What's up guys, my name's Rosh and welcome to another episode of Skeptics Say the Dumbest Things. Today we're looking at a video which makes some rather striking claims about the future of the climate on Earth, and most of them are wrong. Watch on to find out more. The video we're looking at today is simply called Global Cooling, and it's by a chap called Peter Temple.
Now, according to his website, Peter is a futurist and market analyst, and believe it or not, a member of Mensa. With such apparently impressive credentials, I'm interested to see exactly what revelations about the future Peter comes out with. So, let's get stuck in. With the Paris Climate Agreement put to bed, climate mania seems to have died down for the time being.
So, I think it's time for a little dose of reality. Because it's getting colder and drier, and it's all because of the sun and the planets. Colder and drier because of the Sun and the planets. I'd like to point out that this video was originally published in 2016. You know, the hottest year ever recorded. And all available data indicates that the planet is getting warmer, not colder.
I'm also intrigued about how exactly the planets are supposed to be involved. I hope Peter explains himself. You see, everything that happens on Earth happens in cycles.
The only straight line is in man's mind. There are no straight lines in nature. Everything in nature is formed by spinning spheres or waves.
Okay. So when you tell me that the temperature is going to go straight up, I become more than a little skeptical, because nothing ever goes straight up, and certainly not forever. Who's been telling you that, Peter?
No one I know is proposing that temperatures are going to go straight up, or that it will happen forever. Let's look at climate cycles over the past 11,000 years. The big picture. You can see on this diagram that we came out of the glacial period about 10,000 years ago.
Fantastic! A diagram! It was actually quite difficult for me to track down the original source of this graph, since Peter doesn't provide one.
And many of the results in a reverse image search linked to blogs and skeptical web pages rather than peer-reviewed literature. Now, a word of warning. There's a lot to unpack here, so if you'd rather skip ahead to a summary, of everything that's wrong with Peter's use of this graph, you can jump to this time code here. Okay, for those of you who've stayed, let's begin.
There are multiple versions of this graph bouncing around the blogosphere, but only a few cite sources, and many of these are contradictory. This one cites Dansgaard 1984 and Avery 2009, for example, whilst this one cites Dansgaard et al. 1969 and Schoenwieser 1995. Needless to say, something dodgy is going on. Anyway, after a bit of digging, I eventually discovered that the original source is a book by Schoenwieser, 1995. Unfortunately, I couldn't gain access to the original, but I found a couple of reproductions of this diagram in a later paper by Schoenwieser and a book chapter by Brauch, both of which cite Schoenwieser 1995 as the source.
So here they are! You'll note straight away there are a few key differences between this copy and the one Peter is showing us. First, the original is only representative of the Northern Hemisphere. so it is not a truly global dataset as Peter implies. Secondly, and rather more obviously, the original includes projected warming for the next 150 years, which is visibly unprecedented compared to the paleo record.
Peter's version, like other skeptic versions, is conspicuously missing these projections, and appears to end the dataset at year zero. Now, in and of itself, there's nothing inherently wrong with doing this if all you are trying to do is show the temperature fluctuations of the past. Indeed, I found a very similar reproduction of this graph in a 2013 paper which clearly states that the graph was, quote, adapted with permission from chapter 4, figure 25, in Schoenwiese C, 1995. But we have to remember that the year zero in Earth and Climate Sciences is standardized as the 1st of January 1950. It is not the year of publication. This means that Peter's graph is missing the last seven decades of warming, amounting to about a degree Celsius, and incorporating almost the entirety of anthropogenic impacts on the climate. But to be clear, Aside from the absent warming of the last 70 years, and the often contradictory citations accompanying this graph, there is nothing inherently wrong with it.
Problems only arise when it is implied that this is a global dataset, or that the data extends up to the present day. And unfortunately, that is what Peter is doing here. So, to summarise for those of you who've skipped ahead, Peter is falsely trying to claim that his graph shows global temperature data until the present day, when in reality it shows regional temperature data until at most the mid-20th century.
The last 70 years of warming are totally absent. With that in mind, back to you Peter. And then we have these up and down periods of warm and cold cycles.
It's like a giant sine wave. Temperature moves up and down over time, on a highly predictable schedule. Yes, climate cycles exist, and global temperatures do fluctuate.
Milankovitch cycles, for example, regulate the 100,000 year cycle of glacial and interglacial periods we've had in the recent geological past. But these operate on timescales too large to be clearly seen on Peter's graph. So what cycles is he referring to?
Presumably he considers everything above 15 degrees Celsius. helpfully coloured in red, to be a warm period, and everything below to be cool. Based on that dubiously arbitrary assumption, we've got warm periods lasting from anywhere between a century or two, to warm periods lasting for two millennia.
There is nothing regular or predictable about it. Today we're in what's called the modern warm period, and there's climate mania, even though it's been warmer on Earth many times before. Well, we wouldn't know from that graph, would we?
Because The data stopped 70 years ago, and it also isn't representative of the planet as a whole. So let's have a look at a truly global data set, say this one which combines a temperature reconstruction by Marcotte et al. with data from the instrumental record. It looks quite different, doesn't it? Peter is right that it's been at least as warm many times in the past, but it's not the magnitude of the warming but the rate that is alarming.
In fact, over the last century the rate of warming is unprecedented in the recent geological past, with warming ten times faster than normal post-ice age climate change. In fact the trend line shows it's gradually getting cooler because the sun is cooling. Now ignoring the fact that that's not a proper trend line, if we look at an actual global data set we can see that there has in fact been a cooling trend over the past 5000 years, so Peter is right about that.
In fact, Marcos et al. reveal that this is largely driven by a reduction in incoming solar radiation, particularly in the northern hemisphere. But this is not because the Sun is getting cooler. This is driven by shifts in Earth's orbit, part of the Milankovitch cycles we mentioned earlier.
And if we look at data up to the present, we can see that thousands of years of cooling have abruptly reversed in the space of a century. That is too fast to be driven by orbital changes. So clearly something has dramatically changed in the past 100 years. I wonder what that could be?
The next cold period is signified by the dark blue blob right below climate mania. It's starting now. Has… has he just drawn that on?
That definitely is not on the original graph. In fact, the original makes the opposite prediction. Peter seems to have mixed up climate science with colouring in. I think he might need to get his Mensa certificate re-evaluated. But how do we know all this?
By drawing blue blobs on misleading graphs? Well, in the early 1900s, Dr Raymond Wheeler, with a team of about 200 researchers… analyzed climate back about 20 centuries to 600 BC. He used tree rings and sunspot records to plot both temperature and rainfall over that entire period. He identified major climate cycles of 100, 170, 515, and 1030 years. Now he predicted extreme weather at about the year 2000, followed by a turn colder and a long-term drought.
And sure enough, That's exactly what seems to be happening. No, that is not exactly what seems to be happening. Granted, we are experiencing increasingly extreme weather.
The top 10 hottest years ever recorded all occurred within the last 15 years, but there is absolutely no sign that a turn colder is imminent. Now, on to Raymond Wheeler and his cycles. When I started researching this, I optimistically assumed that Dr. Wheeler was a climate scientist, and I looked extensively through the literature in order to find a reference to his name.
What I eventually found out was that he was in fact a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas between 1925 and 1947. He was far from a climate scientist as we would understand it. Wheeler's work appears to have been published in a book, The Key to Understanding Business Cycles. In it, he looks at thousands of years of climate data and attempts to map the ebb and flow of human civilization onto it, while simultaneously looking for patterns.
The trouble is that Wheeler was writing at a time when accurate climate data was scarce and its geographic coverage was limited. Additionally, identifying patterns tells us nothing about the processes which drive them and as such we have no way of knowing if they'll continue into the future. Nonetheless, Wheeler identifies several different cycles with varying degrees of specificity.
For example, his 100-year cycles can contract to 70 years or expand to 120. Hardly a precise forecast. But given the limited data he was working with, and the poor understanding of climate science at the time, we can hardly expect Wheeler to make accurate predictions about climate change into the future. It's therefore strange that Peter seems to take Wheeler's work as if it is some kind of precise and infallible forecast.
In fact, the global temperature has gone sideways since 1998. Oh yes, it has. And the recent drop in solar activity is warning of a much colder time coming ahead. Ah yes, the highly technical term, sideways. So let me get this straight. Peter thinks that Wheeler's cycles, which can vary in duration by as much as 50 years, are highly accurate, but a 17-year period of relatively stable temperatures is enough to conclude that there is no more global warming.
Besides, where have I seen that graph before? Ah yes, it's our old friend, the RSS satellite dataset. I addressed some other problems with this graph in my Richard Lindzen video, but to summarise, Peter, like Lindzen, cherry-picks a few select years of that data and ignores the warming before and after.
It is also the only global dataset which doesn't show warming for that period. all the others do. Using this graph and ignoring the others is literally the definition of cherry picking. But even if global temperatures had remained stable between 1997 and 2014, warming has rapidly and dramatically resumed since then. January 2020 was the hottest January on record, and both February and March were the second hottest after 2016. So when exactly is this colder time due to start?
What's more, the head of the International Space Station A Russian astrophysicist with a name I can't pronounce has publicly predicted a mini ice age is on the way. Dr. Abdus Samatov is one of the few qualified scientists to dispute the existence of anthropogenic global warming. Since Peter only mentions him in passing, I shan't go into too much detail here. But, to summarize, he disputes the existence of the greenhouse effect, believes that rising atmospheric CO2 levels are a result of ocean degassing, believes that recent warming is a product of solar activity, and predicted that a significant period of cooling would start in the mid-2010s.
Needless to say, all of these claims are demonstrably wrong. The greenhouse effect is an observable phenomenon which results from fairly basic physics. The oceans have measurably absorbed more CO2 than they have released, which means they can't be the source of the excess carbon. Global warming has accelerated at a time when solar irradiance has diminished, so the sun cannot be the cause.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Earth has shown no signs of cooling over the last decade. In fact, it is still warming considerably. When a scientist makes a prediction based on their hypothesis, and that prediction does not come true, then we know that there is something wrong with our hypothesis. Dr. Abdus Samatov's opinions on climate change are directly contradicted by reality, and as such, we can dismiss them.
Now, let's drill down to the most recent 4,000 years. This chart uses data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. It comes from the Greenland Ice Core Research Project ending in 1992. Let's take a look at Peter's graph more closely. The first thing to note is that this is oxygen isotope data from a single location in Greenland.
It is not temperature data, and it certainly isn't global temperature data. Now, oxygen isotopes are used to calculate the temperatures of the past, but they still have to be calibrated and converted first. The next thing to note is the scale.
The x-axis seems to be set out in 172 year increments, precisely in line with the cycles Peter is trying to prove exist. If I didn't know better, I'd say Peter has labelled the axis himself. But has he labelled it accurately? Now I couldn't find an exact match for this graph, but I found several similar versions floating around online. Most of them plot temperature rather than oxygen isotope values, and they appear to be based on data from a paper by Ali 2000. However the data from this paper only extends until the year 1855, while Peter's graph appears to extend until at least the late 20th century.
But if we overlay these graphs on Peter's, we can see that his does appear to extend beyond them, so clearly it is not entirely based on the Alley paper. Indeed, I did find evidence in another paper that at least some of the isotope data from the GISP2 ice cores extends into the 20th century, so I'm prepared to give Peter the benefit of the doubt here and accept his x-axis values. Nonetheless, the fact that I couldn't find a graph matching Peter's anywhere is a bit of a red flag. What's interesting about this chart is that it accurately supports all of Dr. Wheeler's cycles.
You can see the large temperature peaks every 1,030 years, the red arrows. These extremely warm and wet periods supported bountiful crops so that major societies grew to the height of their power. Dr. Wheeler called it the civilization cycle.
You can see the 172-year peaks as well, the orange arrows. In almost every case, the temperature turned colder at the 172-year mark. Now, 2007 was the most recent major turn date. PETA.
Mate, that isn't 2007. I know the final date on your graph is ambiguous, but how can an ice core project which you admitted ended in 1992 record data from 15 years into the future? Besides, this is only a single dataset from Greenland. It is not representative of the global climate.
And let's talk about these arrows. Granted, there do appear to be obvious peaks every thousand years or so. But when it comes to the orange arrows, really?
There's nothing close to uniformity in size or duration of any of these peaks. This one doesn't even have a peak. I know the human brain is adept at finding patterns, but this is a bit of a stretch.
And as we've already discussed, the fact that there might appear to be patterns doesn't mean that there actually are. There might be. Indeed, many components of the climate system do have a cyclical nature.
But in order to understand these, we have to study the mechanisms which drive them. Drawing conclusions about the climate by eyeballing a graph is not science. But the other remarkable thing about this chart is the correlation with major civilizations. When the climate turns warm and wet for long periods, the world's greatest empires have emerged. Egypt, Greece, Rome, and so on.
When the climate grew colder, these great cultures fell into ruin. Social mood always turns negative with colder climate, and that brings about riots and wars. Cold periods often get labelled as dark ages, because there is little advancement in living standards.
Now, I'm a bit of a history nerd. so I was very tempted to start discussing the impacts of climate change on ancient civilisations here. But perhaps that's a topic for another video. Needless to say, the fortunes of civilisations are determined by a few more factors than just global or regional temperature, though of course they play a role.
Peter's simplistic narrative that cold is bad and warm is good is frankly laughable. So here we are at the top of the modern warm period. Unless this time is different, the earth is going to get a lot colder and drier. most likely for several hundred years.
Neither of Peter's graphs actually show us global temperature data for the recent warm period. Both are regional. One ends in 1950 and the other doesn't even show us actual temperature data. If we look at a data set which is both global and includes temperature data up to the present, then we can clearly see that this time is different. At no point in human history, or beyond for that matter, have temperatures risen as rapidly as they are rising today.
We'll also see a major financial collapse. Yeah, that's one of the great features of the 172 year cycle. It's happened throughout history, like clockwork.
Maybe there is something to wheeler cycles. Then again, even a broken clock is accurate twice a day. And besides, it's not like financial crises are rare events.
I'd be surprised if we could go more than a decade or two without one. So we've spent billions of dollars on this climate mania for nothing really. We had this information more than a century ago.
The sun and the planets are the main drivers of climate change on our tiny little planet. We know that. We can't change Mother Nature.
It's going to get colder and drier. There's no question about that. Wait a minute, Peter. You still haven't explained how the Sun and the planets are supposed to drive these cycles. No one disputes that the Sun is a major factor in driving natural climate change, but the planets?
Where do they come in? You see, history repeats over and over and over again. So if you want to know the future, you look at the past. But of course, nobody does that.
They'd much rather program computers to try to simulate what they think is man-made warming. Looking at the climates of the past to better predict the climates of the future is literally what climate scientists do. That's how they program the computer models in the first place.
It really seems like Peter doesn't have the faintest notion of even the basics of climate science. Meanwhile, just when we're going to need more energy and warmth, we have politicians trying to tax it out of existence and shut down coal plants. If we paid attention to cycles and history, maybe we could plan for the tough times. every 172 years. No one's trying to tax energy or warmth out of existence, and I'm frankly tired of this lazy, sceptic narrative.
But whether Peter likes it or not, burning fossilized lumps of wood we've dug out of the ground for energy is fast becoming obsolete. History tells us that innovation drives us forward. The future is renewable, and a self-titled futurist like Peter should be able to see that.
Anyway, that seems to be the end of Peter's... wisdom. And I have to say I'm quite disappointed that we never got to hear how planets affect the climate. Nor did we hear of any explanation of a mechanism behind these cycles at all.
If we want to have any hope of projecting climate change into the future, we have to understand why and how the climate changes in the first place. If we see patterns, we have to understand the mechanisms behind them. Without this knowledge, we have no way of knowing whether the patterns will continue into the future or not.
And frankly, Peter has demonstrated an absurdly poor understanding of both the basics of climate science and the history of climate change on Earth. So, that's all for today folks. I hope you've enjoyed the video, and if you did, don't forget to like, comment and smash that subscribe button. I really appreciate it.
As always, links and sources are in the description below. Until next time, goodbye.