I just had an idea half an hour ago and I’m still in shock and trying to process it and figure out whether it is true.

First, I need to explain the conventional model of the ice ages.

Basically, as the planet became dryer (since circa 65My ago) and the amount of buffers (CO₂ and others) in the atmosphere was reduced, the seasonality of the climate became more extreme, and the temperature gradient between the equator and the poles more extreme. This part is not questionable. At one point in time, the planet got so cool that ice remained on the poles around the year, and this is formally known as the ice age. This, too, is not questionable.

According to the conventional model, in the ice age the climate became so sensitive to small variations in Earth orbit and tilt, due to the critical lack of climate buffers in the atmosphere, that those small variations became sufficient to throw the planet into a glacial maximum, also known as the “ice age” in common understanding. The geological epoch defined by alterations between glacial minimums and maximums is known as the Pleistocene, and it began circa 2.5My ago. It is usually, but wrongly claimed that it ended 17Ky ago, but this is merely the time when we entered the current glacial minimum. There is no reason to assume any change in the geological and astronomical underlying causes of the Pleistocene climate alterations.

Also, according to the conventional model, the ice age is a northern-hemisphere phenomenon; not much changes in the South. In the North, however, the entire North America is covered by glaciers, Europe is covered by glaciers, and, paradoxically, Siberia was warm enough to be the pasture of the vast megafauna. At some point, however, things very suddenly changed, and the mammoths in Siberia were frozen so instantly, the enzymes in their digestion couldn’t cause the meat to spoil, which means it happened within hours, and to temperatures of around -70°C, which is about the worst weather that happens in Siberia to this day. In Europe and especially in North America, the vast glaciers melted during this transitional period, which eventually caused the global water levels to rise by about 80 meters. This seems to be remembered worldwide by mankind as the great flood, since this massive sea rise took place in the timeframe of less than a year. Discovery of the suddenness of the global melt was quite a shock in the scientific circles, but I don’t know why they were so surprised; I watched the snow and ice melt in the spring, and it’s always a very sudden thing, regardless of the amount of snow. Simply, when it gets warm enough, the snow just collapses, regardless of the fact that it appeared to be an eternal constant of nature only yesterday.

What shocked me today is an idea – I can’t say how true it is – that there might actually be no glacial minimum or maximum, and that it’s merely an artefact of sea and air currents in the northern hemisphere. In one configuration, the one we have today, the polar vortex destabilizes in such a way that it allows the cold arctic air to flow all the way across the Northern America, and for some reason, probably due to a weakened gulf stream, the north of Europe freezes as well, and the glaciers form all the way down to Slovenia. However, this change of polar vortex configuration means that the cold air stops freezing the plains of Northern Asia in the winter, and the climate there becomes quite moderate, which would normally be expected since Vladivostok is at the same geographic latitude as Madrid, and would be expected to have similar climate. For some reason, the cold air flooding North America is combined with great humidity, probably due to to warm sea currents in the Pacific north-west, which creates enormous amounts of snowfall, sufficient to gradually shift lots of water from the ocean to the extended northern ice caps and glaciers. There is no analogous phenomenon in Siberia, which makes the difference in the amount of continental glaciation (wet cold vs. dry cold). This continental glaciation increases the Earth’s albedo, and thus promotes reflection of sunlight into space, creating a global cooling feedback that allows the ice and snow to remain across the year. If the process is significant enough, and perhaps combined with other factors, it promotes absorption of CO₂ in sea water, which is accelerated at low temperatures. If this process is significant enough, it reduces the amount of buffers in the atmosphere. If this reaches a critical point, you get a stable glacial maximum, which persists until something changes significantly enough to start the sudden global melt and initiate the glacial minimum.

So, the question might be what those initial conditions are, with the sea and air currents, that allow the polar vortex to destabilize over North America in the first place? The second question is, what are the conditions that make this a consistent enough phenomenon, and the third question is what are the conditions that make it a permanent state in the 100Ky range?

I don’t see any obvious errors in my analysis, and I would welcome feedback.

I am quite amazed at the fact that the stuff that I write is almost always and universally seen as controversial, because the way I see it, it’s the common sense interpretation of the available fact pool. I’m not making stuff up, I’m not making low-probability leaps of faith and logic. The fact that I’m seen as controversial means you’re all smoking the wrong shit, I would say.

If anything, I would say that my ability to see what the facts actually are, and what follows from them is controversial only in the sense that everybody else lags behind because they have some kind of emotional or intellectual resistance to accepting the available facts; it’s not that I’m making wild guesses or working with fringe theories. I’m working with the same dataset everybody else can access. I’m not even that smart; if you IQ-test the statistical sample of some demanding science-based university, a percentage of students would match my raw cognitive power, or exceed it. So, if I’m not using an alternative dataset, and I don’t possess alien brainpower, how is it that I’m routinely ahead of the “main stream” to the point where people look at me as if I have two heads when I make a statement, and then months, years or decades later it’s “fuck, how did he know that”. It’s actually very simple. I don’t care what people think. I don’t care what they believe. I don’t care what they consider to be “main stream”. I don’t care if something will be accepted as true by others. I basically don’t care, I just take in the widest available pool of data, I do several attempts at normalizing the dataset (for instance, when thinking about bone shapes of hominid fossils, I ignore those obviously suffering from arthritis; when analysing the political picture, I eliminate obvious wishful thinking), and basically let the data speak to me with as little coloration as I can manage. I’m letting the raw data speak to me, so to say, and tell me about the world it lives in. Then I try to imagine the world the data lives in, and I try to predict stuff, and as I gather more data, I check whether it confirms or rejects my predictions, and so I iteratively refine my simulation until it fits all the available facts, and I allow for paradoxes; things don’t have to be neatly arranged and they don’t have to make sense. I don’t reject a Platipus just because it appears to make no sense. I don’t reject evidence of an extinction event just because it’s a one-off thing. I don’t reject the possibility of rare events just because they don’t happen in anyone’s living memory that introduces the kind of recency bias that allows people to build cities and farms in close proximity of active volcanos that just happened not to erupt in recent memory, or participate in economic bubble hysterias just because the last bubble-popping disaster was decades ago.

Basically, I’m doing science the way people used to do it, before it got so formal and rigid. I’m gathering data, using it to make a model, and then I test the predictive ability of the model with new data, and I either revise it or abandon it, depending on whether it works or not. And I don’t care whether it works or not; I don’t care about my reputation, or other people’s opinion, or about sunk investment in the existing model. I just want to find out how stuff works, and as far as my understanding improves, I don’t care whether I was right or wrong, as long as I get better understanding in the next iteration.

Let me demonstrate this with a few examples.

There used to be a controversy about whether the Neanderthals could speak, because in order to conclude that they could speak there should be a fossil finding that confirms both sufficient tongue mobility (hyoid bone) and brain capability (Broca’s region). My logic was that the common ancestor (Turkana boy) of both modern man and the Neanderthal man had a developed Broca’s region and this had to be present in the evolutionary successors, basically assuming that stuff that didn’t change much across the evolutionary tree was developed early on and then inherited in the perfected form. What follows from this logic is that speech was developed quite early on in the hominid evolutionary tree and it is actually the driving force behind the later brain development, because once you have speech, you can communicate complex ideas, and therefore more complex ideas can actually be an evolutionary advantage, and lack of complex ideas can be an evolutionary pressure. Basically, you can communicate complex things, such as storing food for the winter season, or migrating to where the salmon will be, or ambushing a herd of bisons in order to drive them off a cliff, or tell an educational story to the next generation in order to expand the level of inherited knowledge compared to the baseline of personal experience. Basically, my model of hominid brain development assumes that speech was developed quite early on, and that it created a positive feedback loop that both motivated and rewarded brain development.

Another example is the relationship between climate and the K-T extinction. I started by looking a graph of all known great extinctions in the history of life on Earth:

The shape of the graph surprised me, because I expected the mass extinctions to be independent, Poisson-distributed events, something akin to the background radiation. What I found useful is the ability to look at the graph and ignore all the scientific labelling that concentrates only on a few spikes, naming them the P-T extinction, K-T extinction etc. In fact, the extinctions follow a pattern of an elevated baseline of extinctions, followed by a spike, which means that some evolutionary pressure was in the environment for quite a bit of time, usually millions of years, and then either the pressures exceeded the survivability threshold for a huge number of species and caused a supermassive extinction all at once, or a discrete event aggravated the situation to the same effect. I also had to ignore human ways of perceiving time, because humans are a very short-lived species of even more short-lived beings, and our perception of time and change is inherently flawed. If something doesn’t change for 10 KY, we think it’s forever. If something stays the same for longer than our species has been around, we think it was designed in this perfect and static form by God. This is the motivation behind thinking of great extinctions in terms of discrete events – a supernova explosion, a giant asteroid strike, a supervolcanic eruption and so on. We don’t think in terms of continental drift that takes hundreds of millions of years to change the configuration of continents relative to sea currents, and when a radically fatal configuration is established, it takes 60-70 MY for the effect to manifest itself fully. We also don’t connect the events intuitively across such vast chasms of time, observing the long-term trends and ignoring the very visible spikes, but that’s exactly what I did with the data. I made an assumption that is opposite to every other analysis I’ve seen, and said “what if the spikes don’t actually matter?”, because the dinosaurs were in a process of mass extinction due to the slow process of reduction of global temperature, increased aridity and increase in seasonal climate variances. By “normalizing the data” I mean ignoring the biggest elephants in the room in order to see whatever is left when the distractions are removed, and then I saw that the climate has been cooling for more than 65MY, and a few MY ago it reached the point so extreme it started throwing the planet into ice ages, alternating between glacial and interglacial cycles, where the interesting fact is that it conforms to the Milankovich’s cycles, but only within Pleistocene, only after something cooled down so much it started throwing the climate off balance, and I decided that the amount of buffers in the atmosphere must have gone below the critical level, which allows for the extremes; most likely, the atmospheric CO2 was extracted into the oceans due to greater solubility of the gas in cold water, which put the climate into its death-throes, with the anticipated stable condition of a global glaciation that might last until the continental drift gradually changes the position of continents relative to the sea currents away from the current configuration that promotes cooling. My analysis is that the anthropogenic increase in CO2 emission actually helped stabilize the situation a bit, increasing the buffer levels to a more long-term sustainable value, but the long-term prognosis is unchanged. The problem with human thinking is that, due to our short life span, we assume that the Earth was perfect “the way we found it”, while in fact it was in a configuration that is fatal for life in the long-term, because of the cooling trend, and that we are in the last, terminal phase of this transition, and this terminal phase is called “Pleistocene”, the phase in which even the extremely small variances in orbital parameters can introduce an ice age, or pull the planet out of it. The next phase, I could call it Cryocene (in order not to repeat the “Cryogenian” label), would take place when the buffer levels in the atmosphere fall below the amount necessary for the orbital variances to thaw the planet out of the glacial phase, instead allowing for the progressive increase in glaciation until it reaches the “snowball Earth” phase again. How long until then? It’s hard to tell, but my intuitive interpretation of the graph says that the error of 5MY is acceptable. Translated to human language, the next ice age might be the one we never get out of, or we might have 5MY until that point, because the industrial CO2 emissions introduced so much unexpected buffer it’s hard to anticipate the consequences, to the point where it might delay the onset of the new ice age by several MY, or it might actually destabilize the system, create an unexpected Dansgaard-Oeschger event and pull us into an ice-age sooner. The margin of “I don’t know” is the size of 5MY, which is double the size of Pleistocene. One of the instability-modes that my model predicts is that the plants are normally restricted by the scarcity factors, such as CO2 or Phosphorus in the environment, and when you remove the restrictions, their growth suddenly expands exponentially to the point where they suck up and “bury” all those factors from the environment, basically turning atmospheric CO2 into coal deposits. This means that human-induced CO2 spike can produce a plant-induced CO2 drop which can, in some kind of a perfect storm of conditions, trigger a glaciation. However, the number of unknowns is so vast that my simulation has no predictive abilities within the stated margin of uncertainty. What is quite certain is that my model of a long-term cooling trend, driven by continental distribution that allows for a Coriolis-powered circumantarctic sea current, essentially “liquid cooling” the planet more efficiently than the Sun can warm it up, and promoting gradual buffer-extraction that destabilizes the global climate, is valid, and long-term predictive. The “problem” is that the process started more than 65MY ago, and that the Chicxulub asteroid produced a very visible extinction-spike that masked the actual problem. Or, we could say that human psychological attraction to discrete spikes is the actual problem. I think it has something to do with predatory genetics, where a lion or some other animal is perceived as a significant event, and grass growing is perceived as background noise that is ignored. Well, in my attempt to become less blinded by human biases, I started ignoring the lions and zebras and paying attention to the grass. This is why my analyses start by ignoring the things “everybody knows”, and going back to the raw data, normalizing it against distractions, and letting it tell its own story.

This article is too long already so I’ll stop here, although I could cite a dozen or so additional examples. In any case, you can see the outlines of my method – absorb the raw data, ignore biases and distractions, trust the known-to-be-valid mechanisms, such as thermodynamics, inertia and so on.

But, that’s also how I model politics – it’s not that much different. See who has better debt-to-GDP ratio, who has foreign trade sufficit, who has cheaper energy and more of it, who has better access to the basic natural resources, who is less sensitive to isolation from the global economic and political systems, who has more robust and reliable basic technological systems, and who has population that has a healthier attitude towards reality, and then model interactions and time-graphs. When you do that, not only do my assessments no longer look like some fringe conspiracy theory, but you start asking yourself why is nobody else following such common-sensical principles?

Good question, I guess.

There’s been quite a witch hunt in the Croatian newspapers in the last few days; a Hare Krishna family had a son die from untreated pneumonia and diabetes, and although his sickness wasn’t sudden and he asked them for help, they “treated” it with yarrow tea and prayer instead of taking him to a hospital. They called the ambulance only after he stopped breathing and even then they didn’t attempt reanimation.

There are several issues involved here. First, the Hare Krishnas aren’t known for their faith in either science or anything to do with the Western world, to put it mildly. More accurately, if something isn’t in Srimad Bhagavatam and Prabhupada didn’t recommend it, they will most likely feel that it’s either not important or that it’s actively harmful. Also, there were numerous incidents in their movement throughout its history, from pedophilia to murder and other forms of violence, that are directly opposite to what their teaching is supposed to be, so I wouldn’t put much past them. However, they are not opposed to Western medicine either as a matter of teaching, or from precedents set by the founder, who sought medical assistance several times in his life, for various issues, from minor (difficulties urinating) to life-threatening (stroke and diabetes). So, if there’s a “religious” reason why those parents didn’t bring their seriously ill son to the doctor, it’s not because their religion forbids it, or because its founder set a negative precedent. More likely, it’s a result of their “original thinking”.

The second issue is that the incident was reported in a very particular way with a very clear message, in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, where at least half the population is seriously sceptical towards the official reporting of the facts and towards the official medical recommendations, and this incident was reported in form of a message that says, basically, that if you don’t buy all the garbage we’re feeding you from the official sources, then you are no better than this family of cultists that “refused science and medicine” and is now to be officially prosecuted and their other children are to be taken away from them. The message is quite clear – obey unquestioningly or we’ll crush you like cockroaches.

The third issue is that I’m apparently an evil cult leader and I’m invariably accused of all the evils done by every idiotic cult or sect in recent history, so let me tell you what I did when my children were sick, in the beginning of 2020. They both had 40°C fever and obvious symptoms of a viral pneumonia. Romana took them to the doctor, and they were both misdiagnosed – one with “some virus that’s always going around in the spring” and the other with spring allergies. I was suspicious, but I became certain it was COVID-19 when I got it myself. They had a nasty enough version, Romana as well, but I really got wiped out by it and made it out alive with the narrowest possible margin. All the while, the doctors were useless, they either didn’t know anything or actually lied, the politicians lied that there are only 7 known cases of COVID in the country, they know for certain it’s all contained, and all the while I had kids who survived it and had to go back to school because the super-authoritative medicine we are supposed to trust unquestioningly diagnosed them with “some virus that’s on the way out” and “allergies”. In the meantime, I the evil cult leader told my younger son who was coughing his lungs out during the recovery phase to wear a medical mask in school in order not to spread it to the other kids. Mind you, nobody wore medical masks at that point, so everybody was looking at him funny, “there was no COVID” in Croatia, and what his entire school including the teachers came down with were “spring allergies”. So, what’s the difference between the recommendations given to my kids by the official medicine, and the recommendations given to the kids of Hare Krishnas by their parents? It’s both useless and irrelevant, but I can’t see the doctors misdiagnosing my kids facing any consequences, and, arguably, they really didn’t know enough to do any better, but all of the sudden this useless, hapless medicine is portrayed as something only a fringe lunatic would go against. No, the problem is that the official medicine is useless or actively harmful often enough to warrant serious scepticism, and people need to make educated guesses whether some ailment falls into the group that medicine treats well, or into the group where medicine will do more harm than good, for instance getting you addicted to drugs promoted by the pharma companies that routinely bribe them. In this particular instance, the Hare Krishna parents had insufficient knowledge to make a proper call, they misjudged the situation completely, and as a result their child died. However, it can be said that I also misjudged the situation when I sent my kids to the doctor when they had high fever and pneumonia, because the doctors misdiagnosed them, recommended worthless treatments and sent them home to get better on their own; even worse, they sent them back to school while they were most likely contagious with COVID.

Completely rejecting medicine is obviously not a correct answer, because if you break a bone or have a stroke medicine is going to really help you, but trusting it unquestioningly is barely any better than rejecting it unquestioningly, because medicine has been so corrupted by industrial bribery and connections to politics, that there are areas where they are actively harmful, and one would be much better off avoiding them entirely.

The problem with COVID, in particular, is that the current treatment is actually not universally supported by the medical professionals; in fact, they seem to be the greatest opposition to the official stance, which is advocated by something that resembles a conspiring cabal or a cult of “elites”, consisting of “doctors” who actually produce bioweapons, politicians with anti-capitalist agendas and who knows what else, and since I know for a fact that they lied when I could personally verify their statements, I am certainly not going to trust them at anything they say that I can’t personally verify.