EthicalSkeptic has some interesting climatological thoughts

A suggestion that geophysical forces inside the Earth have a significant effect on Earth's climate, and our present models ignore them completely

CAUTION: It is definitely possible that nigh every claim made in this piece is incorrect. I have noted some of the reasons they might be wrong. I’m sharing this mainly just because I found it interesting, but it is also a nice excuse to talk about how the science is done these days. Also, it’s just fun to read about alternative paradigms. One of the reasons the Graham Hancock’s of the world have so many fans is because even if they’re wrong, they’re fun to listen to.

That said… EthicalSkeptic was one of those independent-thinking science accounts I started following during the COVID madness, as I generally appreciate independent-thinking science people. His “about” page gives you a nice idea who he is, and I doubt any of you would agree with him about everything.

But let me get right into the interesting thing, his climate proposal, which goes as follows.

One, just in the last few weeks, actually, surface temperature data for the northern Atlantic seems to show quite a remarkable warming trend. I’ve seen this graphic all over the place, so hopefully it’s OK just to use.

The top line there is 2023, and you can see the rapid rise that began just a few weeks ago. All the lines together constitute the last thirty years of data. Some objections right off the bat.

• Objection one: Many of the folks ridiculing this chart on Twitter said something like, “thirty years of data, huh? Got anything that goes back a thousand? What about four billion?” And it’s true - something that looks “unprecedented” on a thirty-year plot might actually be stupendously common and boring on a thousand-year plot. Our data for Atlantic surface temperatures just doesn’t go back very far. (Also, if you look for them, there are plenty of pretty rapid changes both up and down in the thirty years on this plot, though none go absolutely this high, obviously.)

• Objection two: Can’t find it now, but saw just one person say that NASA changed the way they were measuring this number in March, the apparent implication being that this data might be “not real”, but just due to a change in measurement technique. And again, it’s true - the more recent data is, the more likely there is something wrong with it. Data been around for a while, if it’s wrong or needs to be corrected somehow, you hope someone has noticed by now. Data from yesterday, not much time for someone to notice.

• Objection three: Well… not really an objection, but worth noting that “spike” is a 0.4°C spike, or 0.7°F. So it’s not as if the water is suddenly boiling or something, you’d be unlikely to even notice such a difference dipping your hand in it. But that much water, even just warmed a little, is a lot of energy.

Two, if you accept the chart, you might then be thinking “man-caused climate change! Carbon, greenhouse gases! Doom, death!” Well hang on here, we’re talking about a rise over a matter of weeks¹. You’re rather hard-pressed to explain an event that occurred over a matter of weeks in terms of humans adding gases to the atmosphere over the last few decades. No… and this, now, is his main contention - this is heat being added to the system from below. He writes, “It is almost as if a gigantic swath of Earth's core-to-mantle, akin to a flaming mountain, has been thrust into the Earth's oceans.”

• Objection: I am less confident about this, but near as I can tell one popular alternative suggestion is to point to a new (2020) restriction on ships at sea burning high-sulfur fuels. The implication seems to be that the sulfur, combining with stuff in the upper atmosphere, had increased albedo (solar reflectivity) in the region, which had kept the ocean cooler there. With ships now burning low-sulfur fuels, I guess there is less cloud cover (?) and so the ocean is warmer. This is not my field of expertise, but near as I can tell, that is an alternative suggestion. It is not particularly clear to me how that would explain a sudden rise.

Three, and now I will summarize his proposed paradigm, which he goes into at great length here. But in a nutshell:

1. In a cyclical manner, over long time scales, Earth’s core periodically throws off “hexagonal closepack” (a type of crystal structure) iron into the mantle². There, it converts to face centered cubic, a different type of crystal structure. This is a phase transition, just like ice turning into liquid water is a phase transition. Phase transitions either require, or release, heat, and this one releases heat, the iron gets hotter.

2. There are two immediately testable predictions from this claim. One, mass of the Earth is moving from the core, closer to the surface. This would increase the moment of inertia of the planet and so, per angular momentum conservation, reduce the speed of our rotation (make the day very, very slightly longer).

3. The core magnetic permeability would weaken, and the magnetic poles would be observed to wander.

4. This heat eventually reaches the asthenosphere (upper mantle), and eventually heats spots on the floor of the ocean, where the crust is lower and thinner. Ocean currents speed up from this addition of energy (which should also be detectable), and the heat eventually makes it to the surface, where it shows up in places like our original chart. “Arctic and Antarctic polar ice sheets melt from the bottom up.” (We would also expect to see other changes - deep ocean volcanic vents should become more active, for example.)

5. The ocean then heats the atmosphere, or fails to cool it as well as it once did. One prediction here seems to be that changes in ocean temperature drive changes in air temperature, whereas standard climatology, which is obsessed with greenhouse gases only, envisions air temperature changing first and this driving changes in ocean temperature³. So that, again, is a potentially testable prediction.

I don’t want to steal all his thunder, so let me just drive you to his piece for the full argument with many great graphics. He does seem to think this is a long-term cycle - eventually “the [core crystal lattice] snaps back into alignment and we get an ice age.” Right now we’re just at (near the end of?) the warming part of the cycle.

Just to add one more thing - one thing that struck me reading his piece is that, indeed, it is known that the north magnetic pole of the Earth has been moving quite speedily toward Siberia lately.⁴ (Man, the Russians are behind everything!)

In fact, this drift even has some airports renumbering their runways, since they are numbered after magnetic north. There is some thought this is due to “magnetic blobs” under the Earth which… may be an independent hypothesis?

Anyway, there you go. I’ll leave you one amusing, related quotation via Edward Hamilton.

Be very happy for comments on this post, especially if you’re a better geophysicist than me, thank you.

1. Worth noting that EthicalSkeptic does seem to accept that man is having a concerning effect on the climate as well, there is just this other major factor that we are totally ignoring.

2. The Earth is “alive”. Easy to forget that living in a place like Michigan.

3. I did appreciate his suggestion somewhere that the reason climate scientists ignore the geophysics is because it wasn’t part of their training. Understandably enough, they want to come up with explanations in terms of stuff they know. That may be a danger in all of science.

4. From here. “This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Cavit - Own work Observed pole positions taken from Newitt et al., "Location of the North Magnetic Pole in April 2007", Earth Planets Space, 61, 703–710, 2009 Modelled pole positions taken from the National Geophysical Data Center, "Wandering of the Geomagnetic Poles" Map created with GMT.”