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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caused a major shift in global climate and the planet began to this oscillation between interglacial like we're now in full glacial back and forth how many times i don't think anybody's worked that out yet the problem is is that each time you have a glaciation it pretty much obscures and erases a lot of the evidence of previous glaciations
But there's been enough evidence to show that, yeah, there've been a multiple interglacial glacial cycles, and that is what characterizes the Pleistocene, right? But if we go back to the beginning of life on earth, carbon dioxide concentrations have been up to a thousand to 2000 parts per million or more. In the long-term view, that's the norm.
Pre-industrial carbon dioxide, 280 parts per million. Go back to the early 1800s, 280 parts per million. Go back to the end of the last ice age, 180 parts per million. So during some of those episodes there, what we saw was that carbon dioxide came within a whisker of getting to the point where photosynthesis stops. If photosynthesis stops, the biosphere dies.
Now, depending on your perspective, if you look at the long-term perspective, you could say, well, we're actually in a carbon dioxide drought. And for most of life history, it's been double, triple, quadruple what it is now, with no apparent bad effect whatsoever. In fact, some of the times when life has been most prolific is when the carbon dioxide has been the greatest.
We also see that going back to 30, 40 years ago, when we first started getting satellite surveys of, let's say, the forest inventory of the planet. And projections were being made based upon previous rates of forest loss that were primarily through deforestation.
And the projection was, is that come around the 21st century, we'd be down to, I forget, half, three quarters perhaps of the forest inventory that we had then. Well, somehow that didn't work out. What has happened is, as we look at more satellite surveys, the number of trees has increased enormously in the last 20 or 30 years.
And I've got a whole series of papers where it's going from, why are projections not holding accurate? You know, looking at the, all the potential different variables. Well, pretty much now it's like, well, we've now seen that there's 20% conservative, 20% more forests than we had projected. Why? Well, the number one reason, carbon dioxide fertilization.
Like if you were to talk to plants, plants would be like, hey, give us more, give us more, right? Also, we're well beyond the point where Uh, the heat capture of is, is pretty much exhausted at this point. And we can look at graphs. I don't know if I, I don't think, you know, we could do that in a, in another interview, but, uh, and take a deep dive into that.
But yeah, I mean, it's now well established that, um, even going back a hundred years ago, it was realized that the heat capture of carbon dioxide was exhausted after a hundred, 150 parts per million. at about the same concentrations at which the greenhouse effect loses its influence and photosynthesis takes over, between 150 and 200 parts per million. So that's where that's at.
Now, getting back to that chart that we were looking at up there, oh my God, I mean, you know, what's going on there is... So I'm guessing that the Eemian down there must have seen a major outgassing of oceanic...
I've often thought, you know, if we look at our modern, say the last 10,000 years, we can see that, oh, they're, you know, interestingly, if you look at the graph from where you see it, it trails upward and then you see the vertical dashed line. Yeah. Okay, so that vertical dashed line represents roughly the average temperature of the planet now for comparison.
And what you're going to see there is if you take away that spike at 8200, you'll see that the amplitude increases as we get towards the present. See, at those swings, left, right, hot to cold, hot to cold, during this period called the climatic optimum, coming just out of the ice age, has increased.
So in other words, the variability of the climate has increased from those first, say, let's say around 3,000, 4,000 years in the immediate post-glacial environment. The other thing to look at is interesting that if you go just below, you're going to see there's two great warming spikes. Look at there, just to the left of 15. You see there's a warming spike. That's meltwater pulse 1A.
Come up and you see the second one right there coming across just below 10. That's the meltwater pulse 1B about 11,600 years ago. And then that full shift to the left where it's got cold really rapidly, that is the Younger Dryas. And then if we look at this next quote, we're going to see the pace at which these warming events took place. So Ryan, go to the next slide.
So now this was 1993, Richard Fairbanks. He is one of the godfathers of... you know, ancient climate change for measurements of annual ice layer thickness over the past 15,000 years. The authors find that Greenland's climate emerging from the last ice age twice. Those were the two spikes shifted from glacial to interglacial conditions over an astonishingly quick three to five years.
Warming that's, that's warming. That's 10 times more than the warming of the last century and a half. And it happens over three to five years. Don't tell me that the debate is over, that the science is settled. It is not, it's not, it's not. How do you explain that? It's a challenge. Let's go to the next one, Ryan, and see where we're going here. Oh yeah, so here we go.
This is honing in on that shift out of the Ice Age. Two extreme global warming events at the end of the Great Ice Age. And notice if you go down just below 15 and you see it's squiggling left and right.
If you were to draw a line from there, you'll see where the trend is towards the warming as you're coming out of the ice, coming out of the Younger Dryas at 11,600, you'll see that it's cool and then it's warming. And when you get to 10,000 years ago, it's pretty much Holocene warmth.
But if you draw a line along that trend, you can almost see that the warming would have started back at 15,000 years ago. And then something interrupted it. Something interrupted it. And this was the, whatever occurred then. And it's within those two warming spikes that the mass extinction took place. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Something happened. We came out of the ice age. And of course, here's the other thing, you know, we talk about mass extinction of mega fauna. I think there's evidence now emerging that the human species underwent a pretty severe bottleneck. And it took three to 5,000 years for a population to recover, to rebound from this.
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