Robert Schoch is not a stranger to controversies. He was involved in the Sphinx affair, the claim it was constructed long prior to the conventional date. He has also popped up on several other occasions as a bit of a heretic as far as mainstream is concerned. One of his books provided some nice information about Gobekli Tepe, for example. He has also spoken at a Thunderbolts EU conference and has developed the idea that a large CME was responsible for bringing an end to the Ice Age – or more properly the end of the Younger Dryas episode (which in some sources is defined as the end of the Pleistocene and by others as the end of the Ice Age). To clarify the chronology of this period the end of the Late Glacial Maximum (originally defined as the last Ice Age) occurred at 18,000 to 15,000 years ago but it is convenient for mainstream to pretend the Ice Age didn't really end until much later as they can then have their cake and eat it (lots of unmelted ice that went on to run-off into the Atlantic Ocean and create the Younger Dryas episode). In reality the Younger Dryas was preceded by two warm periods (divided by the Older Dryas event) and any remnants of the LGM ice sheet would have disappeared prior to the Younger Dryas episode. Ice sheets may temporarily have returned during the Younger Dryas, on the Raanach plateau in Scotland for example, but the emphasis here is on remnants (not a huge ice sheet covering large areas of the northern hemisphere).
Schoch has a super coronal mass eruption at the end of the Younger Dryas (warming up the earth by injecting lots of hot plasma via solar wind dispersal), a theory with some credence in an electric universe scenario. You may note in this theory it is inactivity on the Sun that was by implication responsible for the Ice Ages, a view not too distant from mainstream that blames the orbit of the earth around the Sun (further and nearer the Sun). Did the Sun become very quiet and create the cold and fluctuating temperatures of the Younger Dryas, a sort of long lasting Little Ice Age reglaciation of high altitude zones? It's an interesting idea but is of course diametrically different to that of the catastrophists responsible for the Younger Dryas Boundary event theory. As a result his writings have elicited a response from the Comet Research Group – see the George Howard web site at http://cosmictusk.com/comet-research-group-responds-to-robert-schoch/
I'm not sure why they are bothered too much by Schoch's lack of enthusiasm for a mammoth killing atmospheric explosion at the onset of the Younger Dryas (rather than an earth heating event at the end of the Younger Dryas episode) but I suppose they were shocked that somebody with his credentials has come out against their research. Perhaps he was persuaded by the electric universe people who seem stubbornly married to the idea that virtually every crater on the earth has an electrical origin (rather than an impact origin). If so Schoch has become the public face of the EU hypothesis which is quite a surprise. The response is published in full at the link above (and nothing much new is added to what they have said in the past). Unlike the idea of a giant CME the beauty of the YD Boundary event is that it is much fatter and fuller to the brim as it also accounts for the Older and Oldest Dryas events and the major pair of catastrophes between 40 and 30,000 years ago (when the really big mass die-off occurred). The theory behind it originates in Clube and Napier back in the 1990s (and we have published some of this material in SIS over the years). In contrast, the EU people have studiously ignored the Taurid meteor stream complex – with a rigour one might say. What we have here is a major fault line between catastrophists and SIS sits piggy in the middle – without taking sides. We have also published quite a bit from committed EU people and our next speaker meeting will feature Bob Johnson, one of the more interesting disciples. However, some of the people involved at the Comet Research Group are actively assisting Phil Silvia in the search for evidence of the demise of the Biblical cities of the Plain (see home page of this web site and the link in the Activities Box). Schoch's super CME event can only attempt to explain the onset of warmth in the early Holocene. It is muted in comparison with the Clube and Napier model. The latter also has the added benefit that they do not require major changes in the solar system in the recent past – as far as the planets are concerned. Another reason to take it seriously is that it sounds very much like a watered down version of Velikovsky, a revamp of his ideas but in a way that is in tune with the professional astronomers that they were (at the time).
The Schoch stance is illustrative in that it has one group of catastrophists in opposition to another – and how this is achieved. What is surprising is that Schoch, on so many occasions heretical as far as mainstream is concerned, is quite happy to seek out mainstream science to debunk the YDB event. The fact that he can jump camps willy nilly is illuminating of itself, quite apart from the fact that at least one of those mainstream sources uses a straw man argument – saying the theory involves a comet breaking up in the atmosphere, when it does not. This is entirely spurious as comets break up in space – on a regular basis. At least 100 times a year, every year, earth's orbit encounters the remains of debris caused by comets breaking up. There is nothing extraordinary about the YDB event – it is a commonplace occurrence as far as space debris is concerned. What is different is the hypothesis that earth encountered a fresh and dense stream of material at the YD boundary (a meteoric stream from a comet shedding large amounts of material as it went around the Sun). This included large amounts of dust and gravel and ice as well as chunks of shattered comet – a sort of multiple Tunguska event that affected lots of different locations around the world. Meteor streams with an origin in shattered comets are a commonplace throughout the year. They are a fact of life. There is no requirement to bring in the seemingly fanciful idea of planets on errant orbits, with little supporting evidence, or to postulate a currently unobserved and theoretical super CME event that was capable of instantly warming up the earth by ten degrees (as shown in the ice cores from Greenland – Alley, 'The Two Mile Time Machine'). These are of course problems central to the mainstream song sheet but to opt for one over the other, rather than think of a way to bring the two ideas in sync with each other and out of sync with mainstream, does appear a bit odd.
The Taurid meteor stream is recognised as diminished in intensity over time, dissipated into dust and debris spread out over a wide region of space. Modern meteor streams have a limited number of shooting stars in comparison to what they would have been in the past – even in the relatively recent past (Leonids in the Middle Ages). The important point to take onboard here is that the Taurid complex of meteor streams all represent past episodes of comet disintegration – the sort of thing that one can see in any astronomical report of a comet rounding the sun and disintegratiing (entirely or partially). The more difficult part to believe about the Clube and Napier hypothesis is that the original comet must have been very big – and Napier has recently proposed it was one of the Centaur objects that currently orbit in the further reaches of the solar system, beyond Saturn. It is conceivable such a massive comet like object could have been dislodged and altered its orbit so that it periodically entered the inner solar system. As such the earth would have been affected on a number of occasions – but those occasions need not involve dense streams of material. They would have been the unusual encounters – occurring in the wake of major disintegration episodes. In support of this is the cycle of cosmic catastrophe – and cycles can be related to astronomical orbits. One has to wonder though if some of the cycles postulated by scientists (including those of astronomers such as Clube and Napier) may have more to do with computer simulations than with reality. The fact that NASAs WISE mission found so many Near Earth Objects with earth crossing orbits implies that some pieces of such a giant comet are still orbiting out there in space. It is mostly the big lumps of material that have currently been spotted (and unknown objects regularly enter out atmosphere, one of them being a bus sized piece of comet that caused the Chelyabinksk explosion in 2013). Having said that it is extremely unlikely that earth will encounter a stream of space debris as dense as that which caused the Younger Dryas Boundary event – at any time in the near future. There is a chance possibility that a small comet might break up on its journey around the sun and create a new stream of material that will become a temporary danger, but that again is not an expectation but an outside but feasible chance. Instead, modern apocalyptics have provided us with a scare-mongering alternative – we are all going to boil in a new kind of hell, runaway global warming. It is interesting to note these people also have their own form of salvation – reducing the amount of co2 in the atmsophere. The fact there is no evidence of co2 doing anything extreme to the atmosphere, in any shape or form, is neither here nor there, the meme seems to drive a panic amongst some people, aided and abetted by those wedded to social media and their mobile phones and tablets. It is no accident that most sceptics are getting on a bit – or in the middle aged bracket. They are not so obsessed with modern media and the all consuming social discourse that goes on (sharing scary stories for example). However, we have to assume that the idea of apocalyptic disaster has an origin in catastrophes (long ago and unremembered) and the major religions of the world were designed to contain the fear of them recurring. As we live in a secular world in the West the non-religious secular people, those that are quite willing to randomly insult their religious neighbours and accuse them of being dinosaurs, are subject to the same human weakness – but in an unrestrained manner. The fear of the End of the World still beats in our breasts. This is why we have secular examples of unbridled apocalyptic ideas, socialism in all its forms and varieties, from Hitler to Stalin, from Pol Pot to Hugo Chavez. The necesssity is to destroy the traditional way of life and replace it with a Brave New World. There might be no toilet rolls in the supermarket but that is a small thing to bear in the preparation of a new way of controlling and managing society and people. This is no different from the forces of evil conspiring to bring about Armageddon and the intervention of godhead to create everlasting peace and tranquility. Mainstream religion has over the centuries developed ways and means to mellow apocalyptic ideas (which is why the Church did not predict anything out of the norm at the year 2000AD). It was a variety of secular scare stories that hit the press instead. Mind you, over the centuries various minor religious sects and offshoots have emerged to predict the End of the World as we know it – and when nothing happened they fell out of sight once again. It seems to be an inherent trait in all humans – and one that Velikovsky recognised as outlined in his book, 'Mankind in Amnesia'.