Randall Carlson
speaker
1,469 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 11 Mar
Randall Carlson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, okay, the good question – Now, one of the considered to be the modern analog, the analog for the modern Holocene was the Eemian, right? And the Eemian was apparently a period of extended warmth that was considered to be the analog for the Holocene. But that's the Eemian right there, that huge spike to the... So it's now recognized that the Eemian was a lot more variable than the Holocene.
It's like what it's done is the relative stability of the Holocene has given us this window of opportunity within which we have created modern civilization. If any of that, any of that happened now...
Forget it.
See, one of the things that's frustrated me is, you know, when I was quoting Herman Flone there from 1979, now it's 79, early 80s, when I was reading and learning about this, that, oh, wow, you know, climate has really changed dramatically. So then...
in the early 90s when I heard, okay, they're actually forming a major organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to study, just like Flohn said, its study deserves much higher priority. That's what he said in the, and yeah, we need to know what's, of course, we didn't have this detailed then, but we already knew enough to know that there had been these extreme changes.
So I thought, okay, yeah, this is exactly what we need. Well, then the first report comes out, and I start learning more about the IPCC, and I realize, wait a second, this isn't really about the science of climate change. This is about the politics. And they're already given a preordained outcome.
And from that point on, there was a selective study, and in some of my other shows that I put together, I've got the quotes, the charter, and everything saying directly that The whole point of this is to show the human influence. And then what happened is, see, so this came out in like 93, right? So at the same time, we're beginning to realize how dynamic the planetary climate has been.
All of a sudden now politics intercedes and goes, okay, we're going to focus on human climate change. And we're going to ignore, for the most part, natural climate change because that's going to detract from the preordained conclusions that humans are at fault here. And we want to focus all of this on human activity and so forth and it's carbon dioxide.
And we could spend, I wrote a 90 page essay on carbon dioxide. Where I've just gone into the whole, all aspects of carbon dioxide and the narrative.
Well, in terms of earth history, yeah, we're at low levels, very low levels. In fact, you could even say, well, and see, here's another fact. When you have these coolings, like you see there. Ocean is going to cool down also. The solubility of carbon dioxide is a function of the temperature of the ocean water.
So you know that if you have a fizzy drink, a soda, you know, the fizzy is carbon dioxide. If it warms, the carbon dioxide just outgasses, right? So what happens if an ocean warming outgasses carbon dioxide, a cooling ocean sucks in carbon dioxide. Photosynthesis basically begins between 150 and 180 parts per million.
Because less than 150 parts per million, CO2 pressure in the atmosphere isn't enough. It's too hard for plants to... consume the carbon dioxide, right? What happens is you have stomata in plants, which is the apertures that uptake the carbon dioxide. So if carbon dioxide pressure goes up, You don't, you don't want to be like, you don't want to eat too much.
You know, you want to, you know, you're not going to be a glutton and stuff yourself. So you don't eat four big meals. You don't eat four Thanksgiving dinners at once. Right? Well, so now carbon dioxide pressure goes up. The stomata in the plant in particularly in leaves shrinks, right? When it goes down, it's grasping for more carbon dioxide.
When the pressure goes down, so the stomata open up to try to bring in more, right? So now, it's well established, experimentally and empirically, that carbon dioxide is It's got two functions. One, it is like what we would call a greenhouse gas, right? So it captures, it's transparent to the shortwave heat radiation coming in.
But then that radiation is absorbed into the solid mass of the planet and re-radiated at a longer wavelength. The carbon dioxide is opaque to that longer wavelength. So what happens is that some of that carbon dioxide, I mean some of that heat, rather than expelling out to space, some of it gets reflected back down to Earth. And that's basically the global warming scenario.
But if you think of a sponge, a dry sponge, you set it on the table and you start pouring water on it. Right. It's going to soak up that water. It'll keep soaking it up until it gets saturated. At which point the w the, the water is going to begin to flow out, right? Well, there's a window of wavelengths. It's about, um, 14 to 17 microns, roughly.
That is the window, the capture window for carbon dioxide. That capture window happens to be the same capture window as water vapor. What's happening is once you hit 50 to a hundred parts per million, the heat capturing ability of carbon dioxide is almost completely exhausted.
About the same time that the heat capture function of carbon dioxide begins to dissipate and lose its functionality of heat capture is when the pressure is now enough to drive photosynthesis. But again, if you go less than 150 parts per million, photosynthesis stops. During the late glacial maximum, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere got as low as 180 parts per million.
Now, if you look at the long term, and we can actually calculate, we can go from carbon dioxide trapped in bubbles in ice cores, but going back even farther than that, we can look at fossil leaves and study, look at the size of the stomatal apertures, right? And It gets more complicated than that, but basically in a nutshell, that's kind of what's going on.
But what we see is that the lowest carbon dioxide has been in the atmosphere since life appeared has been during the Pleistocene. What differentiates the Pleistocene from the previous Pliocene is that roughly two and a half million years ago, something...
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