CHAPTER I
ANTHROPOCENE ERA OF GLOBAL WARMING
THE DRIVING FORCE OF CIVILIZATION
The genetic split between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens occurred some
400,000 years ago, and high levels of cognitive intelligence now exist in
every population on Earth. Entrepreneurs are the change agents of history
who now have generated an astonishingly-advanced technology-based
civilization on Planet Earth. However, a unique set of conditions were essential for this remarkable phenomenon to occur. (It has taken 5,000 years).
Climatic conditions favorable for human creativity to function have intermittently occur
ed in 100,000 and 500 year cycles of global warming and cooling. These cycles are
thoroughly documented by redundant data from Antarctic and Greenland ice cores, (1)
from Sargasso Sea sediment cores, (2) from, from stalagmites found in Chinese caves, (3)
from tree rings and from radio carbon dating of artifacts. Two patterns have emerged.
Figure I below charts the 100,000 year cycle, and Figure II charts the 500 year set of
periods of warming and cooling that has finally allowed an advanced civilization to
emerge. In each warming stage of the 100,000 year pattern, rudimentary civilizations
redundantly re-invented similar tools, dikes and charcoal drawings in caves, but these
were lost when the next ice age set in.
FIGURE I
These 100,000 year cycles were not driven by people burning fossil fuels. Instead, they
are solar-driven and are coincident with the elliptical orbit of the Earth around the Sun.
The Earth cycles about 3 million miles closer to the Sun every 100,000 years, which increases the intensity of radiation about 1.3 watts per square meter. Increased radiation
warms the oceans, which in a secondary affect, boil out dissolved carbon dioxide and
methane into the atmosphere (many times more than is currently being generated from
fossil fuels). (4) However, as the Earth cycles away from the Sun, another ice age results.
-2The most recent of these 100, 000 year cycles ended about 6,200 years
ago and we should now be in another Ice Age.
The same Antarctic ice core data, Sargasso Sea and other data have also identified a second (500 year) pattern of warming and cooling which began about 5,500 years ago and
reversed descent of the Earth into another Ice Age. (We would not be here). In each warm
stage of this 500 year pattern, increased solar radiation has warmed the oceans, boilingout great surges of “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere. Remarkably, in each of these
cycles, a major civilization also emerged, but then declined in the follow-on cooling stage.
Every cooling stage has been accompanied by serious droughts and starvation. (Figure II)
FIGURE II
500 YEAR PATTERN OF GLOBAL WARMING AND COOLING
1,000
500
0
500
1,000
1,500
2,000
B.C
B.C.
A.D.
A.D.
A.D.
A.D.
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Most remarkably, for the first time in the history of the planet, the cooling stages have been short enough in this pattern, that the cultural adances made in one warming stage were not lost, but were able to be recaptured and further advanced in the next. The result has been am intermitten but cumulative rise of our current astonishingly-advanced technology-based civilization.
Starting 5,500, ago, there have been 9 of these warming and cooling patterns, including
the current one which started about 250 years ago in the mid 1700’s. This warming stage
now has peaked and the cooling phase has begun. NASA and other data show that there
has been no statistical evidence of warming since about 1996. (5) Serious droughts and
starvation have accompanied all previous cooling stages over the last 5,000 years.
-3The cause of the shift in Solar radiation intensity now is known. Galileo in 1631, had
observed the disappearance of the Sunspots but did live to see the follow-on “Little Ice
Age” or know that it was associated with concurrent precipitous declines in in both the
Sun’s magnetic field and the intensity of solar radiation. The same exact pattern has now
reappeared. (6).
FIGURE III
COLLAPSE OF SOLAR RADIATION
The Sun’s magnetic field which controls the intensity of Solar radiation has been droping about 50 Gauss a year since 1996. Concurrently serious droughts have appeared on
every continent (Figure IV), with food shortages also beginning to appear. The overriding
concern is that Earth now has some 7 billion people to feed, of which some 5 billion live
in under-developed countries, with agrarian economies.
Serious periods of drought and hunger have reappeared with each cooling stage (see
Chapter VIII), lasting most of a century, before the start of the next warming cycle. This
-4pattern has now reappeared on every continent in our current Era. (Figure IV).
FIGURE IV
DROUGHTS APPEARING ON EVERY CONTINENT
HISTORICAL BACKGROUNND
In the first great warming period 5,400 years ago, of the 500 year cycle, three major
world civilizations began to emerge, one on the Yellow River in China, one on the Nile
River in Egypt and one between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what now is Iraq.
Many others have emerged and declined in subsequent periods of warming, (The Indus,
Easter Island , Angkor, the Mayans), but only those three civilizations managed to
survive the following 3000 years, through successive 500 year periods of global warming
and cooling, to the beginning of the Dark Ages.
In both Egypt and China great dynasties rose and fell, synchronous with these successive
periods of warming and cooling. Each succeeding dynasty made remarkable advances
over a preceding dynasty. In Iraq, the Sumerians built some 31 city states, which then
were conquered 3000 years ago (1000 B.C.), by the Babylonians to create the first
Western Empire. Since then, in each subsequent 500 year period of warming, a major
-5western civilization has risen and then collapsed accompanied by droughts and starvation.
The Babylonian civilization peaked around 1,000 B.C. and was followed the Greek
Empire peaking around 500 B.C. The Roman Empire followed 500 years later peaking at
the turn of the millennium, and then slowly disintegrated into the Dark Ages when the
500 A.D warming period was aborted by severe volcanic explosions (Figure V).
FIGURE V
RISE AND FALLOF CIVILIZATIONS
CIVILIZATION
Babylonian
Greek
Roman
Dark Ages
Medieval
Rennaissance.
Current Era
PEAK PERIOD
3,000 BCE, (1,000 B.C.)
500 B.C
Zero A.D
500 A.D. Aborted
1,000 A.D
1,500 A.D
2,000 A.D
Remarkably, the important cultural advances made by the early Sumerians
had been spread throughout the Mediterranean, by the Phoenecians and
other sea-faring people, independent (for the time ever) of rivers that periodically dried up. The Western-based Judeo-Christian culture alone, then
survived the Dark Ages, to continue to evolve and now dominate world
civilization (enabled by the unique appearance of the Solar-driven 500
year warming and cooling cycle)...
The Dark Ages, resulted when the 500 A.D period apparently was aborted by volcanic
eruptions (which “darkened the sky”). Astonishingly then, only the Judeo Christian
Culture survived that terrible period to reemerge in the 1,000 A.D. Medieval warming
period when many of the great cathedrals were built. It was a period much warmer than
now. About two thirds of the ice and snow melted on Greenland at this time with no
record of a significant rise of ocean waters. The Danes farmed Greenland for two
hundred years, as the next cooling period set in. (Greenland is now massively covered
with ice and snow).
Since the Medieval Period, two additional warming periods have occurred at 500 year intervals. In 1500 A.D, the Renaissance period generated a historically-unprecedented explosion of advanced learning in the arts and sciences, enabled by invention of the printing
press in 1456. It also generated many famous entrepreneurial names (Galileo, DaVinci,
Raphael, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, DeMedici, Copernicus, Descartes, Kepler and
Bacon); but ended in the “little Ice Age: when the Thames and the Venetian Canals froze
over, Swiss villages were crushed by descending glaciers and it was possible to walk
across the ice from Manhattan to Staten Island. .
-6The current period of warming now beginning in the mid 1799’s, has seen another
explosion of advanced technology, beginning with the industrial Revolution in 1840 and
the work of many additional famous entrepreneurs up to WW II, (Watt, Fulton, Whitney,
McCormick, Faraday, Edison, Morse, Bell, Marconi, Pasteur, and Einstein). WW II then
forced development of many next-generation disruptive technologies to win the War,
which became the seed corn for the rise of thousands of new businesses About 90% of all
Scientific Knowledge has been generated over just the last 25 Years. (8)
Invention of the transistor, fiber optics and the concept of digital electronic transmission
of data by the Bell Labs, then enabled construction of an Internet and now billions of
computers and some 6 billion cell phones that pervade every world population. Capital
and information now flow with the speed of light anywhere in the world, by-passing
bureaucratic, regulatory, language and cultural barriers, progressively-undermining the
despotic forms of control endured by billions of people for thousands of years. The
conditions for release of latent entrepreneurial talent now are known (Chapter II).
SUMMARY
The evolution of civilization has been long, tedious and most-uncertain of success in its
intermittent but exponential rise. Fortunately, for the first time ever, the remarkable
advancements made in each warm-rainy stage have not been lost because the follow-on
cooling stages were sufficiently short that advances made in one were re-captured and
further advanced in the next. For the last 400,000 years, the latent entrepreneurial talent
needed has always been present in every population.. It now can be and must be released
in all developing populations. Effective methods are available (see Chapter II)
The U.S.as the un-sought leader of the Free World, has become an essential factor in the
urgent need to accelerate the entrepreneurial economic development of all emerging
countries.
Fortuitously, the attack on Pearl Harbor forced the U.S. to mount its unprecedented crash technology program needed to win the War. Those advanced
technologies have now inadvertently thrust the U.S. into an un-sought position of
global dominance, not only militarily, but also economically and technologically,
which is unique in history.
America must now again carry an unsolicited additional burden of catalytic-assistance to
a world on fire. Leadership will be essential in helping developing-nations, release their
latent entrepreneurial talents, to accelerate their own economic development, leading
eventually to development of a middle class, which alone can sustain forms of democratic
governance. Global droughts, as they now continue to expand, will multiply the
difficulties. The world has seven billion people to feed.
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-8REFERENCES
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