Peter Clack

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@PeterDClack

Beautiful description of the living soil and our plant and trees growing in this live rich environment. Climate doomsdayers have no clue about our living earth.

Joined May 2024

12K Following 71K Followers 11K Posts

Latest posts 5

Peter Clack @PeterDClack 13h

The world's regional climates are determined by the agonisingly slow tectonic movements of continental and oceanic crustal plates.

Plate tectonics set the long-term patterns for the shape of the continents, the seaways, future ocean circulation and cloud albedo, while solar irradiance and orbital cycles are the trigger points.

Atmospheric CO₂ and global surface temperature are not locked together either, a story revealed in the geological record. Far from causing a mass collapse, past high-carbon epochs created the richest expansions of biosphere diversity in Earth’s history.

Atmospheric CO₂ levels were often 10 to 15 times higher than today during the early Paleozoic era (538 to 251 million years ago), starting with the Cambrian explosion. During these evolutionary peaks, atmospheric CO₂ was measured in the thousands of parts per million. Changes did not happen over decades either — they took tens of thousands of years.

A modest rise in CO₂ levels in the modern industrial era is not a sign of runaway warming; it's a recovery during a far longer global decline in atmospheric CO₂. This brief pulse has stimulated global vegetation growth and leaf area expansion, verified by NASA satellite observations.

Our current geological epoch — the Quaternary glaciation — sits near historical low levels for atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. We are in a severely cold epoch that has locked the world in a 2.58-million-year ice age regime. This ice age climate continues today.

During the Last Glacial Maximum 26,000 to 20,000 years ago, ice sheets miles deep blanketed North America, northern Europe, and Siberia. CO₂ fell to approximately 180 ppm, flirting with the 150 ppm threshold where land plants cease photosynthetic activity.

The glaciers began to melt and retreat rapidly 20,000 to 15,000 years ago, with most ice disappearing from major landmasses by 10,000 years ago. Sea levels rose by only 10-13 millimetres a year for around 9,000 years, a measurably slow pace of change, compared with today's 3 mm a year.

By contrast, today's CO₂ hovers around 425 ppm, rising and falling through the years to the rhythms of the seasons. CO₂ does not pose a danger to climate, but it is an essential building block for the biological world.

IMAGE: What 540 million years of geological history says: Willis Eschenbach.

Peter Clack @PeterDClack 22h

Earth is still in an Ice Age, and almost nobody knows it.

Ice ages don't end when the glaciers melt; they end when all polar ice disappears completely. Right now, ice still covers Antarctica and the Arctic; which means by scientific definition we are still in an Ice Age.

What we are living in - right now - is called an interglacial period, a warm pause, a temporary thaw between glacial advances. The current interglacial - called the Holocene - began about 11,700 years ago. Every human civilisation, that has ever existed - Ancient Egypt, Rome, China - all of it happened inside this single warm pause.

And here is what makes this deeply unsettling; in the last 2.58 million years the Earth has cycled through at least 50 glacial advances. The warm pauses between them typically last 10,000 to 30,000 years. We are already 11,700 years into ours.

The ice cores drilled from Antarctica tells us exactly what happened before. Every interglacial ends; every one! The temperature drops, the glaciers advance, and ice sheets kilometres thick crush everything beneath them.

During the last Glacial Maximum just 20,000 years ago, ice sheets covered most of North America, Northern Europe and Asia. New York City was under a kilometre of ice. And none of that required a catastrophe.

It happened slowly and quietly, driven by wobbles in Earth's orbit around the Sun, called the Milankovitch cycles. The next glacial advance will come; not tomorrow, not in our lifetime. But it will come.

We are not living 'after' the Ice Age: We're living inside it.
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Peter Clack @PeterDClack 2d

World temperatures were almost 2°C higher than today and sea levels 6–9 meters higher during the Eemian interglacial, 129,000–116,000 years ago.

This protracted warmth was not driven by carbon dioxide; a paradox that exposes the fiction of treating the pre-industrial CO₂ baseline of 280 ppm as a planetary thermostat. If CO₂ were truly the climate control knob, the Eemian could not have been significantly warmer than our current era of 420 ppm.

Tectonic movements, ocean currents and orbital cycles are the ruling heavyweights of climate. Current UN policy continues to distort the atmospheric properties of CO₂ by ignoring such rich lessons from the past.

Historical warm periods — the Roman and Medieval climate optimums — occurred without carbon management, just as the 500 years of the Little Ice Age in Europe unfolded with virtually no change in CO₂.

This contrasts sharply with the UN's 'Code Red' crisis mentality. Civilisation thrived during previous warm peaks without centralised UN oversight. Dismantling the 'CO₂ as primary lever' narrative highlights the natural variability that defines the Quaternary glaciation.

History and physics did not just begin in 1850. We are 2.58 million years into the severe Quaternary glaciation, and our current warmth is simply a standard warm interglacial. The IPCC ignores these precedents because acknowledging them would render their centralised economic solutions irrelevant — like net zero. By 2050, this reasoning risks costing the world $275 trillion while achieving nothing for the planet — an indictment of a flawed climate ideology, designed to promote a UN led One World Government.

IMAGE: The four most recent interglacials over the past 450,000 years (Antarctic temperature proxy and CO2, after R. Hannon 2017).
MIS 1 (11.7 ka–present) – Holocene
MIS 5 (130–115 ka) – Eemian (last interglacial)
MIS 7 (243–191 ka) – Aveley
MIS 9 (337–300 ka) – Purfleet
MIS 11 (424–374 ka) – Hoxnian/Holstein

Peter Clack @PeterDClack 2d

African megafauna thrived in the Thames Valley during the last Eemian warm interglacial. Global temperatures were almost tropical and it was 2°C warmer; yet CO₂ levels were 150 ppm lower.

Arctic summers were mainly ice-free, and forests stretched to the poles. There were no mass extinctions or runaway warming; Earth's ecosystems simply adapted.

Today, we live in the warm Holocene interglacial period and temperatures are 2°C cooler than the Eemian. The past 11,700 years represent a warm recovery from a glacial period that had dominated Earth for nearly 100,000 years.

The Eemian is just one of around 50 interglacial cycles spanning the 2.58 million years of the Quaternary glaciation. Across the Northern Hemisphere, northern Eurasia and North America still bear the scars of mile-thick ice sheets grinding down the surface rock — and carving out features like the Canadian Great Lakes.

Earth has emerged from frequent glacial maximums with a remarkably consistent pattern; roughly 5–6°C of warming every 100,000 years. The Antarctic ice-core record is unequivocal (from EPICA Dome C and Vostok). Temperatures rise several hundred to a thousand years before atmospheric CO₂ rises.

This lead–lag relationship has been settled science for over two decades (Caillon et al 2003, Pedro et al 2012, Parrenin et al 2013). CO₂ does not trigger the end of the ice ages.

Deglaciation is initiated by Milankovitch orbital cycles, followed by ice-sheet retreat, falling albedo and shifts in ocean circulation. Only after the oceans — particularly the Southern Ocean — have warmed for centuries does dissolved CO₂ outgas from the deep ocean, slowly raising atmospheric concentrations from 180 ppm to 280 ppm over 5,000 to 10,000 years.

IMAGE: The last Glacial Extreme, illustrating sea-level fluctuations over the past 140,000 years. The Eemian peaks around 120–130 ka matching or exceeding modern zero levels, before plunging back into glacial extremes.

Peter Clack @PeterDClack 3d

Consanguineous marriage has become a profound public health and social issue facing Western societies.

As millions of people have migrated to European countries from regions across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, long-standing cultural traditions are intersecting directly with Western legal and medical systems — raising questions that public debate has long avoided.

Medical and demographic data show that roughly one billion people globally live in regions where marriages between second cousins or closer are commonplace. In clinical terms, first-cousin consanguinity is documented for its significantly elevated risk of autosomal recessive disorders and associated congenital conditions.

These marriage patterns are entrenched in historical, economic and tribal structures, and do not simply disappear upon relocation. Bringing them into alignment with Western public health standards requires clear-eyed policy.

Furthermore, where these traditional customs overlap with issues of child marriage and age-of-consent laws, the imperative to protect vulnerable individuals becomes paramount.

Protecting children and future generations requires a two-pronged approach: enforcement of existing statutory laws, paired with robust, targeted public health education.

Peter Clack Verified account @PeterDClack 4d

A billion people worldwide live in regions where marriages are commonplace between second cousins or closer, and with brides as young as 9 years old.

These consanguineous marriages are being imported into Western societies amid the hundreds of millions of migrants flooding the West, where underage marriage is illegal and health risks unacceptable. Such child marriages are being deliberately obscured from public view.

These intra-family arranged unions account for 20% to 50% of all marriages in North Africa, West Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. In specific nations, like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, overall consanguinity rates reach 50% to 70%, where first-cousin unions alone representing 30% to 50% of all marriages (Bittles, 2012; The Lancet; CAGS).

Historically, these practices were driven by tribal-clan frameworks designed to preserve family wealth, retain land and maintain localised social safety nets. They are set up within family networks and involve betrothals of primary-school-aged girls, establishing hidden structures where intra-family governance decides individual marital choice.

According to the UN Population Division and the Migration Policy Institute, international migrants reached a record 304 million globally in 2024 (roughly 3.7% of the world’s population). As millions of these illegal migrants move from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East into Western nations, these deeply ingrained traditions are transplanted alongside them. When practiced within migrant communities in the West, endogamy is run by self-contained shadow societies operating out of sight.

The biological impacts of first-cousin unions are well-documented, but they worsen significantly when practiced across consecutive generations. Offspring of first cousins face double the baseline risk of severe birth defects and rare autosomal recessive conditions, rising from a standard 3% baseline to between 6% and 8%.

Multi-generational endogamy steadily reduces genetic diversity within clan lines, resulting in a significantly higher prevalence of complex metabolic disorders, structural physical disabilities and reduced cognition (IQ).

In Western countries, concentrated clusters of rare genetic conditions create an escalating operational and financial burden on pediatric sub-specialty clinics, specialised care programs, and state-funded clinical resources.

Western history shows clear examples of endogamic failure, largely restricted to ruling elites rather than broader populations. Europe's Habsburg dynasty practiced endogamy to concentrate political power, culminating in the severe physical and intellectual impairments of Charles II of Spain (who possessed an inbreeding coefficient of 0.25) and the famous 'Habsburg jaw'.

Similarly, widespread intermarriage among Queen Victoria's descendants passed hemophilia through multiple European royal houses.

While Western royalty illustrated the perils of endogamy on a small scale, current global population movements present the actual scale of this public health risk on a broader demographic scale.

The integration of strongly endogamous clan structures into Western societies creates severe incompatibilities across legal, cultural and institutional domains. By prioritising marriage strictly within the extended family, trust networks remain internal.

This impedes broader cultural assimilation, reinforces parallel social structures and resists integration into host communities. These practices create acute legal and social conflict by legitimising forced unions, childhood betrothals, and marriages involving minors — directly breaching host-nation child protection statutes.

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