycles temperatures fluctuate by 5–6°C warming every 100,000 or so years. Most scientists agree that these cycles are driven by orbital variations.
However, the way CO₂ amplifies this effect remains an open question. This raises deeper questions about if we really understand the full role of CO₂ in the climate. Is it simply beyond us to forecast future climates? Much of the climate narrative is based around the role of so-called fossil fuels, the pace of modern changes in temperatures and CO₂ levels, and the analogy of a greenhouse effect.
The contributions of the oceans, water vapour and cloud cover albedo together dominate Earth's greenhouse effect, accounting for the vast majority of atmospheric heat retention and moderation in all parts of the world. Yet this interplay seems obscure in public statements from the UN. The Milankovitch orbital cycles set patterns of glaciation, followed by ice-sheet retreat, falling albedo and changes to ocean circulation. Only after the oceans - especially the Southern Ocean - have warmed for centuries does dissolved CO₂ outgas from the deep oceans.
Earth has warmed by roughly 1.4°C since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850. By any geological standard, a 1.4-degree recovery from a multi-century cold snap is modest. During the Eemian interglacial, temperatures were 2°C warmer than today, yet CO₂ remained steady at 280-290 ppm. Today, our global average temperature sits at around 15°C - this is more than 6°C cooler than the long-term Phanerozoic average of 18-26°C that sustained the explosion of terrestrial life.
Yet, the UN-driven climate agenda labels historical perspective as disinformation, even claiming to 'own the science'.
The cost of this narrative is staggering. Some $147 trillion has been funneled into intermittent wind and solar infrastructure. We have deployed 1.3 million turbines and billions of panels, yet hydrocarbons still supply roughly 81% of global primary energy. The sheer physical scale of the required mining for copper, lithium, and graphite faces inevitable, severe supply logjams.
The baffling green transition is far more resource and mining intensive than any traditional energy system it seeks to replace.
Image: The heavy industrial reality behind renewable energy infrastructure: Source tifonimages / Getty Images