I’m going to let you in on a little secret about a doomsday device that threatens with mass extinction of the vast majority of all species on Earth, including mankind. This device has been created 41 million years ago and has been steadily working on cooling the planet down, reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, increasing the temperature gradient between the poles and the equator. It has cooled the planet down so much that the existence of permanent ice sheets on the poles has become the norm for the last few millions of years. Lately, it rendered the climate so fatally unstable, that the Milankovitch cycles, the small variations in orbital eccentricity, axial tilt and precession, have become sufficient to plunge the planet into ice ages – or, considering that we are in an ongoing ice age, we should call those the “glacial maximums”. Inevitably, as the process of global cooling progresses, those small variations will at one point cease to be sufficient for bringing the planet out from a glacial maximum, and further on, it will cause a global glaciation, also known as “snowball Earth”.

This doomsday device is known in geography as the Drake Passage.

To quote Wikipedia, “There is no significant land anywhere around the world at the latitudes of Drake Passage, which is important to the unimpeded flow of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current which carries a huge volume of water (about 600 times the flow of the Amazon River) through the Passage and around Antarctica.”

Some 65 MY ago, due to plate tectonics things started taking place, that gradually rearranged the flow of sea currents around the continents. The Drake Passage was opened 41 MY ago, separating South America from Antarctica. This created a steady Antarctic circumpolar current which is basically a Coriolis-effect-driven heat pump, and you can understand how that works if you imagine a rotating cold vessel filled with liquid, where rotation of the vessel helps the exchange of heat between the two, only in this case the liquid flows outside the “vessel”. The liquid spins inside the vessel due to inertia. It essentially cools warm seawater by exchanging its heat with the edges of the polar continent where it dissipates into space. The effectiveness of this circumpolar current in dissipating the energy from Earth is such that it creates a net-negative energy balance, although a slight one, and creates a long-term trend.

This long-term cooling trend is what drove the evolutionary forces that created our kind of mammalian life, and it’s the trend that will eventually result in a complete global freeze that will produce the final extinction of our kind of mammalian life. This is the reason why there are no longer any large ectothermic creatures around, such as the Titanoboa, why the birds needed to evolve the ability to migrate seasonally in order to avoid the freezing cold of the north hemisphere winter, and why the mammals needed to evolve in order to hibernate. Closer to our time, the formation of the isthmus of Panama some 5 MY ago impeded the equatorial sea currents, forcing them to circumnavigate the continents and thus bring more equatorial heat into the southern circumpolar current. This had the “immediate” effect of throwing us into a Pleistocene ice age, since the global temperature and the amount of CO2 buffering plummeted to the point where Milankovitch cycles could actually have a significant effect on the climate.

The temperature graph of the last 65 MY has a long-term downward trend, and everything else is merely a blip.

The formation of the Antarctic circumpolar current started the long process of climate change that produced us, the creatures of the Ice Age, and it will also produce the end-result of freezing Earth so completely, that it will stay there for hundreds of millions of years, until plate tectonics eventually rearrange the continents in such a way as to produce a net-positive global energy balance and cause a gradual thaw, at which point every form of life we know and are will be long extinct.

It happened already, several times, and every time the continental masses were arranged in such a way as to enable free circulation of sea water around at least one pole. The only time such circulation was inhibited we had the Cambrian explosion of life, and when it was re-established 41 MY ago we had the acceleration of the process of global cooling that started 65 MY ago when the continents rearranged themselves in a way that creates a net-negative long-term global energy balance.

One of the problems with global cooling is that CO2 is more readily absorbed in cold water, and this long-term global trend sinks our atmospheric CO2 into the oceans and thus removes the buffer that would otherwise reduce the thermal gradient between the equator and the poles and also moderate the slight effects that Milankovitch cycles have on global climate. That’s why Milankovitch cycles are of consequence only in the Pleistocene, which is what got me interested in the first place, leading to very interesting findings that I’m describing here.

This short-term increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration that we managed to produce with our high-energy civilization might have bought us some time, by temporarily increasing the climate buffers and reducing the impact of the orbital and axial variations on the climate, but since Earth is a very complex thermodynamic system, where circulation of 3 mediums (magma in the mantle, water and air) and entropy within and between them, solid impediments to circulation, plus solar input and albedo, plus thermal buffers (methane, CO2, water vapour) and accumulators (ice, methane hydrate), produce effects that are impossible predict without a very demanding computer simulation, we currently don’t know what exactly to expect, and as far as I’m concerned, the CO2 input could influence some mechanism in such a way that it actually causes a sudden ice age, for instance by introducing too much fresh water from ice melt into the oceans and thus disrupting the thermohaline circulation. When I watched the movie “Day after tomorrow”, the events described seemed implausible, but after I did some research I actually think it’s one of the most likely scenarios I’ve seen described. The thing is, we don’t know, because it isn’t about logic, it’s about thermodynamics, and you need to know all the variables in order to be able to predict, and one single thing can decide between radically different outcomes.

But this is all short term. Long term, the sentence is death by cold. How long term? In Pleistocene, the climate became unstable. These are in fact the death throes of climate that precede the global glaciation, where Milankovitch cycles are no longer sufficient to produce a glacial minimum, and you get a runaway glaciation. What exactly are the conditions in which this takes place, in respect to oceanic and atmospheric temperature, albedo and CO2 concentration, I don’t know, because that would require a computer simulation. What I do know is what the long-term temperature graph looks like, I understand the underlying mechanism, and I can predict that within a few million years we will have frozen oceans on the equator. But for all I know, there’s another interesting trend, which shows that the dominant Homo species goes extinct in the glacial maximum – Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalensis and others. I don’t see great odds of our industrial civilization surviving an event as disruptive as a glacial maximum, and without industry, and having killed off all the Pleistocene megafauna that would allow at least a moderate number of humans to live off the land if the industrial agriculture fails, I’m not giving us the odds of survival greater than 1% in the timeframe of 50 KY. But of course, for a species to which 1 KY is “eternity” and which no longer has any kind of historical recollection of the last glacial maximum, even those prospects are incredibly long-term.

References:

Impact of Antarctic Circumpolar Current Development on Late Paleogene Ocean Structure, Miriam E. Katz, Benjamin S. Cramer, J. R. Toggweiler, Gar Esmay, Chengjie Liu, Kenneth G. Miller, Yair Rosenthal, Bridget S. Wade, James D. Wright
Science 27 May 2011:
Vol. 332, Issue 6033, pp. 1076-1079
DOI: 10.1126/science.1202122

Role of the isthmus of Panama in global cooling by Gerald H. Haug, Geoforschungszentrum Potsdam (GFZ), Germany; Ralf Tiedemann, Forschungszentrum fur Marine Geowissenschaften, Germany; and Lloyd D. Keigwin, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

65 MY trend of cooling, David Lappi

The Physics of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, Worth D. Nowlin, Jr., and John M. Klinck, REVIEWS OF GEOPHYSICS, VOL. 24, NO. 3, PAGES 469-491, AUGUST 1986, Department of Oceanooraphy, Texas A&M University, College Station

The worst thing you can do to a stupid person is tell them they should not take things on faith, but that they should personally verify things, because that’s what science and independent thinking are all about.

This is an incredible load of bullshit, because science is not at all about verifying everything yourself. Science is about organizing human knowledge in such a way that everything you deal with in the sphere of science has been verified by multiple people, and most people only verify one or two things personally, while having faith that the rest of the scientific community has been doing their job with the same diligence in the sphere of their personal competence. Essentially, a particle physicist can only verify statistical data obtained from an accelerator, he doesn’t verify that the Earth is round or that there’s a black hole in the center of the galaxy. A geologist only verifies things regarding tectonic plates and their movements, and the nature of the minerals recovered by deep drilling, he doesn’t verify things in the sphere of influence of meteorology. You only specialize in that one thing, and the rest you take on faith. So, basically, if you organize a system in such a way that in every sphere of scientific interest you have multiple scientists peer-reviewing and fact-checking each other, you create what is known in cryptography as the web of trust. You don’t need to personally verify everybody’s PGP key. What you need to do is personally verify PGP keys of the people you personally know. The groups of people overlap, and if you have people A, B and C, and if A can verify B, and B can verify C, A can trust C without being able to personally verify. There’s also the criterion of results, which is probably the most important thing of all because that’s the main difference between hard science and a circlejerk. The criterion of results is when you can produce technology based on your science. It’s when you can use what you know about photography, lithography, chemistry and quantum physics and produce a microprocessor. The fact that it works proves that you know what you’re talking about; without that, it could all be bullshit. One religious fanatic told me, more than a decade ago, that science is unreliable, it’s never the complete truth and certainty (that he, presumably, gets from some bronze age scripture). I told him that science and technology indeed contain a certain degree of unreliability, but I put it this way: you have a screen in front of you, that reliably produces the same picture refreshed some 60 times per second. This picture is not garbled. There might be a dead pixel somewhere on the screen. There might be a difference in backlight illumination in the corners. The computer itself performs millions operations every second in order to display the picture. It is able to connect to the network, get data, process it, display it in client software, you then read it, understand it, reply to it and send it back through the server, and I download it on my side and see the exact same message that you sent. Not a single bit was corrupted, despite all of the supposed unreliability of it all. You don’t see people complaining on forums that they can’t understand the text because it’s garbled, because those computers, they make mistakes every now and then. Actually, it’s all incredibly reliable, it’s so reliable you have air traffic control which uses radars and computers to reliably detect position and speed of multiple aircraft simultaneously, they use the data to predict future and issue specific orders to pilots, and this happens all over the world every day, and every other decade you have an accident due to an air traffic control error. This stuff is so reliable you can use it to make bricks. Yes, there’s some possibility for error, there’s an innate degree of unreliability in there, but you need to understand what it is. My computer is so reliable it works for years on end without any issues, and if there’s an issue, it’s not with the computer, it’s with some program that’s not the greatest, or with the operating system which can be configured to just reboot in order to install updates while I’m in the middle of something. The unreliability is not of the degree where you can’t tell what the red color is supposed to be or where you can’t read the letters because they came out garbled, and the random pixels are just flaring up on the screen like white noise on the old analogue TV sets when the reception is bad. The unreliability is that you don’t always have good base station coverage for your GSM phones, the unreliability is that you sometimes have no mobile data connection because you’re in a canyon and there are no base stations nearby. The unreliability is that out of thousands of planes that fly every day, every year you’ll have several bad accidents. It’s not that it sometimes works and sometimes not. It almost always works perfectly. I’d trust air traffic control more than I’d trust my eyesight, and that’s not because I have poor eyesight or because I’m a gullible person, it’s because they are so incredibly good at what they do, and because they are tested all the time and they reliably deliver the goods. They are not tested by me, but they are, and I believe it all because I’m not a fucking idiot, like those people who would say that the Earth is flat and that you’d believe that too if you actually tested it like they do, and it never crossed their small shallow minds to just go from northern to southern hemisphere and look at the night sky, because the constellations are different, which is an absolute proof that you’re on a sphere. So be wary of those who tell you to go verify things for yourself, because they are usually either stupid or evil or both. Testing things yourself is something that’s so sensitive to sample bias, ignorance and manipulation it’s usually the worst thing you can do. Your best option is actually the PGP system, the web of trust. You need to figure out who is it that reliably knows something, and if you want to learn something, learn it from a person in a web of trust, because that person has been peer reviewed. Maybe you can’t verify him because he’s above your pay grade, but there are people on and above his pay grade who can and do verify him, and if he tells you how something works, this information is of better quality than anything you could come up with using your senses and “common sense”, because let’s face it, if common sense of most people was worth a damn, it wouldn’t take us most of history to figure out formulas for inertia and gravity and to figure that light can be broken into separate wavelength components, and it was mostly done by one guy, because common sense of everyone else wasn’t worth shit.

There are certain things one can and should personally test. I personally test cameras and lenses and see how they behave, because I’m a photographer and I can. I know what to look for when I test them and I know how the equipment works well enough that I can figure out the way lens designers set up the spherical aberration by the way the out-of-focus areas look. That’s because photography is within my sphere of competence and I know what I’m doing. I can also find flaws in other people’s reasoning, because that, too, is within my area of expertise: I’m actually very good at thinking. There are many things I can personally verify, but even more important is that I know the difference between what I can check an what I can trust. I can trust that people at Intel know a thing or two about quantum physics, because if they didn’t, their shit would fail much before the 14nm level of integration and I wouldn’t be able to overclock my CPU to 4.6 GHz. I can trust that people at NASA know calculus and that the Newtonian physics work, because without them we wouldn’t have the communication satellites. I can trust that the Earth is round because if it were flat I’d see the Magellanic Clouds and the Southern Cross from Europe, which I don’t.

What I can’t trust is that people are smart enough to use that mythical “common sense” in order to verify complicated things personally. For instance, it’s quite easy to figure out that there are communication satellites in the sky, which basically proves the entire modern physics if you’re a competent enough thinker to do the necessary reasoning. You buy a satellite dish, point it at a random part of the sky, see what you get on your TV. Then point the dish at the satellite, good reception. Voila, proof that you have a radio transmitter in the sky at a very precise location. Now, think about how it can be there, who put it there and how, and how can one transmit images from a station on Earth, relay them through a satellite in the sky, so that you can pick the signal up and amplify it, and then reproduce it on your TV. But if you don’t know how a TV converts radio waves into RGB pixel intensities and how PAL encoding works, fuck off with that “I’m not a sheep, I’ll verify things” shit. You’re a stupid sheep alright, go back to eating your grass and bleat. Leave verifying to people with functioning brains, and you stick to blind following because that’s actually the safest thing for you to do, because finding someone smarter and following him is the only way for you not to fuck up everything.