An interesting article at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/01/250102162311.htm .. a new study investigating ancient methane trapped in Antarctic ice cores suggests global increases in wildfire activity coincide with periods of abrupt climate change – throughout a large slice of the last Ice Age. They used an ice core going back 67,000 years. For more details see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08363-3 …
The planet experienced short, sudden, episodes of burning – and they appear to have occurred at the same time as big shifts in climate. Either sudden cooling or a burst of warming. Being educated within a uniformitarian system the authors seem to be interested in correlating this information into the modern global warming mantra rather than seeing it as part and parcel of catastrophic events involving an unknown mechanism. The results are said to show a connection with the so called Dansgaard-Oeschger events [warmings] and Heinrich events [cooling episodes of long duration]. The latter are known as Dryas events in the early Holocene – the Younger, Older, and Oldest dryas events [with the latter also classified as Heinrich One]. These are associated with rapid climate change but what actually was the mechanism behind them eludes climate and earth scientists. They display evidence of temperature change, and shifting rainfall patterns. It is also interesting to note the Younger dryas event is thought to have included, at its beginning, global wildfires. An outbreak of landscape burning that are blamed, by some, on space rocks. Meteors, for example. There is considerable literature out there on this subject – by those for and those against.
The problem confronting scientists is what triggered these episodes of abrupt climate change. The consensus opinion is that it is all down to coean currents going into a switch mode. That may well be part of the answer – but what triggered the ocean currents to shift? This is thought to involve currents slowing down, or speeding up – or not getting as far north as they had previously. We can all remember the Al Gore film and the idea the Gulf Stream would come to a halt as the planet got warmer. Again, this seems to be a cockeyed idea as one would have thought it was the onset of cool weather that impeded the ocean currents. HH Lamb had this all worked out in the 1950s to 1970s, particularly where it came to the so called Little Ice Age in the 16h and 17th centuries. He wrote some books that are still relevant today and will come back into popularity once the global warming scare has subsided. Get yourself up to date now. The imposition of cold weather around the globe is associated with an opaque sun – as a result of dust and gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere. The most popular cause of course is volcanism – but heavy meteor activity has never really been explored, apart from a few marginal catastrophists that include the astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier, and some of their colleagues at observatories around Britain and Ireland. Mainstream has never liked their ideas and mostly ignore it. However, they cannot argue against it as the Taurid complex is an ancient collection of meteor streams that have dissipated over time but still exist. Even though most of the material with an origin in one or two comets, has dissipated far and wide, and the pieces of material have grown smaller and smaller over the centuries as a result of buffering from the solar wind. It is estimated the Taurid complex goes back at least 30,000 years. Possibly longer. There is an extensive literature on the subject but you will need to root it out as it is not on the agenda of mainstream thinking.
HH Lamb said that when the polar zone expanded it put pressure on the temperate zone, shrinking it to some degree, and this in turn caused a shift south of the tropical zone. It makes sense as it thus explains shifts in the monsoon belt and shifts in the Intertropical Convergence Zone [tropical rainfall belt]. This can easily be corroborated in the Galapagos Islands for example. When the earth cools the rainfall belt shifts and the islands become dry as a result of low rainfall. The same thing was going on in Mexico. The Maya occupation zone had a shifting pattern and when the rains failed they had to move elsewhere in order to farm in a wettish environment. These were especially evident during the Little Ice Age and also self evident over several thousand years. The shift in the monsoon rain belt was a repeating hazard in the Near and Middle East and it also affected the amount of water in the Nile – leading to the collapse of the Egyptian centralised state. The so called first, second, and third intermediate periods when Egypt fell into regional provinces and pharaoh’s authority was limited – lasted until the annual flood levels righted themselves. This is a basic feature of Egyptian mythology as they had a long experience of such changes. They even erected annual Nile level data that have been preserved into the modern world. Hence, Lamb’s system applies particularly well to more recent climate ups and downs. It must also apply to more ancient episodes – some of which lasted for a couple of thousand years. What was exactly going on then is what Lamb says, but at a greater scale. If it involved the Taurid complex of meteor streams these would be bigger and more dense trains of meteoric material shed by a giant comet. We don’t know how long Comet Halley goes back into history or how large it was when it first started interacting with the inner solar system. Clube and Napier proposed an even bigger comet – one of what is now called a Centaur object. Look it up on Wiki or type it into your search engine. These space rocks are enormous and they exhibit both cometary and asteroid like behaviour. It would take a very long time for such an object to shed most of its mass.
At this juncture what might have caused these warmings and coolings in what the consensus call the last Ice Age is up for grabs if anyone else wishes to catch the hornet. Mainstream do not seem inclined to investigate any further than ocean current changes – studiously ignoring that something has to cause the ocean currents themselves to change. The idea it is all down to cascades of fresh water from melting ice sheets is another idea that has become established without much examination of facts. It puts the mystery into a box and until somebody else comes along with a more acceptable idea, and preferably with a uniformitarian slant, it will be the repeated response to anyone asking questions.
Another idea is that volcanism alone is responsible for opaque skies. True, when it comes to 2 or 3 year periods but not when it comes to hundreds of years. We have even had the idea that the earth was in a wobble to explain the longevity as even the Younger Dryas was not a permanently cold period but varied between very cold weather and more comfortable temperatures. Wobbles on the axis of rotation are the province of physics as a discipline and there is only limited published material on the subject. We have Chandler wobbles, which are of short duration, and longer wobbles of one or two thousand years. The latter could conceivably fit into the dryas and Heinrich event durations but consensus physics claims the earth cannot move at the axis of rotation. That idea goes all the way back to the 19th century and has not been tested when it comes to the more recent discovery that electro-magnetism plays a role in the universe. Therefore, within the solar system. A change in rotation may have a trigger involving the earth’s dipole. On that basis it would not need a large passing space body to shift the earth from its axis. Time will tell if these ideas have any traction.
A volcanic origin for the Younger Dryas was recently ruled out in a research paper at https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adt4057 ..
but see also https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/01/250116133816.htm …