Australia’s Mangroves: BBC & ABC’s Disturbing Fear mongering with Scientific Dishonesty and Idiocy

 

Australia’s Mangroves: 

BBC & ABC’s Disturbing Fearmongering with Scientific Dishonesty and Idiocy 

I want to thank Dr. Alan Longhurst for alerting me to the BBC’s fearmongering. He requested that I address the media’s perversion of science. Dr. Longhurst (now 97 years-old) is one of the world’s premiere oceanographers, inventor of the Longhurst-Hardy Plankton Recorder, served as the first Director of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center of the US National Marine Fisheries Service and Director of the esteemed Marine Ecology Laboratory of Canada’s Bedford Institute of Oceanography, among other prestigious positions and tropical research. 

 (The photos and captions are screenshots from BBC: Mangrove forests: How 40 million Australian trees died of thirst.) 

 The BBC’s short video begins by showing devastated mangrove forests form northern Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria from a 2015-2016 die-off. The BBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company) framed this natural event as a human-caused climate change disaster, to perpetuate the myth of a climate crisis. 

Mangrove specialist Dr Norman Duke attributed the episodic 2015 die-off to a 40 cm drop in sea level for 6 months due to an El Nino that caused the mangroves to “die of thirst”. Duke acknowledged that it is well known that El Ninos naturally cause such major drops in sea level in the western Pacific. But there is no evidence, nor any consensus, that El Ninos have been made worse by rising CO2. It is known however, that El Nino activity has increased over the last 6000 years as the earth cooled since the Holocene Optimum due to changes in the sun’s orbital cycles. 

Duke estimated that about 7,400 hectares (74 km2) of mangroves were lost. That would amount to no more than 2% of the total mangrove covered forests in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Mangroves are salt-tolerant shrubs and trees that grow in warm, coastal waters. The areas of severe dieback matched zonation contours, where higher elevations were drier and most vulnerable to sea level fall. 

 In 2017, Duke published, “Large-scale dieback of mangroves in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria: a severe ecosystem response, coincidental with an unusually extreme weather event”. He reported that mangrove diebacks “occurred when regional annual rainfall levels were low, temperatures were high and sea levels were notably lower at the time.” And those conditions correlated with “the El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle for this region”. 

 Although mangroves are tropical, and their expansion is linked to warmer conditions, and are known to be reasonably heat tolerant, Duke (2017) attempted to draw a connection with global warming, mentioning there were exceptionally high temperatures recorded at the time and “coincidental with heat-stressed coral bleaching”. Coral bleaching attributed to global warming was being tearfully pushed by Duke’s colleague Terry Hughes. Hughes’ catastrophic global warming narrative is now being refuted by the rapidly rebounding Great Barrier Reef corals. Such good news might be the driving force for Duke and the BBC to resurrect a catastrophic mangrove narrative to protect and support inane climate crisis narratives. 

 Duke (2017) had noted mangrove losses and retreat were linked to drought, decreased precipitation and temporary drops in sea level. All those weather conditions, including warmer temperatures due to reduced cloud cover, are all associated with El Nino events, as warm tropical waters slosh eastward across the Pacific. Falsely, the BBC, ABC and Duke are now oddly claiming the mangrove die-off and El Nino connection is newly discovered. 

 But others had also reported the El Nino effect at least 5 years ago. Lovelock (2017) in Mangrove dieback during fluctuating sea levels wrote “During El Niño, weak equatorial trade winds cause the thermocline to shoal in the tropical western Pacific and the presence of cool water results in sea levels that can be lower by 20–30 cm”. “Because both low sea level and low rainfall co-occur during El Niño years in the Indo-Pacific region, intensification of ENSO in the coming decades with climate change may be particularly unfavorable for productivity of mangrove forest ecosystems.” 

 Still the BBC and Duke doubled down on a climate crisis connection with transparent idiocy and sleight of hand. They seamlessly switched from blaming a natural fall in sea level for the die-off, to expressing concern that rising sea levels from global warming would hinder mangrove recovery. Yet that desperate claim is easily refuted, and in fact has been refuted already in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. 

 In 2016 Asbridge published “Mangrove response to environmental change in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria”. That study concluded, “increased amounts of rainfall and associated flooding and sea level rise were responsible for recent seaward and landward extension of mangroves in this region.” For the period 1987–2014, “mangroves were observed to have extended seawards by up to 1.9 km (perpendicular to the coastline), with inland intrusion occurring along many of the rivers and rivulets in the tidal reaches.” 

 But such knowledge did not prevent Duke and the BBC from descending into the depths of stupidity and call for paradoxical, useless and expensive remedies to “save” the mangroves. Duke wants to water the mangroves from the air or from ships to prevent them from drying and dying. The rationale for such stupidity: mangroves store carbon. They worried that the mangrove die-off released “1 million tonnes of carbon into the air”, and the ABC added that’s the “equivalent to 1,000 jumbo jets flying return from Sydney to Paris.” But mangroves have naturally dried and died before. No wonder great scientists like Longhurst fear the current perversion of science driven by climate alarmism.

Why the Sun, Not CO2, Heats the Oceans Revisiting the Debate: Does Greenhouse Back-radiation Warm the Oceans?

Why the Sun, Not CO2, Heats the Oceans 

Revisiting the Debate:  Does Greenhouse Back-radiation Warm the Oceans?

This is the transcript for the video published on youtube 

https://youtu.be/61VxYVIHW-U

Welcome everyone.

About a decade ago there was a heated and unresolved debate on whether infrared back radiation from greenhouse gases is heating the oceans. Because infrared penetrates less than a millimeter into the ocean's surface, many skeptics argued it is impossible to blame rising CO2 for ocean warming. However, several prominent skeptic scientists, people who I have great respect for, also weighed in arguing it was silly and useless to argue infrared heat can't warm the ocean.

After analyzing the physics detailed in this video, I’m convinced it is solar energy that drives the observed ocean heating, and any infrared ocean heating is insignificant at best. If this analysis holds, it is another significant strike against the prevailing CO2 driven global warming theory

To ensure lay people are brought up to speed, here's a quick summary of where consensus climate science stands today.

Climate scientists construct models of the earth's energy budget. The amount of energy absorbed by the earth or emitted back to space each second, is measured in Watts and is standardized for an area measuring one square meter. For those unfamiliar with that measurement, simply understand that more Watts signify more energy.

The energy budget illustrated here was published by Stephens 2012. Others have slightly different numbers, but this illustration is one of the best because it is one of the few that lists the range of uncertainties in their measurements.

Because the sun's surface is so hot it emits high energy shortwave radiation. On average the earth warms as short waves add 75 Watts to the atmospheric water vapor while the earth's surfaces absorb about 160 Watts, totaling 240 Watts that are heating the earth's daytime climate.

According to the Stefan-Boltzman law, and remember scientific laws are undisputed, when a surface is heated it causes that surface to respond immediately by releasing an equal amount of energy from that surface.

To maintain the earth's temperature balance, the 240 Watts of energy from the sun should cause the earth to emit 240 Watts back to space or transfer some of that energy from the surface into the oceans or soils. However, because the earth is so much cooler than the sun, it only emits that energy as longwave infrared waves, which interact very differently with the earth than the sun's shortwaves.

While some longwaves can escape back to space unimpeded and at the speed of light, other longwaves can be absorbed by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor. Greenhouse gases then re-emit that absorbed energy, and redirect half back towards the earth's surface. On average the earth's surface also absorbs an estimated 345 Watts of re-cycled longwave energy which counteracts the rate of cooling and prevents the earth's nighttime cooling from dropping to the point of global freezing.

However, that longwave energy is not trapped, as many media headlines suggest. Eventually nearly all the energy from the sun escapes back to space. However, the best modeled energy budgets suggest that a slightly less amount of energy radiates back to space relative to what had originally entered from the sun.

Putting aside some large uncertainties, there appears to be a radiative imbalance of 0.6 Watts less energy leaving the earth than is added by the sun. Some researchers estimate that imbalance may be as high as one Watt.

That imbalance does not violate the Stefan-Boltzmann law because that missing heat gets stored below the land surface or below the ocean surface, where the heat cannot radiate back to space in a timely manner.

There is no scientific disagreement that our oceans have been warming since the Little Ice Age ended around 1850 AD. What remains to be debated is, to what degree are oceans naturally warming due to storage of more shortwave energy from the sun, or due to storage of increased downward longwave energy emitted by rising carbon dioxide concentrations.

Some have argued, incorrectly, that the earth's land surface heats and cools the same as the oceans.

However, in contrast to the ocean, the suns' shortwave energy doesn’t penetrate soils much deeper than an inch. The combined heating from shortwave & longwave energy plus sensible heat transfer from warm air, increasingly heats soils at the surface reaching summertime highs. Then, primarily via conduction, surface heat slowly passes down the temperature gradient from the warm surface to cooler depths in accord with the second law of thermodynamics. Heat transfer via conduction is slow, so temperatures can remain 8ºC (15 º F) cooler just 10 inches (25 centimeters) below the surface.

During the winter, the colder surface reverses that temperature gradient, so that stored summer heat travels via conduction back to the surface. Again, because surface cooling happens quickly and conduction happens slowly, the deeper soil remains warmer than the surface soil.

Greenhouse longwave energy penetrates only a few microns into the ocean surface and even less into most soils, but the sun's shortwave energy passes much more deeply into the ocean.

More energetic shortwaves like blue light can penetrate over 100 meters (that’s about 4000 inches) into clear ocean water, with only half its energy absorbed within the first 20 meters. In contrast 50% of less energetic red light is absorbed in just the first few meters. That's why seaweeds in the deeper ocean cannot use red light to photosynthesize like land plants do.

Although both the heating of the land and ocean depends on surface heating, radiative and convective heating are much more important for heating the ocean. This causes important differences in the way our oceans heat and cool, thus analogies to land surface heating are misleading.

This standard, albeit overly simplistic ocean temperature profile, shows the upper layer of the ocean, often referred to as the epipelagic layer or sunlight layer, extends from the surface to 200 meters depth. Turbulence due to winds and currents mixes and homogenizes the temperature as illustrated here and globally averages 13°C or (55 °F).

Below that mixed surface layer is the thermocline layer, defined as a region of rapidly cooling temperatures, because mixing of warm surface heat into the layers below rapidly declines with depth. .

At a depth of about 1000 meters and below there is a more homogeneous temperature of just 4°C or 39°F However, the illustrated homogeneous upper sunlight layer obscures the most important dynamics of the oceans' surface skin layer that are key to controlling ocean heating and cooling.

A 2018 paper by Wong & Minett analyzed ocean temperatures from data collected during 2 ocean cruises in warm tropical and subtropical waters of the north Atlantic. They reported important differences in heating and cooling patterns in the microns-thick surface skin layer and millimeter thick subsurface layers. 

For perspective, the sharpened point of a pencil is about one millimeter wide. It takes one thousand microns to equal just one millimeter. The ocean’s surface gatekeeper is only a couple of microns thick.

Only 4.9 Watts per meter squared of solar energy was absorbed in the first 10 microns. .

In contrast, the subsurface was increasingly heated, so by 10 millimeters deep, 261 Watts of solar energy were absorbed.

Only at the surface can any ocean heat be released back to the atmosphere or space. So, this differential solar heating creates the required temperature gradient that allows the solar heated subsurface water to constantly move up towards the cooler surface.

Heating by longwave energy adds another complication that must be considered. Longwave energy only penetrates the first few microns of the skin layer. And that fact prompts some skeptics to argue CO2 back radiation cannot heat the ocean.

But on the other side of the debate, it is argued that because longwave heating can add 100 times more energy into the skin layer than solar heating, longwave heating can alter and even reverse the temperature gradient required for ocean cooling.

But if true, then how does the ocean ever lose heat.

Nonetheless, the alarmist narrative becomes that added infrared energy must alter the temperature gradient to some degree. Therefore, as more greenhouse gases add more longwave energy to the surface skin layer, it increasingly disrupts the temperature gradient enough to reduce the rate of subsurface cooling. So, rising CO2 is indirectly warming the ocean.

But measurements do not support such narratives.

Satellite measurements determined the oceans' surface temperature by measuring the longwave radiation emitted from the skin layer. The sub-skin layer below was also measured but via emitted microwaves.

The results show the ocean's skin layer is always cooler than subsurface layers below, despite the combined surface warming by shortwave and longwave heating plus rising heat from solar heated waters below

In the daytime, there is a deeper solar heated diurnal warm layer. At night, without solar heating, subsurface waters eventually cool and mix with the water below creating a more homogeneous upper layer temperature everywhere except in the cooler skin surface.

No matter the season, or time of day the skin layer is always cooler than the waters immediately below.

Although not intuitive, the constant cool skin surface phenomenon can be explained by the Stefan-Boltzman law. According to that law, when the skin surface layer is heated, by longwave or shortwave energy, the surface skin layer radiates an equal amount of energy back to the atmosphere immediately. Any longwave heating of the skin surface layer is so transitory there is no observable effect on the temperature gradient that's required to cool the ocean's solar heated sub-surface layers.

As Wong & Minett's results illustrated, the micron thick skin layer absorbed 410 Watts of longwave and a negligible amount of shortwave, but simultaneously emitted 470 Watts out of the ocean, maintaining the observed cooler skin layer.

The 470 Watts of longwave-out vs 410 Watts of longwave-in does not violate the Stefan-Boltzman law because the skin surface heating is the combined result of warming from 67 Watts of solar heated water rising from below and the downward longwave radiation from above.

That combined heating also caused the skin surface to lose a total of 7 Watts more from sensible heat loss to the cooler air above via conduction, and more latent heat due to evaporation from the skin surface. Thus, on average the skin surface cooling balances skin surface heating, but the skin surface remains slightly cooler because it radiates heat away faster than subsurface heat can rise from below.

Still their data raises one concern. It is very unusual that their estimated heat loss via sensible and latent heat was a mere 7 Watts of cooling. That is 15 times less than globally averaged ocean cooling rates.

It is well established, that the energy needed to evaporate enough water that's observed in the earth's water cycle, oceans must experience over 80 Watts per meter squared of evaporative cooling.

Acknowledging the conundrum that those longwave energies do not penetrate deeper than a few microns and thus cannot warm the oceans directly, the stated intent of Wong & Minett's analysis was to advance their hypothesis that more co2 longwave energy can still warm the ocean indirectly by reducing the temperature gradient and thus, reduce the rate of cooling of the ocean's diurnal warm layer.

To support their claim, they argued the absorption of more longwave into the skin layer, did not result in the required increased surface temperature that would immediately increase emissions and balance the longwave energy surface budget.

To that end, they examined the increased longwave heating produced on cloudy days as an analog for the effects of increased longwave heating from rising carbon dioxide.

Their highlighted results illustrated here, show that despite an increase of 40 Watts of longwave heating from cloudy skies, there was no increased cooling via emitted longwave-out and no increased loss of sensible and latent heat so the cooling temperature gradient must have been disrupted. But that would violate the Stefan-Boltzman law, their narrative requires magical thinking.

In reality the Stefan-Boltzman law was never violated. It was simply a bad narrative. Although increased cloud cover did increase longwave heating, cloud cover simultaneously reduced the shortwave solar heating of the layers below the skin surface.

The reason 40 increased Watts of incoming longwave did not also increase outgoing longwave is due to the fact that clouds equally reduced the solar heating of subsurface waters. When long wave and shortwave heating are both considered, the balance between incoming and outgoing heat at the skin surface was maintained as predicted by the Stefan-Boltzman law.

Others have argued that warmth generated by longwave heating of the skin surface would be transported quickly downward by mixing with layers below.

However, downward mixing of the observed cooler skin layer would only cool the warmer subsurface layers. While any mixing that brings warmer subsurface water up to the surface, only enhances its cooling.

Only the mixing of deeper solar- heated subsurface waters with the cooler waters below, carries heat deeper into the ocean. The mixing of solar heated water into deeper layers, then makes solar heat less likely to resurface and cool.

Thus, it is the downward mixing of solar heated waters, not the transitory longwave heating of the skin surface layer that stores energy in the ocean and creates the estimated energy imbalance.

Taking a broader global view, analyses of heat flux into and out of the world's oceans illustrates where the oceans are warming. Huang's (2015) illustration of ocean heat flux contradicts claims that a thickening global blanket of CO2 is heating the world's oceans.

Nearly half of the ocean surfaces, regions colored green, show no net heat flux into or out from the ocean.

The regions of greatest heat flux into the ocean are colored red.

There, the intense tropical heating is further amplified by the reduced cloudiness observed in the tropics, as published in Fasullo and Trenberth’s 2008 study.

Furthermore, the tropical trade winds cause greater upwelling of cold deep water in the eastern Atlantic and eastern Pacific.

Colder waters on the surface can reverse the typical heat flux so that heat flows from the warmer air above into those colder upwelled waters.

The obvious clue to the primary driver of ocean warming is that the regions of greatest solar flux into the ocean are the same regions created by pacific and Atlantic La Ninas. That solar heated water is transported westward and then poleward along ocean currents where the greatest amount heat is vented, (colored dark blue. The Holocene optimum, with temperatures warmer than today happened during perpetual La Nina conditions.

For details on how a solar heated ocean causes our current warming trend, please watch my earlier video: Global Warming Driven by Pacific Warm Pool, La Nina & ITCZ: an alternative climate change theory or read its transcript.

To date there has been no provable mechanism illustrating how heating from CO2 can heat anything more than the ocean's skin surface. In contrast the combined climate effects of solar heating, the ITCZ migrations and La Ninas are strongly supported in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

So, I will ignore the click bait news media's fear mongering that our oceans are "on the boil" due to rising CO2. There is simply no scientific proof to support such dishonest narratives.

And I will sleep well. There is no climate crisis.

Our democracy depends on a diverse array of good critical thinkers. So, please shun mindless group think.

Instead embrace renowned scientist, Thomas Huxley’s advice Skepticism is the highest of duties and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

And if you appreciate the science clearly presented here, science rarely presented by mainstream media then please

Attenborough’s “Breaking Boundaries” documentary; Distorting Science to Shill for One World Government

 

Welcome everyone

Below is thee  transcript for  

Attenborough’s “Breaking Boundaries” documentary; Distorting Science to Shill for One World Government

View at https://youtu.be/w8IbgqVgxP8

Today I will look at how one of my environmental heroes is now betraying the science. When I taught ecological classes, I would eagerly incorporate many of Attenborough’s beautiful wildlife videos.

But after just recently viewing his 2021 video, "Breaking Boundaries: the science of our planet", I’ve been disturbed, to see Attenborough’s magnificent cinematography increasingly used to distort the science, instill fear and shill for “a globalist agenda”

The video alternates between parallel narratives from Attenborough and narratives by a Swedish scientist, Johan Rockstrum. Together they pushed a myth that we are turning a planet that was once our friend, into a planet that is our foe.

But anyone with the least amount of knowledge about earth's history knows the earth has always been both friend and foe to wildlife and humanity. Deadly weather commonly unleashed throughout history, eliminated all that did not adapt, causing mass extinctions and collapsing civilizations.

Oddly, Attenborough argues that by simply adhering to globalist Johan Rockstrum’s planetary boundaries, we can save the world.

And like all demagogues and false prophets, he offers a utopian fantasy that his guidelines ensure the earth remains the "perfect home.”

Attenborough and Rockstrum begin by suggesting that this graph of Greenland’s ice core temperatures is science’s most important and most relevant for guiding human civilization.

Rockstrum points to the great instability of temperatures over the past 100,000 years during the last glacial maximum. The numbered peaks are Dansgaard–Oeschger events, caused when accumulating ocean heat that had been transported from the tropics into the Arctic, periodically melted enough of the insulating ice to let heat ventilate, causing temperatures to rapidly rise by 10 ºC (18 ºF) in just 10 years. That instability, Rockstrum claimed caused great environmental hardships for humans.

But during the most recent 11,7000 years, a period called the Holocene, the average temperature stabilized, and varied only by plus or minus 1 °C. However they don’t mention that stability was due to less ice.

Despite the fact that humans did not create the Holocene, they suggest humans can now magically maintain the Holocene’s stable climate, if only we follow Rockstrum’s guidelines and keep the earth within his so-called 1 ºC planetary boundary.

Attenborough repeats a false narrative that he frequently espouses, bemoaning, "The Holocene has ended. The garden of Eden is no more. We have changed the world so much that scientists say we are in a new geological age: the Anthropocene, the age of humans"

Therefore, to prevent further catastrophes and return to Eden our “immediate priority, is to reduce carbon emissions to zero and stabilize temperatures as low as we possibly can”

In contrast, according to the executive committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences, the official group of scientists who define the earth’s geological ages, the Holocene has not ended. And despite political efforts by some scientists to declare the Anthropocene as an official age in order to highlight humanity's negative impacts, there has yet to be any consensus on the proposal that the Holocene has ended.

Instead of formalizing the Anthropocene, the International Union of Geological Sciences officially defined 3 distinct ages of the Holocene The first 2 ages are defined by dramatic changes in Greenland’s ice core. Accordingly, the Greenlandian Age began 11,700 years ago marking the end of the last glacial maximum, the re-arrangement of ocean and atmospheric circulation and a rapid warming of about 10 degrees Celsius. Furthermore, the transition from the Pleistocene’s last glacial maximum into the Holocene resulted in one of the world’s greatest mass extinctions, mostly of large animals, and the loss of biodiversity.

In contrast to Attenborough’s stable Garden of Eden, Greenland’s ice cores also reveal just how unstable the Holocene climate has truly been.

The Northgrippian Age, named after the location of one ice core, began when temperatures plummeted to the lowest point in the entire Holocene 8,200 years ago. Temperatures then rose, reaching 1 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer than today, that warm period has been informally called the Holocene Climate Optimum. Then a cooling and drying trend occurred that established many of the world's deserts.

The most recent period, the Meghalayan began 4,200 years ago marked by a 200-year global mega-drought that collapsed many Eurasian civilizations, as well as a megadrought in sparsely populated North America, stretching from Massachusetts to Idaho.

Indeed, it has been droughts and famine, during cooling trends that have destabilized the environment and human civilizations.

The Meghalayan’s cooling trend was interrupted by warm spikes lasting several decades such as the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods. In addition, more intense El Nino and La Nina events evolved. Such instability has made it difficult for scientists to determine if recent extreme weather events are just more of the same, or perhaps signal an end of the Holocene and the start of the Anthropocene.

During the Greenlandian Age, the Sahara was a rich grassland with scattered shallow lakes, supporting a wealth of wildlife that supported several tribes of hunters and gatherers. Those stone age people celebrated that abundance of wildlife in numerous cave paintings

But around 6000 years ago as rainfall decreased, the green Sahara transitioned to the Sahara Desert, again greatly reducing biodiversity, and forcing humans to seek more hospitable conditions elsewhere.

The Sahara’s reduced rainfall was largely caused by a shift in the location of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ. The location of the greatest solar heating within the global tropics, causes intense currents of rising air which then draw in moist surface air from the north and south via the Trade Winds, and concentrates that moisture where the winds converge.

As the moist air rises, cools and condenses, that moisture rains out, bringing a heavy rainy season to the land below. The remaining dry air continues to circulate, eventually sinking further to the north and south, bringing deserts and arid climates to those regions below.

The ITCZ moves seasonally with the sun Bringing a rainy season to the tropics north of the equator during June and July, while simultaneously causing a tropical dry season south of the equator.

By December and January, the ITCZ has brought a rainy season south of the equator, leaving a dry season to the north

In addition, the ITCZ also migrates over millennia due to the sun's orbital cycles. Throughout the Holocene, the ITCZ has exhibited a trend that has continuously contracted southward, and it is that migration that reduced the rains that once supported a green Sahara.

In response to the Holocene’s drying trends, humans either perished or moved to the great river valleys where ample water enabled civilizations to continue. Great civilizations emerged in the mid Holocene along China's Yellow River, within India and Pakistan’s Indus River Valley, and along Egypt’s Nile River. Great Stone Age civilizations emerged in Mesopotamia along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. 

But as the ITCZ continued to migrate, the Akkadian empire in northern Mesopotamia and dependent on rainfall, collapsed during the 200-year drought that marks the beginning of the Holocene’s Meghalayan Age.    Regional rainfall decreased by 20-30% and water levels of the Dead Sea abruptly fell by 100 meters.

The Old Kingdom of Egypt, also known as the Age of Pyramids, also collapsed as drought reduced the Nile River's flow and the floods that had previously renewed the fertile soils and maintained Egypt’s agriculture.

Late Bronze Age civilizations such as those that flourished in Greece, or Troy or had re-emerged in Egypt, collapsed due to megadroughts 3,200 years ago

The greatest droughts and deadliest famines occurred during conditions of low CO2 and cooler temperatures of the Little Ice Age, under the very conditions that Attenborough and Rockstrum argue that we must return to.

The Great El Nino and resulting droughts of the 1790s devastated east India and caused widespread civil unrest. The Victorian Great Drought of 1876 resulted in 30 million deaths The mid–1700s Strange Parallels Drought caused famine and substantial societal upheaval across southeast Asia, India, and the Siberian plains.

Climate change during the Little Ice Age also brought murderous diseases such as the Bubonic Plague, but that was never mentioned by Attenborough. Instead, despite mounting evidence that the Covid pandemic was caused by an escaped virus designed in China's Wuhan laboratory by medical experts whose gain of function research was globally funded, Attenborough featured a cholera expert who fear mongered that the Covid epidemic is evidence of the world exceeding our planetary boundaries.

Yet the Bubonic Plague, the greatest killer of all, that had truly been affected by climate change, was ignored. That plague killed over 200 million people worldwide, even though we were well within Rockstrum’s climate boundary. The Bubonic Plague periodically disappears when temperatures rise above 81.5 ºF (27.5℃), because its transmission is greatly reduced by that warmth. But that fact does not support Attenborough’s CO2 driven global warming climate crisis narrative

Furthermore, La Ninas drive Asia’s wet periods, increasing vegetation and promoting greater rodent populations. In turn, more rodents support more fleas that transmit the deadly bubonic bacteria. When El Ninos bring dry periods that reduce the Asian rodent population, flea populations are forced to seek other hosts and so bite and infect other animals and people.

By the end of the video the reason for Attenborough’s sins of omission and fear mongering become clear. By Rockstrum’s own words, they reveal their true motive for the video's "end of the world" fear mongering.

They want Rockstrum’s planetary boundaries to be the guide for a global governance that could be enforced by the United Nations Security Council.

The natural causes of climate change, a migrating ITCZ, the El Nino cycles of droughts and famines, or the cool conditions that enabled several Bubonic Plague outbreaks, don’t support their arguments that there is a need for a world government, and so, get ignored.

Like all demagogues and false prophets, Rockstrum combined climate fear with a promised utopia, but only if we follow their mandates. He promises clean air, healthier children, longer life spans, stable markets, stable jobs, and less conflicts. But such pie-in-the-sky promises should make all sane people wonder just how badly his politics have biased his science.

Unsurprisingly, Rockstrum is on the board of directors of the "global challenges foundation" whose founder states, “our intention is to start a debate on the need for an international political system” …"the need for a world government” … “one that can enforce its rules”

Rockstrum is also on the board of the "Eat Foundation" that proudly announces it is working to build consensus for a grand food system transformation. You got to wonder what could go wrong when such experts' control the economy? Well, Venezuela, Ghana, and now Sri Lanka quickly come to mind?

The Holocene’s southward migration of the ITCZ also caused increasing climate instability by promoting greater El Nino and La Nina events. Alternating El Nino-like and La Nina-like ocean temperatures in the Pacific cause a natural global see-saw of droughts, floods, and heatwaves, but those events have been falsely portrayed as evidence of co2 driven climate instability.

During La Nina-like conditions, strong trade winds cause warm water to pile up in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean warm pools, promoting strong summer monsoon rainfalls that sustain the crops that feed half the world's population. La Nina-like conditions may only last a few years, or for 30 or more years during a negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and even longer when strong solar irradiance strengthens the Trade Winds. Simultaneously, La Nina-like conditions force cooler surface temperatures due to upwelling in the eastern Pacific Ocean, which then promotes descending dry air and drought conditions over portions of western North and South America.

Conversely during El Nino-like conditions, warm water stored in the warm pools, more readily slosh eastward, surfacing somewhere between the central and far eastern pacific, bringing heavy rainfall to the Americas but drought to Asia and Australia. El Nino-like conditions dominate during periods of a positive Pacific Decadal Oscillation or periods of weak solar irradiance as was the case during the Little Ice Age sunspot minimums.

Cooler little ice age temperatures and low CO2 concentrations, never spared the world from massive droughts, famine, or collapsed civilizations and millions of deaths.

.

The El Nino-like conditions that dominated the 1300s and 1400s, brought decades-long droughts that collapsed Cambodia’s Khmer empire, as well as the  Victorian Great Drought and other previously mentioned droughts.

During more La Nina-like conditions during the Medieval Warm Period, extreme drought conditions in the American southwest forced the Anasazi civilization to abandon that region.

To achieve their political aims, demagogues and false prophets always fear monger impending doom. Edmund Burke warned in the 1700s “no passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers to act, ...and to reason, ...as does fear.”

Tragically, instead of educating the public about the complexities of Holocene climate change and droughts, Attenborough chose to stunt the public's ability to reason by pushing fear. To that end, he included parts of a speech by Greta Thunberg, the teenage actress who first learned to fear climate change at the ripe old age of eight years old.

Although the media has systematically denigrated and silenced knowledgeable skeptical scientists, Greta’s handlers easily featured her so-called in-depth knowledge of climate science at the "World Economic Forum" in 2019 at Davos. 

Her words are repeated in his video, clearly echoing Attenborough’s intent! Greta ranted “I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel everyday”

Like most mainstream media, every bad weather event becomes a click-bait story about the impending doom of climate change. The NY Times reviewed "Breaking Boundaries", calling it a documentary about the end of the world. Although many outlets criticized the video's animations and presentation style, mainstream media never challenged its abundant distortions and misleading omissions.

Likewise, in the political struggle for power in the USA, the Senate Democrats created the "Special Committee on the Climate Crisis". Their goal was not to uncover the truth by fostering robust scientific debate, but to shut down debate. As their first priority clearly stated, the Committee's purpose was to provide "oversight and investigation of the efforts of special interests to foster climate denial". Gee, how dare our democracy allow citizens to challenge the climate crisis fears pushed by demagogues.

So, it is not surprising that the NY Times just published on July 8, 2022, an article titled “Democrats can win [upcoming elections] if they Embrace the Politics of Fear”. Accordingly, climate fear has been a staple of so many democrat politicians and policies.

Finally, one last example of how Attenborough and Rockstrum distorted the science. Early in the video's narratives they claimed the polar ice caps reflect just the perfect amount of sunlight to prevent the earth from overheating. But now the warming and melting from rising CO2 is disrupting that perfect balance. Yet the history of Greenland’s ice cap tells a very different story.

During the early Greenlandian age, Greenland’s glaciers were still growing. But during the Northgrippian age, glaciers such as the Jakobshavn retreated 100 meters per year and its margin remained behind the glacier's current boundary for 7000 years. Despite reflecting much less sunlight than Attenborough’s perfect balance would suggest, that lack of polar ice never triggered a tipping point or runaway warming. Instead, the earth entered a cooling trend. The recent Meghalayan age had been informally called the neo-glacial as glaciers expanded at higher latitudes with maximum extents culminating in the Little Ice Age.

But due to natural climate oscillations, glacier growth and retreat has oscillated. Between 1960 and 1990, the Jakobshavn did not retreat, and Greenland gained ice.

Similarly, alternating periods of ice growth and retreat, frequently happened between 6500 and 2600 years ago as summer sea surface temperatures alternated between 2–4 °C cooler to 6 °C warmer than present while sea ice ranged between 2 months more ice and 4 months more open water than today. Accordingly, the so-called paleo-Eskimo cultures periodically abandoned and reclaimed the arctic ocean's coastal habitats. So, is the current loss of arctic sea ice simply a continuation of the Holocene’s natural oscillations?

Scientists tell a similar story about Norway’s glaciers that completely melted away at least once during the Holocene. The Hardangerjøkulen glacier, seen here, (and I do apologize to native Norwegian speakers for any mispronunciations) it melted away 8000 years ago when the mean summer temperatures were 1 °C higher than today. 

 The Jostedalsbreen glacier melted away 7600 years ago when mean summer temperatures were 0.7 °C warmer than today.

But most informative, the Folgefonna glacier melted away 9700 years ago when temperatures were similar to today but precipitation, had been reduced by 70%.

Likewise, glacier advances and retreats during the little ice age, in both the Swiss Alps and Africa’s Kilimanjaro, have correlated with changes in precipitation, as evidenced by simultaneous changes in surrounding lake levels. And despite the doomsday narratives, correlations between temperature and ice extent are often lacking. Yet again, Attenborough and Rockstrum ignored those scientific observations so they can push their warming crisis.

Climate truths will always be resisted by those who profit from fear and those who have been naively convinced by chicken little scientists and cinematographers. But the truth will set you free. Indeed, these truths provide the critical thinking to minimize to what degree you will be manipulated by dishonest political agendas. 

So please, share these truths!

Our democracy depends on a diverse array of good critical thinkers. So, please shun mindless group think.

Instead embrace renowned scientist, Thomas Huxley’s advice Skepticism is the highest of duties and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.