The Tarong high-grade thermal coal deposit, in the South Burnett area of Queensland 180km NW of the State Capital Brisbane, was discovered in 1968 by a geological team from Conzinc Rio Tinto of Australia (CRA).

In the remainder of this essay, I will refer to the company as Rio Tinto [1].

Rio Tinto did not waste time. By 1970, following a massive drilling campaign of mostly vertical open drill holes, they had proven 163 million tons of coal within an open pit mine profile with low stripping ratio [2]. Much, much more has been discovered since in the immediate area (see: South Burnett Coal Reserves 2015). They named their discovery after the Tarong pastoral station in which it was located.

The deposit is now owned by the Queensland State Government utility, Stanwell Corporation. Coal has been continuously extracted from Tarong since 1984 through the open cast Meandu Mine. The mine’s entire output of 2 million tpa is sent by conveyor belt to the adjacent, Government owned, Tarong Power Station, which burns it to produce 1.4 GW p.a. of electricity, fed directly into the Australian East Coast Grid [3]. Tarong does not just contribute electrons to the ECG. As with all turbine systems, it contributes critical grid stability (firming) at no extra cost.

With present known reserves and present consumption rate it will be at least 250 years before the Tarong Power station runs out of coal.

With the closures and projected closures of coal mines across Australia [4], the price of electricity from Tarong is set to become the lowest in Australia [5].

About the geology

The Tarong deposit is located within a north-trending, 60x10km, outlier of thick Late Triassic sediments. The outlier is now called the Tarong Basin [6]. The Basin is fault bounded within Early Paleozoic metasediments and assorted intrusives that make up the Australian east-coastal Tasman Orogenic Belt of the Great Dividing Range. Major steep dipping, north-trending faults divide the Belt into elongate tectonic slices called “blocks”. It is probable that the Tarong Basin is a pull-apart basin caused by a late Triassic strike-slip re-activation along one or more of these faults. The sediments that fill the basin were laid down in a swampy environment of slow meandering streams, shallow lakes and, most importantly in this context, a riot of tropical vegetation whose remains locally accumulated to fossilise as coal.

Rio Tinto (and I) appear on the scene

In 1964, Rio Tinto discovered the giant copper-gold deposit of Panguna in Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea. By 1968, they were advanced in the process of developing a major mine there. They hoped to find a similar deposit in Eastern Australia. Stream-sediment geochemistry – then a new exploration technique – had worked well for them in the islands but had not previously been employed at scale in Australia. It was a smart exploration play.

In the early months of 1968, as a junior geologist with Rio Tinto Exploration, I was transferred from the Northern Territory to work on base metal exploration in the Lower Paleozoic rocks of the Queensland coastal ranges. Geologist W H Johnstone (hereinafter, Bill) and I were tasked with collecting stream sediment samples from across an approximate 100km by 30km area between the regional inland centers of Towoomba and Kingaroy. Bill had been working in the area for some months prior to my arrival and was much more experienced than I. He mentored me in the techniques of stream sediment sampling.

The area is dominated by forested north-trending ranges, the intervening valleys partially cleared for grazing and for horticulture on the rich alluvial flats. Access was generally good: paved roads and farm tracks in the valleys, logging tracks through the intervening hills. Some of the most beautiful country in eastern Australia, baking under the hot summer sun.

We based ourselves at the Grand Hotel (today, the Grand Old Crow Hotel) in the small agricultural town of Crows Nest (pop. around 1000), central to the area. I was based there for over three months. One of the best exploration bases I ever had.

Rural Town Interlude

On weeknights there was little entertainment to be had in Crows Nest (no rural TV in 1968). We spent our evenings in a shared room at the Grand (bathroom at the end of the corridor, telephone in the public bar downstairs), sorting samples, writing up notes, planning next day’s activities. I did not own a camera back then so attempted to record my day’s experiences in a sketch book.

Long summer weeknights in the Grand Hotel, Crows Nest

But on Saturday the town was busy, even roisterous, as the farmers came into town for shopping, a meal at The Grand and to socialise after a hard-working week…

Saturday night in the Ladies Lounge at the Grand Hotel. 

Back to the Story

Early in our acquaintance, Bill told me that sometime previously when he was staying in a hotel at Nanango (50km north of Crows Nest), he was approached by a local man called Nobby [7], who owned and ran a contract water drilling service for farmers. Nobby had told Bill that around the headwaters of the Yarraman and Meandu Creeks (30km north of Crows Nest) many of his boreholes had encountered seams of coal. At that time, drilling for agricultural water was subsidised by the State Government, but drillers had to inform the Department of their results and provide a geological log for each hole.

Bill decided to go to the State capital Brisbane to check this information at the Department of Agriculture. He would not have done this without the permission of our immediate supervisor, Gladstone-based geologist Ian Witcher. It turned out that, over the general area described by Nobby, almost every water bore sunk over a period of many decades had recorded coal in their logs (even rural water drillers had little problem identifying that black stuff in their cuttings). By contouring the results, an area prospective for coal mining in the southern Tarong Basin was outlined. Although many other coal occurrences were known in Queensland at that time, the attraction of Tarong was its good existing infrastructure and proximity to the population centers of SE Queensland.

Me (smoking a pipe), Nobby [but see footnote 8] and Bill Johnstone in the front bar of a Nanango Hotel

Ian Witcher notified the Head Office of Rio Tinto Exploration in Melbourne. The company’s Exploration Manager – the legendary Australian mining Geologist Haddon F King – made the strategic decision to pivot exploration in the South Burnett area from base metal to coal. The first diamond drill hole to test the coal potential of the Tarong area was planned for the center of the best legacy water bore results.

For whatever reason (I was the most junior geologist on site), I was asked to geologically log this hole [9]. It was collared on the top of a low hill in the Meandu Creek area: a hill clothed in dry grass, scrub and stands of Eucalypt trees with some clearing for pasture on its lower slopes; now long swallowed up by the later mine.

Prior to drilling, although outcrop was poor, I attempted to make a geology map. A conglomerate was exposed on the hilltop – an outlier of the basal unit of a late, overstepping formation. On the lower slopes, some surface float of sandstone. Along the new drill access, track the dozer blade had exposed outcrop of a soft, rubbly, buff-coloured rock. I confidently identified this as mudstone. All units were flat lying.

The 200m vertical drill hole presented the easiest logging exercise of any I have ever attempted. Layer cake stratigraphy; well-bedded sedimentary lithologies dominated by sandstone, siltstone, mudstone and coal; sharp contacts between units; little post-depositional deformation. In first 100m, the drill hole encountered at least five coal seams ranging from 1 to 25 meters thick, the first seam only 20m below surface.

After the ancient metamorphic rocks of the Territory, I thought coal geology a piece of cake. But the “mudstone” I had observed at surface turned out to be heavily weathered coal. So much for my surface rock recognition skills.

My association with the Tarong project ceased at this point as I was transferred to another project in Papua New Guinea (see HERE). Someone else was brought in to replace me. Hopefully someone with more knowledge and experience of coal exploration than I.

The Moral of my Story

The discovery of Tarong is a good example of a general principal for the exploration geologist: when you are exploring an area, always seek out local knowledge. If someone, knowing a company geologist is in town, approaches you with an interesting rock specimen he has found, treat him (it’s always a him) with respect. Listen to his story and make sure you protect his interests if you or your company follows up on any new knowledge or insight he has brought you.

In 1962, Lang Hancock, a cattle station owner in the Hamersley Ranges in the remote northwest of Western Australia, brought the iron ore potential of the area to the attention to Rio Tinto. He was rewarded with a generous ongoing royalty from Rio’s subsequent, hugely profitable iron ore mines. Hancock died in 1992, but the royalty stream continued. Hancock’s only child Gina Reinhart, who had grown up on her father’s Mulga Downs station, leveraged her small inherited fortune into a much greater one to become today Australia’s richest person with over $46 billion (US$32 billion) in assets.

Lang Hancock and his daughter Gina, circa 1980. Photo by the Sydney Morning Herald.

It seems to me likely that the well-publicized story of Lang Hancock’s new-found wealth prompted a Nanango resident called Nobby to approach a Rio Tinto geologist in a pub in late ’67 or early ’68.

Bill Johnstone’s decision to follow up on his local knowledge was the key to the discovery of the Tarong coal deposit.

Epilogue

After I left Queensland, Bill’s career and mine took different paths and we never met again.  Much later, I was told by a mutual acquaintance that when Rio lodged a Mining Lease over the Tarong coal deposit, Nobby was given a similar royalty deal to that of Lang Hancock on any future coal sales by Rio Tinto in the South Burnett Region. I was also told that Bill subsequently married one of Nobby’s daughters. Although I have no independent verification for any of that, if it is true, good luck to them both. They deserve it.

The post The Power of Local Knowledge: the discovery of the Tarong coal deposit: appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

A glimpse of the Future

There is good evidence that the next advance of the earth’s glaciers will occur within the next thousand years or so. A catastrophe for humanity, but I am optimistic enough to suppose that as a species we will survive. Our few remaining short-lived descendants, as they shiver before fires at the mouths of their caves will tell each other stories of a legendary past when their long-lived ancestors enjoyed a life of abundance in a former golden age – the Happy Holocene.

Meanwhile, back in the Holocene…

Today our technology is so advanced that more than 60% of its 8 billion plus citizens are free to pursue fields of skill and knowledge that have nothing directly to do with food production. In developed, industrialised nations, that percentage must be nearer 90%.

One of these fields of knowledge is geology.

The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), founded in 1961, is the peak governing body of geology. Under its aegis are a number of Commissions covering such things as Structure and Tectonics, Geochemistry, Ethics, History of Geology, Geological Education and so on. The oldest and probably the most important of these Commissions is the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) which is tasked with responsibility for the subdivision of geological time going back 4.6 billion years (4.6 Ga).

To Fully Understand this Post, you will Need to Know How Geologists Divide Time

Time divisions and subdivisions are based on the stratigraphic record – the sequential accumulation of sediments and the fossil assemblages (if any) within them. Boundaries between subdivisions are based on significant, widespread and geologically rapid, transitions in the overall depositional environment. Localities where these key transitions are well exposed are referenced as type-localities and dated by isotopic methods. Each distinctive rock/fossil assemblage (divisions and subdivisions) are given a name, thus reifying them as a “thing”. Many of the names go back more than 200 years and reflect the happenstance of early geological research (see my previous post, The Invention of the Paleozoic). On a stratigraphic chart, time divisions are organised by nested hierarchies of ever smaller intervals of time. Eons (sometimes called Eonothems) are the longest: there are four of these in the 4.6 Ga geological record. Together, these four Eons are subdivided into fifteen Eras (Erathems), and these fifteen Eras together contain twenty-six Periods (Systems). The Periods contain 38 Epochs (Series), and the Epochs themselves contain over a 100 Stages (Ages).

A Stage has the shortest time interval and the smallest geographical extent of the time division.

The boundaries of Eons and Eras mark changes of global extent in tectonic processes, atmospheric composition and biospheric evolution and reflect the time evolution of these forces. However, as will become apparent, the boundaries of Periods, Epochs and Stages are much more dependent on locally available evidence, subjective judgment of experts, and the historical development of classification schemes.

If we consider the stratigraphic chart as a Library of Time, then the Eons are books, the Eras chapters, the Periods paragraphs, the Epochs sentences, and the Stages words. The last words of the last paragraph of the last chapter of the last book to be added to the library are: “to be continued…”

To carry out their task, the ICS created a number of Sub Commissions, each responsible for one of the 26 Periods in the stratigraphic record. The most recent Period, the one we live in today, is known as the Quaternary and began 2.58 million years (2.58 Ma) ago with the start of the Pleistocene Ice Age.

Geological subdivisions of the recent past, according to the ICS. Redrawn from their official chart. 

The Cenozoic

A little over sixty-six million years ago (66 Ma), a 10 km wide rogue asteroid, travelling at 40,000 kph collided with what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. This global catastrophe caused the near instantaneous extinction of 75% of all species of life on earth, including the non-avian dinosaurs. The event formed a centimeters-thick global sedimentary marker for the end of the Mesozoic Era and the beginning of the Cenozoic Era.

Graph A: Cenozoic temperatures over the past 65 Ma. The Quaternary Period and the Pleistocene Epoch begin at 2.6 Ma on the extreme right of the graph (labelled as Pleistocene Ice Age).

For the first 20 Ma of the Cenozoic, global temperatures were 10-15°C higher than today (and atmospheric CO2 levels 2-5 times higher), supporting a burst of adaptive evolutionary radiation of all Orders, Families and Species to fill the recently-vacated ecological niches of life. The Mammalian Order of Primates to which we belong evolved during this time.

Beginning around 45 Ma, the Hothouse temperatures which had prevailed during the early Cenozoic commenced a long slow fall. By 35 Ma, permanent ice sheets had become established over the Antarctic Continent. By 2.6 Ma, permanent ice sheets had also formed over Arctic regions. Permanent ice at both poles is the definition of an Ice Age. A new Period and a new Epoch had begun.

The Quaternary Period

The lower boundary (i.e. the beginning) of the Quaternary Period and the Pleistocene Epoch is defined by the start of the Pleistocene Ice Age when temperatures plummeted, and kilometer-thick ice became generally established over land and sea at high- to mid-latitude areas around both poles. These extreme cold conditions are known as Glacial and they affected the nature of sediments, and the fossils within them, that were deposited all over the world.

The maximum extent of Ice sheets during the last glacial episode around 20,000 years ago. Image source, NASA.

The end of the Pleistocene Epoch should therefore be when glacial conditions cease for a significant period of geological time (i.e. at least a million years). That has not happened yet. Considering the duration of previous Ice Ages, each of which lasted many tens of millions of years (such as the Sturtian Ice Age in the Proterozoic Eon around 700 Ma, the “Snowball Earth” Ice Age at the end of the Ordovician Era around 440 Ma, or the long-lived Late Paleozoic Ice Age centered around 300 Ma), the Pleistocene Ice Age – currently only 2.6 Ma old – has millions of years yet to run. (see my post, Climate Change Explained in Three Graphs). Nor are the general icy conditions of the Pleistocene ameliorating with the passage of time. The opposite is true. Glacial advances in the latter part of the Pleistocene, starting around a million years ago, have been longer, colder and more extensive than those of the earlier part of the Epoch. The change to longer cycles and colder glacial temperatures is referred to as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition.

The evidence thus indicates that the Pleistocene Ice Age is becoming ever colder with time and, as Ice Ages go, has only just begun.

The Holocene

We live in the Holocene – an interval of ice retreat, relatively warm temperatures and sea level rise. It began 11,700 (0.0117 Ma) years ago.

Pleistocene geological records show the presence of at least 45 similar temporary retreats of ice. These are called Interglacials and make up around 20% of Pleistocene time. The exact number of Interglacials depends on how their start and end dates are defined. The warm conditions of the Holocene (“warm” only with respect to the preceding glacial) are not significantly different from any of the previous interglacial episodes within the Pleistocene.

Graph B: Temperatures during the last 0.45 Ma of the Pleistocene as measured in Antarctic ice cores. Five Interglacial events are recorded, the last two labelled Eemian and Holocene. Data from www.climatedata.info    

During the last interglacial (the Eemian), elephant and hippopotami gamboled on the mud flats of the River Thames. With the return of glacial conditions these species migrated south but, 120,000 years later with the arrival of the Holocene, another species of large out-of-Africa mammal gambols, once again, on the banks the Thames.  

Graph B, above, shows changes in air temperature (blue) and CO2 concentration (red) over Antarctica, as measured in the VOSTOK and EPICA deep ice cores. Broadly similar graphs can be produced for other regions of the globe, but the Antarctic data provides the best resolution.  The graph covers the last 20% of the Pleistocene. Five upward spikes in temperature are apparent: these are Interglacial episodes of ice retreat – the last two labeled on the graph as “Eemian” and “Holocene“. During the 10,000 year-long Eemian, West Antarctica and the Ross Sea were ice fee (Nature Geoscience 2026, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-026-1988-1). The Emperor Penguins survived. There were no tipping points.

There is another important takeaway from this graph: there is good correlation between temperature and CO2, but the peaks and troughs of CO2 lag the peaks and troughs of temperature by 500-1000 years. This tells us that, whereas temperature might be acting as a control on atmospheric CO2 levels, CO2 cannot be controlling temperature (since an effect cannot precede its cause).  

Graph C: Greenland ice core data from Vinther et al 2009: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08355. and Macassar Strait benthic sediment data from Rosenthal et al 2013  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617. Compilation of the two data sets onto one graph with common scales is by Andy May.   

Graph C shows air and sea temperatures over the past 10,000 years – the last 85% of the Holocene. The temperature data come from oxygen isotope ratios measured in ice cores from Greenland (orange line) and sea-floor sediment (benthic) cores from the Western Pacific (black line). The good correlation of temperature variation with time between regions on opposite sides of the globe, based 0n two completely different deposit types, is compelling.  

Other graphs of Holocene temperatures using different proxy methods and from different locations around the globe have been published. You can view a comparison of these graphs, in Nature Science  Data, 2020 HERE. Although differing in detail, they all show a similar pattern to graph C.

From the graph we can see a steep initial rise in Holocene temperatures to a plateau around 10,000-5000 years ago. This time interval is known as the Holocene Climate Optimum.  Optimum, that is, with respect to life on earth. During the HCO, the only permanent ice to survive in the world were those of Antarctica, Greenland and the high plateaus and valleys of the great mountain ranges.

The HCO was followed by a slow and gradual decline in global temperatures and the reappearance and steady advance of mountain glaciers, reaching their maximum extent during the informally named Little Ice Age. The LIA began around 800 years ago and lasted until the middle of the 19th century. Its coldest temperatures (nadir) occurred during the 17th Century – a century of global failed harvests, plagues, invasions, revolutions, civil war, religious pogroms and, in Europe and North America, the judicial murder of thousands of harmless old women accused of witchcraft. 

See “Global crisis: Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century” by Geoffrey Parker, 2013, Yale University Press: ISBN 978-0-300-15323-1;

also “The Crisis of the 17th Century” by Oxford historian Hugh Trevor Roper, 1967, Liberty Fund, ISBN 978-1-61487-084-4).

During the “Little Ice Age” the world had a modest foretaste of what a return to full glacial conditions might mean for our civilisation. That inevitable return will not be to a new Ice Age, just the return, after a brief period of relief, to the normal conditions of the Pleistocene Ice within which we are already living.

Is the Holocene Unique among Pleistocene Interglacials?

Comparing graphs B and C, all the interglacials of the Pleistocene for which we have sufficient resolution show a similar strongly skewed pattern – a steep initial rise to a plateau, followed by a long slow fall to Glacial or Neoglacial conditions. The relentless decline in global temperature following the Holocene Climate Optimum follows this pattern and provides an ominous pointer to the next episode of Pleistocene glaciation.

Beginning around 100-150 years ago (at the extreme right of the ice-core data of graph C), there is a steep upward spike in global temperature of 1-1.5° C.  This is the Modern Warm Period (MWP) – the subject of much current existential angst from scientists who should know better (see my previous post HERE). But modern global temperatures are only “warm” when compared to the anomalously low temperatures of the preceding Neoglacial. Compared to temperatures that were normal for the majority of the Holocene, today’s temperatures are relatively cool. Compared to temperatures that were normal for the first 60 million years of the Cenozoic – when life on earth boomed – they are catastrophically cold.

From graph C we can also see that increases and decreases in global temperature of up to 3° C, over relatively short time periods, have occurred every 500-1000 years or so throughout Holocene time.

There is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Holocene other than that it corresponds with and helped facilitate the rise of human civilisation.

There is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Modern Warm Period other than that the academic stratigraphers of the ICS Sub-Committee for the Quaternary happen to live within it.

But the ICS Interprets Pleistocene Data Differently…

According to the ICS, and with the approval of the IUGS, the Pleistocene Epoch (or Pleistocene Ice Age) finished, terminated and collapsed forever 11,700 years ago (0.0117 Ma), to be replaced by the Holocene Epoch. These august bodies must therefore consider that the Holocene interglacial is fundamentally different from the numerous interglacials that preceded it.

To be logically consistent, if the Holocene is a separate Epoch within the Quaternary, then all previous Interglacials and Glacials of the Quaternary must be judged as Epochs also. With 90 or more Epochs, the Quaternary would then contain more than three times as many Epochs as all other 26 Periods of the stratigraphic record combined. An absurd proposition. And the Quaternary is not finished yet.

In this dilemma, the ICS appears to be trapped in an epistemological maze with no clear roadmap to follow.

Because the sediments are so recent, stratigraphers of the Quaternary have a plethora of available evidence enabling them to create ever finer subdivisions of geologic time. But that is no excuse to elevate these micro-divisions to the status of “Epochs”. Otherwise, we would have to conclude that an Epoch of the Quaternary is equivalent to a mere sedimentary horizon of the Paleozoic. If there is to be logic and meaning to standard terms for the division of geologic time, consistency of definition is surely vital.

But could the ICS be correct in concluding that the Pleistocene Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago with the beginning of the Holocene? It will be another million years before we can be 100% certain of the answer to that question. But we don’t need to wait that long. Based on the evidence presented, I am more than 90% certain that the glaciers of the Pleistocene will return. Whether that be in 500, 1000 or 2000 years’ time, we just don’t know.

The members of the ICS apparently consider that, starting from the time of the cultural Neolithic Revolution (made possible by the benign climate of the early Holocene), humans have caused sufficiently large changes to global sedimentary processes and fossil assemblages to justify raising the status of the Holocene from merely the most recent of the many Pleistocene interglacials, to a unique stratigraphic Epoch in its own right.

Whatever the reasoning of the ICS, this is a controversial and debatable proposition. As the late, great, Carl Sagan wrote in 1979: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. No such evidence has been presented.

But it Gets Worse…

Astonishingly, in 2019, the ICS made another proposal to their governing body, the IUGS. They advocated the creation of a brand-new Epoch to succeed the Holocene Epoch. This Epoch was to be called the “Anthropocene”, a neologism cobbled together from two Greek words meaning roughly: “The New Age of Man”. It was proposed that the Anthropocene started around 1950AD.

This is equivalent to the fond hopes of 1946 that the establishment of the United Nations would lead to a new epoch of Global Peace and Stability (Pax Americana?) that would last for 1,000 years.

To their credit, in 2019, the IUGS, in a near-unanimous vote, rejected the Anthropocene proposal of the ICS.

I strongly suspect that the stratigraphic proposals of the ICS concerning the Holocene and Anthropocene were influenced by the current fashionable scientific meme that the effects of modern human activities, including CO2 emissions, are strong enough to overwhelm all other terrestrial and extraterrestrial forces that have controlled temperature, sediment deposition and life around the globe for billions of years.

Back to the Future…

Our remote descendants, as they shiver in their caves, may well think otherwise.

The post The Happy Holocene appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

Good News! 

The malign influence of the Catastrophic, Anthropogenic Global Warming meme (CAGW) (2) that more than 40 years ago escaped to infect the world – like a virus from a Wuhan Lab – is finally beginning to collapse.

The Evidence is Clear.

Despite $14 trillion (an estimated figure by Bjorn Lomberg) spent by world governments in CO2 abatement schemes over the past 20 years, atmospheric levels of CO2 have continued to rise.

Today fossil fuels provide more than 80% of our energy needs, a proportion that has barely changed from 20 years ago. Most of the balance, then as now, comes from nuclear and hydro (3).  Although the absolute amount of energy from wind and solar has increased over that period, so have all other sources of energy. A rising tide of demand has lifted all boats: there has been No Energy Transition.

A rising tide lifts all boats. (Click for larger, sharper image)

With the best sites already taken, new wind and solar “farms” are having to be built in widely-scattered, remote, onshore or offshore locations. This requires thousands of kilometers of new transmission lines that cost much more than the installations themselves. Governments attempt to overcome this problem with huge subsidies, but their capacity to do this is limited. The resulting distribution bottlenecks will make the renewable installations currently being built stranded assets (see: Barclays Transition Realism White Paper February 2026 for a detailed argument on this case).

Despite, or perhaps because of, increasing atmospheric CO2 levels and a barely noticeable rise in global average temperature over the past 150 years, all measures of human wellbeing – wealth, health, nutrition, clean water, education – show that humanity is thriving. But the killer metric – the one that encapsulates all others, is longevity. According to Our World in Data, in 1900 average global life expectancy at birth was 32 years; in 1950 it was 45 years; in 2021 it was 70 years while today (2025) it is 73 years. Huge relative inequities still remain of course (700 million have no access to electricity), but the poor of yesterday would consider themselves rich if they had even half the comforts, amenities and opportunities available to the poor of today.

In Paris, in 2015, the 21st annual United Nations Conference on Climate Change (known as the Conference of Parties, or COP 21), concluded with an agreement that participating countries should take steps to move the world to Net Zero human carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

On its own insistence, China (who in 2025 built one new coal-fired power station per week and currently emit almost as much CO2 as the rest of the world combined) was excluded from the Agreement on the grounds that it was a “Developing Nation”. They got to move their net zero aspirations forward to 2070.  Genuine Third World Developing Nations were given a similar free pass.

Western countries were the first to ratify the 2015 Paris Agreement and became the most enthusiastic adopters of net zero programs. All have seen their economies decline as their electricity prices soar and their industries close or move offshore. A yawning gap has now developed between East Asian countries, increasingly the manufacturers of the world’s consumer and industrial goods, and a rapidly de-industrialising West.

Even as most countries continue to protest that they are still true believers (just give us more time and more money), western Governments are slowly waking up to the reality that, although energy from the sun and wind is free and renewable, the machines, devices and wires required to capture, store and distribute it most definitely are not. And that cost is ruinous.

These machines and devices are largely bought from China who can make them more cheaply than anyone else because their industries use cheap fossil fuel power (and, in the case of solar panel manufacture, slave labour). There are no prizes for guessing where a large proportion of that $14 trillion has gone!

As a result, western countries are finally scaling back on ambitions to power their economies solely with wind and solar. Instead, they are re-opening or refurbishing coal-fired power stations, building new ones and scrambling to sign up new coal, oil and gas supplies.

In 2020 - the 5th Anniversary of Paris - COP25 was held in the city of Glasgow, Scotland. The meeting was described by (then) Prince Charles, in the typical hyperbolic language of true believers, as “the last chance saloon” for climate action. Inspired by the occasion, Scott Morisson, Prime Minister of Australia and a former fierce champion of fossil fuels, in a Damascene conversion, signed his country up to the Paris Net Zero by 2050 Target. One of the last to sign up to Paris, Australia might become one of the last to leave, switching the lights off as they go.

With hindsight, COP25 in Glasgow now increasingly appears to have been the last chance saloon for climate alarmist madness.

Following the Glasgow meeting, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and their flagship offshoot the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was set up. This was a cartel of over 140 banks and financial institutions that colluded to deny funding for fossil fuel exploration and development, the money to be transferred to finance renewable energy schemes. The alliance reportedly controlled $130 trillion in assets.

Mendicant Governments and NGOs lined up for the chance to get their fingers sticky in that honey pot.

But the group was formally disbanded on October 3rd 2025, following its abandonment by virtually all major US, European and Japanese banks (4).

Mark Carney, the wokest banker of them all (formerly Governor of the Bank of England, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action, instigator and promoter of the NZBA - now Prime Minister of Canada) is now walking back the draconian CO2 abatement schemes of his predecessor Justin Trudeau (5).

Meanwhile global coal consumption and atmospheric CO2 levels reached record highs in 2025 (6).

The last (November 2025) UN climate conference (COP 30 in Brazil, the 10th anniversary of the Paris) ended in disagreement, recrimination and futility.

Prominent CAGW supporters Bill Gates (the world’s first centi-billionaire and public philanthropist), and James Hansen, (former Director of the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies, widely acknowledged as the father of CAGW), have recanted.

In October 2025 (just before COP 30 in Brazil), Bill Gates issued a statement saying:

Climate Change does not pose an existential threat to civilisation. 

Matching actions to words, Gates severely cut back the funding and activities of his climate advocacy and policy group Breakthrough Energy, stating that his money would be better spent on combating disease and poverty.

In 2024, James Hansen, now a late but enthusiastic convert to nuclear power, wrote:

Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.

It is hard to escape the fact that the Paris Agreement for Net Zero by 2050 is now a sick joke more honored in the breach than the observance by those countries foolish enough to ratify it.

Dead, buried and soon to be forgotten.

Meanwhile, back in the World of Science

An October 2025 paper (7) published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society shows that species level extinctions due to climate change “have not significantly increased over the last approximately 200 years” thus hopefully putting an end to the absurd claim by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) that CAGW is causing or will cause the Sixth Mass Extinction event in the history of life on earth.

Numerous papers have been published (8) showing that the majority of small Pacific and Indian ocean island nations continue to grow in area despite modest sea level rises. And that includes these poster children for climate catastrophists – the tiny island nations of The Maldives, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

Throughout the world, ticking Climate “Doomsday clocks” (and they come in many forms) are regularly reset to avoid them becoming a permanent record of failed prediction.

Satellite reflectance imagery by NASA conclusively demonstrates that, since this data became available in 1980, the world has become up to 20% greener (i.e.- an increase in the Leaf Area Index or LAI) largely as a result of increasing atmospheric CO2 fertilisation. Studies of leaf stomata confirm this conclusion. For largely the same reason the yields from all major global food crops have been steadily increasing since the 1960s (9), (10).

The world in 2024, from satellite data. All green coloured areas have shown an increase in plant growth over the previous 45 years whilst desert areas (white) have decreased in area. Source of data: NASA

Fears of widespread famine due to overpopulation – the great Malthusian scare of the 1970s and 1980s – are now a thing of the past.

The effects of atmospheric CO2 fertilisation

Over the last 100 years, deaths from weather-related natural disasters (adjusted for global population increase) have declined by over 95% ! (11).

Sceptical scientists are now increasingly getting their papers published, and having alarmist papers retracted. Yea and verily, even by those grim gatekeepers of CAGW orthodoxy – the editors of the Journals Science and Nature (see HERE).

The Museum of Once-Fashionable Science. 

But it is Too Soon to Celebrate

In 2024 and 2025, the UN Secretary General António Guterres, variously declared that it is:

Climate crunch time

that:

The oceans are boiling

and:

Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits.

however, he added:

There is an exit off the highway to climate hell.

The “exit” he was referring to is the 2015 Paris Agreement.

But in 2019, in a performative stunt for Time Magazine, António Guterres conclusively demonstrated that the oceans are not “boiling”. In fact, he looks rather cold. 

In July 2025, the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICC) - sixteen unelected and unaccountable lawyers sitting in The Hague – declared a “human right” to avoiding the “indisputable, urgent and existential threat” of Climate Change. President of the court Yugi Iwasawa added that CC was an “an existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet” (AP News, July 23, 2025).

These legal opinions enable and encourage years of future litigation and lawfare.

Sixteen unelected lawyers sitting in The Hague. Although nominated by mostly third world countries, their lawyerly dress and pretensions are pure European

Little better can be expected from lawyers – self-righteous orthodoxy is a feature of the legal profession- and few politicians ever see a passing bandwagon parade that they don’t want to join. No doubt the majority members of both groups are sincere and well-meaning persons who see themselves as noble Saviors of the Planet. But they have neither the wit nor the wisdom to realise that the band wagon’s wheels are wobbly and about to fall off. And the cheering crowds are thinning as professional activists move on to more fashionable causes: where once they shouted “Climate Action Now”, today they shout “Free Palestine”.

But what of the climate scientists who designed, built and drive the Climate Change bandwagon? The majority still, by and large, pay service (or, at least, lip-service) to the climate catastrophe meme. It is worth remembering that these scientists are dependent for their funding – their very careers – on politicians. The scientists scare public and Governments with their doomsday models: the politicians, suitably scared, then support the scientists with oceans of money. It is a vicious, self-reinforcing ouroboros loop (12), armored against evidence and reason (see my previous posts, The Mathew Effect and There is no Wisdom in Crowds).

As Upton Sinclair pointed out in 1934:

It difficult to get someone to understand something when his career depends upon his not understanding it.

Fads and fashions (cultural memes) in the wider, non-scientific community are relatively ephemeral phenomena that appear and disappear suddenly and mysteriously. But scientific fads and fashions (usually dignified by the name of paradigms) that have the weight and inertia of established Institutions behind them can take decades to die out as their adherents, one by one, retire or die.

Because they have invested so little time in acquiring them, the enthusiasms and opinions of the young can change easily (13), but for the heavily invested old, the process can take much longer. The years of hard study and training that it takes to master a field of science tends to impose rigidity of thought and resistance to new ideas. To this human failing a new and additional rigidity is now being imposed on institutional science by AI Large Language Models, all of which are “trained” on orthodoxy and consensus as part of their basic architecture (14).

It is instructive at this point to pause and consider…

A brief History of Earlier False Science Scares 

Eugenics theory was born out of late Victorian ideas of Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism. George Orwell, writing in 1945, may well have had eugenics in mind when he wrote:

 Some ideas are so absurd only an intellectual could believe them.

Eugenics was first defined and named in 1883 by Francis Galton, a first cousin of Charles Darwin. Committed Eugenicists – almost all successful, educated, middle-class white men – believed that that people like themselves had achieved their privileged status as a result of their superior genes, while the poor were poor largely because they had inferior ones and not, as social reformers believed, because of the inequities of society. Since genes are hereditable, eugenicists held that the human gene pool would be improved by selective sterilisation of the industrial working-class poor through various coercive means, while at the same time offering money to rich white men to persuade them to have more children.

Throughout the first half of the 20^th Century, these ideas became widely supported and were regarded by many as settled science.  Believing they were Following the Science, throughout the world Governments moved to implement eugenics programs. In the US, from the 1900s through to the 1940s, thousands of “feeble minded” or “sexually promiscuous” women (mostly black) were compulsorily sterilised. The 1927 US Supreme Court test case of Bell v Buck produced an infamous 8:1 ruling that these practices were entirely constitutional.  In Sweden during the same period, at least 12,000 women were similarly mutilated under various coercive schemes. In the UK, in 1931, the British Eugenics Society managed to get a Bill for the “Sterilsation of Mental Defectives” put up in the House of Commons. Fortunately the Bill was defeated, mainly through the votes of socialist and Catholic MPs. But the most enthusiastic adopter of eugenic theory was the National Socialist Government of Germany between 1933 and 1945. The Nazis sterilised over 400,000 women and added the innovation of mass genocidal murder to their eugenics toolbox. They did this to eliminate the genes of those whom they considered unfit, undesirable and racially “impure” from European society. It took the belated realisation in 1945 of the full horrors of Nazi eugenics programs to finally discredit the theory. A better scientific understanding of how heredity actually works then put the final nail in its coffin.

You can read more about the rise and fall of eugenics in an earlier post of mine called The Mathew Effect.

Around the same time as eugenics theory was being discredited, another fashionable science meme arose to replace it. In the late 1940s, medical and nutritional scientists declared that the over consumption of dietary fat (lipids) was the primary cause of Coronary Heart Disease (CHD). In 1976, the US Committee on Nutrition declared that an astonishing 98.9% of American medical scientists supported the dietary fat-CHD connection.

Following years of relentless exhortation from scientists, academicians, bureaucrats, media and profit-seeking manufacturers, whole populations across the Western World shifted away from eating meat, dairy and eggs to bread, rice, pasta, potatoes and sugar – a sure recipe for diabetes and obesity.

It took the publication around the turn of the Millennium of numerous massive, heroic and long-continued epidemiological surveys to conclusively demonstrate that there was no connection between fat consumption and heart disease.

Science is ultimately self-correcting but, as with the preceding eugenics scare, it took 50 years and enormous human suffering for that to happen.

You can read more about the Great Fat Scare of the late 20th Century, along with references and documentation, in an earlier post of mine called Fear of Fat.

And what, in its turn, has replaced the eugenics madness of the first half of the 20th century and the fat scare of the second half of the 20th Century to terrify the inhabitants of the 21st? CLIMATE CHANGE.

As the philosopher George Santayana gloomily observed in 1906:

Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it.

Conclusion – There is Hope, but There is Also a Warning

For sceptics, although many battles were won in 2025 and the possibility of an end to the struggle is in sight (Say not the struggle naught availeth), it is too soon to celebrate. The war on the CAGW (Climate Change) doomsday cult is far from won. As 2025 rolls over to 2026, die-hard cultists, both institutional scientists and the useful idiots who support them, have merely retired to lick their wounds, plan new strategies and to double down on their alarmist predictions. They are not thinking:

We misinterpreted the evidence. We cherry-picked the data. We got it wrong. We apologise.

They are thinking: 

We were not extreme enough.

So, in these dog days of 2026, in a re-purposed garage near you, the useful idiots are working hard…

Swimming in an ocean of hydrocarbon products, the useful idiots are working hard. 

******

(Updated and reformatted March, 2026)

Footnotes and References

(1)  The title of this post is a line from an 1855 poem by Arthur Hugh Clough. “Say not the struggle naught availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain:  The enemy faints not nor faileth,  As things have been they yet remain…. But Westward, look, the land is bright”. Winston Churchill used the quote in a speech to the House of Commons during the dark days of 1941.

(2) Around 2010, the CAGW global warming meme was in trouble. Global average temperatures had been in slight decline for over ten years, the 2009 UN Climate Conference (COP 15 in Copenhagen) was an acknowledged failure with no agreement among its 60,000+ delegates, the Northern Hemisphere winter of 2009-10 was one of the coldest and snowiest in decades and thousands of hacked (or leaked?) emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia had been made public in 2009 demonstrating years of malpractice and scientific finagling by prominent CAGW researchers - a scientific scandal that became known as Climategate.

To meet the crisis, and considering that those who control the language control the narrative, the promoters of the meme changed its name from Global Warming to Climate Change. Although climate has always changed and no doubt always will, the new name had a nice alliterative feel to it and was rapidly adopted by doomsday cultists.  It had the advantage of allowing climate scientists to attribute any future extreme weather event, be it heat or cold, flood or drought, calm or storm, abundance or scarcity, to rising CO2 levels.  The theory thus became immune to falsification. For every bad event that happened, climate alarmists were now able to argue “it was rising atmospheric CO2 levels that caused it”. But a theory that can explain everything, predicts nothing.

(3) Source: Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution

(4) Source: New York Times.  https://nytimes.com/2026/01/17/climate/how-wall-street-turned-its-back-on-climate-change.html

(5) In the northern Autumn of 2025, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney indicated he would approve completion of the 2000 km Keystone XL Pipeline, previously cancelled by his predecessor Justin Trudeau, and by President Joe Biden of the US. The pipeline is designed to take crude from the Alberta oil fields of Canada to refineries in the western and mid-western United Sates.

(6) Source: International Energy Agency. https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-25/executive-summary

(7) P.S.Kench et al (12 authors) 2023: Nature Communications. Reef islands have continually adjusted to environmental change over the past two millennia. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36171-2 and…

(8) K. E. Saban & J. J. Weins. Proceedings of the Royal Society Oct 2025. Unpacking the extinction crisis: rates patterns and causes of recent extinctions in plants and animals. Proc Biol Sci (2025)292(2057):  https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.1717

P.S. Kench et al (3 authors) 2018: Nature Communications. Patterns of island change and persistence offer alternate adaptation pathways for atoll nations. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-02954-1

(9) Sources: Our World in Data- https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/key-crop-yields

and…https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth-study-finds/

(10) Another reason for ever increasing yields of major food crops is the use of nitrate fertiliser (urea) – a product made by the Haber-Bosch process from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen. Nitrogen is the major component of the atmosphere – abundant, ubiquitous and free. Currently, the only economic source of hydrogen is natural gas. The cost urea is the cost of natural gas.

The effect of nitrogen fertiliser on a crop of wheat. Photo source: Deli Chen, University of Melbourne

(11) Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/decadal-deaths-disasters-type.png

(12) Ouroboros : An ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. An endless loop. A vicious circle.

If you Google the word, you will be informed that it is a symbol representing: ”the infinite loop of time”. Whatever that means. In my opinion: meaningless baloney. The real symbolism is perfectly clear.

(13) Ephemeral cultural memes. As a boy, I remember the schoolyard fashion for Yo-Yos (spinning tops on the end of a looped string). It came from nowhere and swept the world but lasted all of two years.  Today, for the young, it is six-seven. And no, I don’t know what that means either. Wikipedia doesn’t know what it means. I think that’s rather the point. When old guys like me (and you too, dear reader, if you’re over 16) get to hear of a pop-meme, it’s probably already yesterday’s thing.

(14) Joe Nalvan Jan 5, 2026: AI Models and Their “Knowledge” of Climate Change.  https://judithcurry.com

The post Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

There is No Wisdom in Crowds

The present system of science publishing is broken. Abuse and fraud are common and increasing. Ways of overcoming this are suggested.

*************

In 2023, the New Scientist Magazine reported that chemist Jose Manual Lorenzo, an Associate Professor at a regional Spanish university, had, along with multiple co-authors, published 176 scientific papers in 2022 – a rate of one paper every two days. Assuming that Lorenzo had other things to do with his time apart from research and authorship (eating, sleeping, supervising, lecturing, administration, following the football etc..) it would be a miracle if he had had time to read these papers, let alone make any meaningful input to their content.

Professor Lorenzo is one of a new breed of what are called hyper-profile authors.

How has science publishing come to this?

Over more than 500 years, scientific discoveries that revolutionised our knowledge of the world have been announced in books or Scientific Journals by single, or at the most, by two authors. To name but a few (my personal choice): the theory of evolution of species through natural selection by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1856 [1], the grand unification of electricity and magnetism (electromagnetism) by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865 [2], the Special and General Theories of Relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905 [3] and 1916, the discovery by Edwin Hubble in1929[4] that billions of galaxies exist beyond our Milky Way, the theory of Alfred Wegener in 1912, that whole continents can move across the face of the earth [5], and the resolution of the helical molecular structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953 [6].

But since the end of WW2, single or even double author papers have become rare. Few today have less than 5. A paper (on fruit flies) was published in 2015 in the Journal Genes, Genomes, Genetics with 1014 authors – included in this paper as “authors” were the many hundreds of conscripted undergraduate students who had helped collect the field data [7]. But in the same year, the entomologists were beaten into the Guinness Book of Records by the particle physicists who published, in the journal Physics Review, a paper with 5,152 authors [8].  The paper is 33 pages long, the first 24 of which are taken up by the alphabetic author list. This is taking consensus and inclusion to absurd lengths. In the case of the physicists, the totality of staff in large cooperating government research groups, from several countries, from lowest technician to Heads of Departments, were signed up. (Did no one have a dissenting voice?).

In all these cases each “author” presumably got to add the publication and any citation credits to his or her personal CV.

It is as if in 1859 Charles Darwin, publishing his revolutionary book On the Origin of Species, had included as co-authors T. H. Huxley, C. Lyell, J. D. Hooker, A. R. Wallace, A. Gray, Captain R. Fitzroy and the entire crew of HMS Beagle, including the ship’s cat!

There is no wisdom in crowds

Traditionally, the role of minor or peripheral contributors to a scientific paper were dealt with by including them in a brief “Acknowledgements” section in the main text. But listing such contributors as authors destroys the accepted meaning of that word. A new term - hyper-authorship - has been coined to cover this recent publishing phenomenon, while authors with huge publication lists (such as Professor Lorenzo at the head of this post) are called hyper-profile authors. From this point on, I will refer to such people as hyper-profile authors or bracket them in quotation marks as “authors”.

A 2025 publication in the Journal of Informetrics [9] shows that the academic disciplines most guilty of hyper-authorship are (in order) Clinical Medicine, Engineering, Biology and the Political & Social Sciences. The fields most immune to the phenomenon (relatively) are Mathematics, Chemistry, Psychology and Economics.

For academics, their institutions and the journals they publish in, status and reputation come from:

1. The total number of papers or books you “author” (the famous “publish or perish” dictum),

2. The prestige of the Journals in which you publish. Today there are over 40,000 technical journals: Nature and Science are the big dogs at the top of the tree who routinely reject more than 9 out of 10 of scientific papers submitted to them (but see footnote 12). At the bottom of the pecking order are journals that will publish anything, so long as you pay their fee. These latter are known as predatory journals [10], they are also sometimes referred to as paper mills.

3. The number of references that your paper garners. Such published references are called citations. It does not matter whether the citations praise or damn your work, a citation is a citation: your paper is being read.

4. The position of your university in annual global ranking tables. There are around 30,000 self-described “universities” in the world (internet search) but ranking tables, such as the annual TES (Times Educational Supplement) Rankings consider less than one tenth of these as worthy of inclusion in their surveys. Oxford, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Princeton, Cambridge and Harvard are the top five in this table for 2025, but just being included in the top 200 is a proud boast. These tables are compiled on the basis of the number of publications and citations garnered by the research employees of each university. A high ranking is vitally important to universities as it determines the number of students they attract, the fees they can charge and the amount of grant money and endowments they are able to hoover up.

Points 2, 3 and 4 were designed to provide controls on abuses of point 1, ensuring that mere quantity does not overwhelm quality.

But the incentives on all parties to rig the system in their favour are high, and the ways of gaming the system are many…

Let me count the ways…

1. Join an informal “publishing network” made up of researchers with similar interests across several institutions and continents – the more the better. Wide discussions and sharing of ideas are undoubtedly a good thing [11], but one of these “similar interests” will certainly be: “include me as a co-author in your papers and I will you include as one in mine”. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

2. If your publishing network is large, then it is likely that editors, struggling to find willing reviewers of your paper with appropriate knowledge (peer reviewing is a time consuming, voluntary service), will seek them from among your network – people who might be your friends, colleagues or have previously co-authored with you. This is not peer review, it’s pal-review.

3. Break your long and comprehensive papers into discrete portions and publish each portion separately (a technique more suitable to some research fields than others). Otherwise known as Salami-slicing.

4. Pay to publish in predatory journals with lax or non-existent review processes (see footnote 10). Pay to publish.

5.  Media statements by you or your institution about published or pending research results are a good way of short circuiting the normal science assessment process and making direct emotional appeal to the public and to government funding bodies. Therefore, in press releases on your latest results use only hyped-up language, emphasize the positive and hide any qualifications, uncertainties or alternate explanations you might have. Science by Press Release.

6. Make sure each paper you “author” includes as many references to your own publications as possible – and make sure your “co-authors” do the same. Self-promotion.

7. Confirmation bias hinders objective appraisal. Papers that confirm existing widespread theory will always gather more citations than those that challenge it. Therefore, if you want to get past peer reviewers and attract maximum citations, do not introduce new ideas that challenge orthodoxy, or, if you do, hedge them about with obsequious qualifications and apologies or bury them so deep in the text, appendixes or supplementary data that they might not be noticed.  Confirmation Bias [12].

8. If you are a peer reviewer for a journal submission, make your favourable review conditional on the submitting “authors” making references to your own papers. Intellectual blackmail.

9. As a corollary to point 8, if you know, suspect or guess (in many cases, easy to do) who the supposedly anonymous reviewers of your journal submission will be, then load your paper with favourable references to their papers. Flattery.

10. If you are an editor of a journal making annual editorial reviews (a requirement of many publishing companies), then add multiple references your own papers in that journal (for an egregious example of this, see footnote [13]). This will not only increase your own citation index, but that of the journal as well. Corruption.

 11. If your research is not producing positive results, or results that do not support your pre-conceived ideas, or you just want an easy way to increase your publication and citation indexes, simply invent or falsify your data. This is deliberate fraud, but it can be very difficult to prove. With around half a million scientific papers published each year, many hundreds of examples of fraud have been exposed. But those are probably just the tip of an iceberg (see footnote 10 and references in the Stuart Ritchie book mentioned in Acknowledgements). Fraud.

The Problem

There are far, far more PhDs awarded today than there are career academic employment positions. The stratagems I list above loom large in the competitive world of young researchers who wish to gain a foothold in academia. Once they have garnered, by whatever means, sufficient publications and citation credits then tenure (a job for life) awaits, and they can afford to relax:  the Mathew Effect will do the rest. Success breeds success.

“For unto everyone that hath, shall be given: and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not, even that which he hath, shall be taken away” Mathew Gospel, 25:29

Hyper-authorship, pal review, salami slicing, pay-to-publish, confirmation bias, back scratching, science by press release, self-promotion, intellectual blackmail, flattery, corruption and fraud are well known problems and have been outlined in numerous books, papers, op-eds, blogs and podcasts over many years. But the malign influence of these stratagems has not gone away. There is evidence that it is getting worse. A detailed 2025 review on this subject in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science [14] warns that “the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications”. This is happening because academia, by and large, assesses and rewards researchers on an easily gamed set of criteria. A natural selection process has evolved that rewards the dishonest practices enumerated above. This creates a “survival of the fittest” environment in which honest researchers risk extinction if they do not compete on similar terms.

The science publishing system that has grown up over the last 50-100 years (peer review, publication and citation indexes, exaggerated benefits for established elites) is broken and is totally inadequate for today’s environment of globalisation and digital publishing. A drastic overhaul is urgently needed.

Some suggested solutions:

All research results, whether positive or negative, should be published online: free, searchable and available to all. Scientific wisdom is not the exclusive preserve of academia.

Peer review should be retained but with no anonymity. All correspondence between peer reviewers and editors with the author(s) – good reviews as well as bad – should be published along with the paper [15].

Papers with more than one author must include a written statement detailing the intellectual contribution to the paper of each listed author.

Official press releases must adhere to the same standards of language, restraint and caution as are applied to scientific papers.

A supplementary section providing all data and computer code on which the conclusions of the paper are based, as well as full details of experimental methods employed so that others can replicate your work, should be an absolute requirement for acceptance by all journals.

A link to a section where any subsequent citations can be listed must accompany each paper. The list will include the names of the citation author(s) and their context.

Replication papers, when or if they become available, should be published on the same web page as the original paper, whether they falsify (and thus disprove) your thesis or not.

Links to all other sections of the paper as detailed here must be given in the main text.

With each paper, an open discussion forum should be provided where anyone (including the authors) can propose corrections, respond to criticism, offer comments or provide additional data and alternative hypotheses. This section will have filters to exclude comments on the basis of irrelevance, rudeness, abuse, ad hominin and ad verecundiam based attack, hate speech or non-adherence to the basic, universally established principles of the scientific process. But beyond all that, free speech rules and no ideas are forbidden or censored however uncomfortable they might be to the author(s).

In this environment, hyper-authorship will become a rare event, people seeking to replicate results will have immediate guaranteed data access, mistakes will be quickly identified and corrected, apologies and mea culpas can be given or retractions announced. Science publishers who do not follow these rules will be labelled as predatory, and their offerings as unscientific garbage.

In an open contest of ideas, the best – those that are meticulous, well-argued and evidence based – will rise to the top and the dross will fade away. Authority and consensus should have no input to this process: but authority and consensus can be expected to be an emergent output and form the basis for individual and institutional rankings.

Acknowledgements:

Much of the inspiration, and some of the detail, for this post comes from Stuart Ritchie’s 2020 book: Science fictions: Exposing Fraud, Negligence and Hype in Science. (published by Penguin-Random House, 353 p. see:  www.sciencefictions.org).

I have also been inspired by reading John Ioannidas seminal 2005 paper “Why most published research findings are false”. (PLoS Medicine https://doi:101371/journal.pmed.0020124). (But note: the deliberate attention-grabbing title is not fully justified in the text where all examples given come from the field of clinical medicine).

********

 Key Words: hyper authorship, hyper profile authors, peer review, pal review, predatory publishing, paper mills, publishing networks

The post There is No Wisdom in Crowds appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

Dr Norman [1], a young scientist at the start of her academic career, writes a technical paper full of new observation and innovative ideas challenging accepted orthodoxy and submits this to a prestigious international Journal. Norman is happy to acknowledge minor, but valuable, input from her friend and colleague Dr Edwards and includes him as a co-author. Professor Yelland, the head of her department, must also be included as a co-author because it is his policy that all papers from his fiefdom carry his name. This is a very common practice, which the Professor justifies by saying that he is the Head of a Team and, by virtue of his reputation and contacts, all members of the team are beholden to him for their contracts, salaries, funding and (he likes to think), intellectual leadership.

But the Professor has another policy: authors of joint papers must list their names alphabetically. Were Norman’s paper to be submitted in the order of their relative contributions, as Norman, Edwards & Yelland - it would, correctly, establish Norman as the lead author. But under Yelland’s direction, she is forced to publish it as authored by Edwards, Norman and Yelland. An important distinction, as we shall see.

Why this policy? The Professor justifies it by saying:

“We are all equal members of a democratic team – there are no prima donnas here. The more authors a paper has, the more authority it can claim”.

But there is an unspoken reason: one that everyone involved understands:

No one can be allowed to outshine their boss. With an alphabetically arranged author list, most will assume that my name comes last only because of my position in the alphabet.

You think that’s petty? And so it is, but anyone who has worked in the dog-eat-dog world of academia will recognise that such selfish stratagems are par for the course (2)

For Edwards, with the paper published, widely cited as Edwards et al. and winning prizes, there is Tenure and, on the future retirement of Yelland, appointment as the new Head of Department. To Professor Yelland’s already large bibliography is added another starred item: his reputation boosted: fresh research grants and new acolytes assured. Norman’s academic career languishes. Unable or unwilling to renew her contract, she resigns and seeks a position in industry where the harsh realities of commerce ensure that talent is rewarded on the basis of results, not reputation

But Norman, Edwards and Yelland can consider themselves lucky. If their study had been in the highly-politicised field of Climate Science, it is likely their paper would have been rejected. Today, most Journal editors are employees of science publishing companies. If an editor – seeking a contest of ideas and open debate – were to accept a paper that challenged Climate Change orthodoxy, then said editor would run the risk of being fired. Why? Bear with me with me while I follow the money. Science publishing companies make money from consumers of their products through a subscription-based model. The money involved is huge: the publishing company Elsevier (with more than 3000 science Journals on their books) made a profit of $4.2 billion in 2024 (Internet search). The consumers are the world’s universities who pay on the number of clicks made by the registered users of their libraries: the more clicks, the higher the fee. Universities today get their funding largely from governments who wish to promote research consistent with their ideological and political ends. In the Western World, these ideologies typically involve alarmist views on climate change. So we return to where we started: a vicious ouroboros loop: a snake eating its tail. This snake is not a perpetual motion machine. It is fueled and directed by government money.

The ouroboros snake: the original vicious circle.

My story of Dr Norman is a parable that illustrates many things, among them:

• turning your back on truth in favour of empathy, consensus and inclusion.
• self-serving behaviour at the expense of others.
• the “publish or perish” requirement for academics if they want promotion.
• The role of governments in controlling the direction of scientific research, and..,
• success itself, whether deserved or not, can be self-reinforcing.

The last bulleted point is an example of the Mathew Effect [3]. The Effect is named from scripture:

“For unto everyone that hath, shall be given: and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not, even that which he hath, shall be taken away.” St. Mathew Gospel, 25:29. (King James Bible translation).

The term Mathew Effect was first coined in a 1968 [4] paper in the journal Science by Robert K. Merton – a professor of sociology at Columbia University. In Merton’s abstract, the Effect is defined as:

“…a conception of ways in which certain psycho-social processes affect the allocation of resources to Scientists for their contributions – an allocation which in turn affects the flow of ideas and findings [5] through the communication networks of Science.”

(Saint Mathew and his English translators put the idea much more succinctly).

The Mathew Effect is a cynical and bleak observation on how success can breed success: how reputation and authority can become self-sustaining: how rigid orthodoxy can exclude new ideas, potentially giving one person or small elite in-group at the head of every discipline an authority they may not deserve. The Mathew Effect can be seen in all fields of human endeavor but is most noticeable in the organised and structured disciplines of universities.

With the aid of hindsight, examples of the Mathew Effect are easy enough to find. I have chosen a just few from the wide field of science:

1. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus - a scientist and catholic monk- published his theory that the Earth and the planets circle the sun and not, as the scientific and theological paradigms of the time held, the other way round. Those who accepted and promoted Copernicus’ mathematical arguments were fiercely persecuted. In 1600, philosopher Giordano Bruno was tortured then burned at the stake for (among other things) his heretical Copernican beliefs. In 1632, Galileo Galilei was put on trial and shown the torture implements of the Inquisition. He sensibly made a public recantation. That saved his life, but he was put under lifetime house arrest, and his books on astronomy banned. Science eventually moved on under the overwhelming weight of evidence that the earth is not the immobile center of the Universe, but the Catholic Church’s ban on the works of Copernicus and Galileo remained for the next 200 years (6).
2. In 1883, English polymath Francis Galton, influenced by Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, proposed selective breeding as a means of improving the human race. He called his proposed new science Eugenics. By “improving”, Galton and his followers meant creating more people like themselves – rich, white, educated, Northern European males. They proposed, amongst other measures, coercive sterilisation of poor, uneducated women.  Over the next 60 years in Europe and North America eugenic ideas became widely popular and a field of study for university academics and for implementation by government agencies. In the UK, politicians such as Arthur Balfour, Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, literary figures George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells, scientists Leonard Darwin (Charles Darwin’s son), Sir Ronald Fisher (pioneering biostatistician), Sir Cyril Burt, Julian Huxley and economist John Maynard Keynes, supported the movement through the 1910s, 20s and 30s (these are but a small selection of well-known British eugenicists).  In 1931, the British Eugenics Society managed to put up a Bill in Parliament for the “Sterilization of Mental Defectives”: it was rejected mainly through the votes of catholic and socialist MPs. But elsewhere in the Western World, government-supported programs of coercive breeding and forced sterilisation were widely adopted. In Sweden, sterilisation for eugenic reasons began in 1906 and was formalised by Law in 1934. These were supposed to be “voluntary” sterilisations, but it has been shown that in Sweden extreme coercive measures were used, and the victims, numbering in the tens of thousands, were mostly poor, uneducated women. The Swedish Law was only abolished in 2013. In the USA, forced sterilisation for eugenic reasons began in the early 1900s. In 1927, in an 8:1 opinion on Buck v Bell, the US Supreme court ruled that a forced sterilisation carried out by surgeon John Hendren Bell on Carrie Buck was constitutional. John Bell was a surgeon, a eugenicist and Superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and the Feeble Minded.  In his ruling, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.  thundered that the US was being “overwhelmed by incompetents” and that “three generations of imbeciles was enough”. The victim, Carrie Elizabeth Buck was no imbecile but a powerless poor black woman who had been incarcerated at the age of 18 in Bell’s Virginia State Colony for the supposed “crime” of feeble mindedness and promiscuity on the sole evidence that that she had borne an illegitimate child as the result of rape. But for all the inhumane excesses of the United States and Sweden, the most enthusiastic adopter of Eugenics principles was the National Socialist Government of Germany between 1933 and 1945. The Nazis were quite prepared to call a spade a spade: they called eugenics Racial Cleansing, and added mass murder to its toolbox. It was the post-war realisation of the full horrors and scale of Nazi genocidal programs, along with better scientific knowledge on how genetic inheritance actually works, to finally discredit the Eugenics movement.
3. In in the late 1940s, it was noticed that there was a noticeable rise in the number of people (mostly men) dying from coronary heart disease or CHD. A few sensible scientists pointed out that CHD was strongly age- related and the rise simply a reflection of increased longevity (i.e. good news, we are living longer). But scientists often scorn simple explanations in favour of explanations from the fields of esoteric knowledge that they have spent long years acquiring. Dr Ansel Keys (Professor of Physiology at the U. of Minnesota and the developer of the eponymous K-Rations for US infantrymen in WW2) and cardiologist Dr Paul Dudley White (the Head of the American Heart Association, AHA) called the rise an epidemic and laid the blame solely at overconsumption of fat (meat, dairy, eggs) in our diet. Using United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) data, Keyes in 1953 published (7) a graph showing a compelling linear correlation between dietary fat consumption and deaths from CHD in six countries (USA, Canada, UK, Italy, Australia & Japan). But the paper was a piece of egregious scientific finagling. If Keys had used the full data set of 22 countries available from the FAO, there would have been no neat correlation. Before plotting his graph, Keys simply omitted data from countries that were inconvenient to his story (8). But criticisms of Key’s paper came too late. The Dietary Fat = CHD meme had already escaped, like a virus from a Wuhan Lab, and spread around the world. The idea rapidly became near the unanimous scientific opinion of university departments, learned Academies and Government Agencies. Ansel Keys made the cover of Time Magazine in 1961. The income of the AHA soared from $1.5 million in 1949 to $26 million in 1962, and it continued to rise (9).                                    Time Magazine: the bellwether for fashionable ideas.                                                                                                                                                                     In 1976, the US Committee on Nutrition published a survey that showed 98.9% of “nutritionary scientists” supported the dietary fat/CHD connection. The phrases Follow The Science, The Science is Settled, Consensus of Experts and Scientists Say,. were used by activists and repeated endlessly by media and politicians (in a different context, these slogans are still being used today). The few dissenting scientists (presumably from the 1.1% minority of the survey) were sidelined, cancelled or fired. This was the Mathew Effect in operation. But eventually – it took 50 years – heroic clinical trials involving hundreds of thousands of people tracked by surveys over periods of up to 40 years, showed no evidence that dietary fat causes CHD. Major data reviews (meta-analyses) by the Cochrane Collaboration (acknowledged as the gold standard of epidemiological reviews) and others in 2000, 2001, 2004, 2007 and 2012 concluded: “there are no clear effects of dietary fat changes in total cardiovascular events” (10). The scare was over, good science had driven out the bad, but the harm it caused lives on to this day.  It has been argued that the present-day surge in obesity and Type-2 Diabetes is the direct result of the “Great Diet Shift” that took place during the latter part of the 20^th century, where whole populations in the Western World moved away from meat and dairy to diets high in carbohydrate (bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, sugar). For more information and detail on the great fat scare (lipophobia) of latter half of the 20th century, go to my earlier blog post HERE.
4. In the early 1980s, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were medical researchers at the University of Western Australia. They discovered that gastric (or peptic) ulcers are caused by gut infection with the bacterium helicobacter pylori and not, as the medical establishment had believed for over a century, by stress, spicy food, excess stomach acid, smoking, alcohol, whatever – the only treatment being offered horrendous invasive surgery (which did not actually work). In 1983, Marshall and Warren submitted their findings to the Gastroenterology Society of Australia. It was rejected by their reviewers as among the worst submissions they had received that year. The paper was subsequently published in 1984 by the Lancet (https://doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(84)91816-6 ). The publication was opposed by conventional medicine which held that bacteria could not survive in the acid environment of the stomach. Despairing of a breakthrough, in 1987 Marshall drank a culture of helicobacter pylori that he had obtained from his patients. Within a few days, he was suffering all the unpleasant symptoms of an active gastric ulcer. Marshall then quickly cured himself with a course of antibiotics. This heroic experiment brought Marshall notice and the Marshall and Warren infection theory slow acceptance. Starting in 1994, ten years after the first publication of their results, the pair began to be awarded a stream of scientific honours and prizes, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005.  But for over 10 years sufferers from gastric ulcers had been denied an available, effective, cheap and non-invasive cure for their condition [11].

What happened to those experts who for over 400 years peddled, and in many cases enforced, false narratives with unshakeable ex-cathedra authority? When new evidence falsified their ideas, did they recant and apologise? No, the majority did not and took their obsolete theories to their graves. As mathematician/physicist Max Planck (inventor of Quantum Theory) cynically observed in 1921: “Science progresses one funeral at a time”. 

The museum of once-fashionable science. Click for sharper image

American philosopher George Santayana said in 1905: “Those who don’t know the past are condemned to repeat it”. History should teach us caution, but human beings are vulnerable to prophets of doom and each generation breeds its own false narrative. Where our ancestors were cursed by religious orthodoxy masquerading as knowledge, Social Darwinism masquerading as genetics, lipophobia masquerading as nutritional advice and old wives’ tales masquerading as gastroenterology, today we are cursed by computer-model outputs masquerading as evidence. I speak here of today’s fashionable scientific study, Climate Catastrophism, which, over the last 40 years, has gained great traction by predicting climate apocalypse if we do not mend our evil ways.

In all these cases, the authority and influence of the science elites were, and are, heavily reinforced by the Mathew Effect.

Postscript

As an antidote to the general cynical tone of this post, I am pleased to conclude on a more upbeat note. When considering the inertia in the birth and demise of scientific paradigms, one can argue that things are getting better. Bruno in 1600 was tortured then burnt at the stake for his heliocentric beliefs; Galileo in 1643 was merely shown the instruments of torture. It took 60 years for Galton’s eugenics theory to discredited. It took 50 years for the dietary fat scare to be disproven, but it took only 10 years for Marshall and Warren to disprove the medical dogma on gastric ulcers.

Footnotes

The post The Mathew Effect, and other Problems of Science appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

The Scottish kilt and distinctive clan tartans are inventions of Englishmen in the early 18^th to early 19^th centuries. Most people, Scots and English alike, now believe they are the product of an ancient Scottish Celtic culture. Although the Celts lost their rebellions against the British Crown and Parliament in 1715 and 1745, Celtic mythmaking, with English help, eventually conquered the Lowland Scots, the English, and finally the world.

The Invention of the Kilt [1]

“Traditional” Highland Dress – Myth and Reality

More than 70 years ago, my father (an Edinburgh historian and teacher) told me this story – it’s an old Edinburgh joke that probably dates back to the 1920s when he too was a lad:

“If a Londoner sees a man in a kilt, they think he’s a Scotchman. In Edinburgh, if they see a man in a kilt, they think he’s a Highlander. In the Highlands, however, if they see a man in a kilt they know he’s an Englishman.”

Alas, how things have changed.

Travel to Scotland today (as I did earlier this year) you will be welcomed at the border by a person (a woman on this occasion) playing the bagpipes in full “highland” motley. Ghillie brogues, knee-high hose with tassels and sgian-dubh, tartan kilt secured by a broad belt from which was suspended a long hairy sporran, black jacket with silver buttons over which was thrown a tartan shoulder plaid secured at the shoulder with a large silver brooch. All this topped by a glengarry cap with cath dath trim, red pom-pom and eagle feather.

Continuing to the capital Edinburgh, your ears are assailed on every corner of Princes Street by more kilted persons playing medleys of Scottish tunes. I spotted a tour guide from Germany dressed in tartan kilt and sporran (what clan did he belong to?). In the Royal mile there was a wild-haired, bare-chested man in a kilt with his face painted blue – I think he was channeling Mel Gibson in that wildly-inaccurate 1995 Hollywood Movie Braveheart. It seemed that every second or third shop was offering to kit you out in your own personal clan tartan. Even in the Highlands itself, you can’t always get away from the tourist shtick.

Edinburgh Retail Interlude:

“Guten Morgen. Herr Schmidt, from Dusseldorf, ja, ja? – yes, one moment sir… (he types on his computer) – yes here it is, we do have a tartan for you, sir – it is the ancient dress tartan of the McHaggis of Invercreagh. A Herr Schmidt from Heidelberg was here – yes, yes, yes, in this very shop sir – in… aah…let  me see, 2003 – and he assured us that his great-great grandfather married a bonny lass from the McHaggis clan in 1876. We have very strict standards in this establishment, you know – but you most definitely do qualify sir”.

Lowlanders make up more than 80% of the Scottish population and have mostly Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Welsh or Irish roots. Prior to the late 18^th Century, Lowlanders almost universally regarded Celtic Highlanders as half-naked savages living in primitive conditions outside of normal, law-abiding, civilised society. They were not wrong.

The few available accounts of the dress of Highlanders before the mid-to-late 18^th century describe (in some cases with wood-cut illustrations) a single long length of hand-woven woolen cloth called a plaid, woven in a cross-banded pattern called tartan [2]. Hand spinning and weaving were then a scattered cottage industry throughout the Highlands and Islands. The plaid was worn over the shoulder to hang fore-and-aft to mid-thigh and secured at the waist by a belt. Below the waist, the plaid was arranged to form a sort of open-sided mini-skirt. Excess material could be draped over the head and shoulders like a shawl or hoodie or bundled around the waist like a shed pullover. In short, a cheap, one-piece, multi-purpose garment, useable for many things, but not the most efficient at any. The wealthy few might wear a woolen or linen shift below the plaid. The even wealthier few (i.e. Clan Chiefs) scorned the peasant dress and wore tartan trousers called trews (or trowse).

Following the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1715, English Regiments were stationed in the West Highlands at Fort William and in the East at Inverness. The Army built new roads and tried to suppress inter-clan fighting and ensure safety for travelers.

The early 18^th century was the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in England. The first practical, commercial steam engine was developed by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Demand for iron products was growing steadily.

Thomas Rawlinson (1669-1737) was a member of a family of Quaker Ironmasters who owned and operated a number of iron smelters in Lancashire and Chesire. They used hematite ore from nearby mines and reduced it to iron with charcoal. The ore was plentiful, but wood for making the charcoal was not.

Around 1725, Rawlinson travelled to the now quasi-pacified Highlands to seek fresh charcoal supplies. His eyes were on the virgin birch forests of Invergarry, north of Inverness [3]. These were owned by Ian McDonnell, Clan Chief of the McDonnells of Glengarry. Rawlinson and The McDonnell formed a partnership. The Chief would lease access to his forests and provide labour from his serfs. Rawlinson would ship iron ore from England to Glengarry and build an iron smelter there; for their return journey, his ships would load charcoal for England. A synergistic and mutually profitable arrangement, they hoped. Representing his family, Rawlinson moved to live in Glengarry (he rebuilt Invergarry castle, destroyed by the Army after the 1715 rebellion) and became Managing Director of the enterprise.

Rawlinson soon realised that the half-naked dress of his new employees was unsuitable for industrial operations, whether felling trees, making charcoal or attending to iron furnaces. For Rawlinson it was a Health and Safety issue, but the garb also offended his English Quaker sensibilities. So, around 1727, he approached the tailor of the English Redcoat Regiment stationed in nearby Inverness and together they devised a suitable industrial dress for his employees. This was a separate, belted, mid-knee length tartan skirt in plaid material featuring multiple stitched-down pleats to keep it heavy and weighted. Rawlinson called this garment by the English word ”kilt” [1]. His Gaelic speaking employees called it a philibeg, or little skirt. Both Rawlinson and the Chief wore the new dress, and its obvious practical advantages soon made it widely popular.

In 1725, with interclan fighting and disorder still rife in the Highlands, the English authorities raised an armed militia (then called a watch), to help keep Law and Order. The Watch drew its recruits from Highland clans that had been loyal to the crown during the 1715 rebellion. These recruits were mainly Cambells, but also included Grants, Frasers and Munros.  They were outfitted with a uniform of a one-piece belted plaid (12 yards long!) in a new distinctive dark tartan of forest green and navy-blue. This quickly led to their nickname the Black Watch (in Gaelic: Am Freiceadan Dubh).

For a very different explanation of this nickname, and the subsequent history of the Black Watch and other Highland Regiments, see footnote [4].

The presence of the Watch created the beginnings of the idea that groups of Highlanders could be identified by a common tartan pattern. In 1739, the Black Watch Militia was converted to a line Regiment and their plaid replaced by a kilt, topped with the red jacket with contrasting regimental facings of the British soldier.

The Invention of Clan Tartans

In 1822, the brothers John and Charles Allen [5] appeared in Edinburgh. They were born and raised in southern England from an English naval family (their grandfather was an Admiral, their father a naval Lieutenant), but nothing of their early life is known. Somehow, by the time they were young adults, they had acquired a fascination for and a knowledge of Gaelic and Celtic myth and legend. For many years before their arrival in Edinburgh, they appear to have been corresponding with major Scottish tartan retailers. These were now commercial firms concentrated in centers close to the Highlands, like Stirling. The Allens provided them with “traditional” designs that the brothers, when later challenged, would claim to be based on an ancient, illustrated text in their possession – a document (they claimed) given to one of their ancestors by Bonnie Prince Charlie no less [6]. Among their many talents, the Allens obviously had a flair for textile design. Of course, no one ever got to see the original of this ancient family document. Sir Walter Scott asked but was fobbed off with elaborate and ingenious excuses. The designs, along with elaborate and fanciful stories of their origins and how they came to be in the possession of the Allen family were eventually published by them as Vestiarium Scotticum” (1842) and later as “Costume of the Clans” (1845). These lavish, limited-edition, books, with their multiple hand-coloured plates, became a major source of tartan designs throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

1822 marked the visit to Edinburgh of the Hanoverian King George IV. This was a big and lavish event: the first visit of a British monarch to Scotland for almost 200 years. The event organiser, romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott, requested that all Highlands clan chiefs to come to Edinburgh to meet the King. Each was to bring a number of retainers identically dressed in a kilt of a distinctive tartan, so that so that the elderly King could tell which clan was which.  The Chiefs, enthused by their new-found status, hurried off to the Stirling tartan emporiums to choose tartan designs from their pattern books. These patterns were mostly the creations of, or inspired by, the Allen brothers. Edinburgh was full of tartaned, kilted Highlanders.

The King was charmed and ordered for himself a kilt in Royal Stuart tartan (bright red, white. yellow and blue industrial colours: you can Google a portrait of the portly Hanoverian in this outfit). The extravaganza was a great success. The Celts had finally conquered Scotland, and England too. Their sartorial revenge for the battle of Culloden in 1745. Later, these concocted Celtic myths were to conquer the British diaspora around the World as well. Every Highlander, Lowlander, or Englishman with a Scottish surname, or a hint of Scottish blood in their ancestry can now choose their very own “traditional” tartan [7].

Death charge of the Highlanders: The Battle of Culloden, 1745

Queen Victoria and her Consort Prince Albert fell in love with the Highlands during a visit to Scotland in 1843, They bought an estate near Braemar in the Dee valley of Perthshire where, in 1848, they built Balmoral Castle – a vast,  grey-granite, neo-gothic mish-mash of castellations, Romanesque arches, pointy (and pointless) turrets, faux arrow loops and Juliette balconies: the interior filled with Victorian-Gothic-Celtic-tartan kitsch. There Victoria and her husband would spend their summer holidays and Albert could stalk deer or shoot grouse in his kilt without appearing too ridiculous. A tradition the Royal Family has maintained to this day.

With Victoria and Albert as an example, wealthy upper-class Englishmen (and not a few Lowland Scots) flocked to the Highlands to buy similar estates where they could act the role of Clan Chiefs and slaughter the local wildlife which bigger, more numerous and much wilder than anything available in England. They bought land, as Victoria had done, from Clan Chiefs eager to sell out their tenants for a dollop of cash. The English aristocracy pretended to be Clan Chiefs: The Clan Chiefs pretended to be English aristocracy.  The local subsistence population (whose presence with their sheep and cattle would have restricted the field of fire) had their tenancies revoked and forced to move out. Single young men flocked to the local Highland Regiment recruitment centers; others sought employment in the rapidly-industrialising Lowland cities. A huge number emigrated to the United States or the Colonies. The Highlands became depopulated and remain so this day, an event known as the Highland Clearances.

Final Thoughts

There are no real villains in this story. Thomas Rawlinson brought jobs and money to an impoverished Highland community and had concerns for his workers’ physical and moral safety.

John and Charles Allen made little or no money from their fantastical schemes and got no royalties on their designs. More charming, deluded eccentrics than fraudsters, they lived on the charity of friends and died in genteel poverty in the late 1870s, still researching their imaginary roots.

The Celtic myths they helped promote were harmless and amusing stories that give all Scots a sense of Nationhood and a glorious, romantic past.

Generic tartan patterns are genuine Highland inventions that reflect the artistic genius of the Celts.

Victoria and Albert, playing at dressing up in their Highland Estate, were hardworking Royals who deserved their summer holiday fun.

The “traditional” Highland dress, for all its dubious origins, is still a fine and impressive dress for a man.

Looking even further back in time

My tale of Scottish myths and legends almost exactly mirrors how, around the 13^th century, the Anglo-Norman ruling aristocracy of England adopted the Celtic myths of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany – the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - as the true history of their own inheritance. This is an example of the process to which the quote at the head of the post refers.

Acknowledgments

My content, as well as its title, is taken from the book: The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, by Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Specifically, Part III: The Sartorial Myth. Trevor-Ropers’ book was published by Yale University Press and printed by Cambridge University Press in 2006. It is a meticulous scholarly work with full documentation and references and written an easy and readable style.

Extra details have been added from internet searches. The words, commentary, opinions and illustrations are mine.

*****

 Personal Note: This post was prompted by nostalgic feelings for Scotland as it was when I was a lad more than 70 years ago. But would I really want to live back then with no fridge in the kitchen, no washing machine in the laundry, no TV in the lounge, no computer in the office, no car in the garage, no personal communication device in my pocket and a life expectancy of around 70 years?   Definitely not.

 ******

The post The Invention of Scotland appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

In my previous post (Benford’s Law – 1), I footnoted the following:

“Confusingly, there is another Benford’s Law, propounded in 1980 by US physicist Gregory Benford. It states: “Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available”. (Gregory) Benford’s “Law” is an interesting and humorous aphorism rather than a scientific Law and is much less known than that of Simon Newcomb and Frank Benford.”

Gregory Benson’s Law. Click for larger image

The “Law” comes from the words of a character in Gregory Benford’s 1980 Sci-Fi novel “Timescape”. According to the Wiki synopsis, Timescape is a dystopian novel set in a future 1998 where the world is threatened by human-caused ecological disaster. It is saved by a hero scientist (a physicist, of course) who invents a time machine and travels back to the 1980s in order to persuade humanity from their evil ways, but in the process gets involved in various time related paradoxes.  The novel was popular and won many awards. Sounds like a fun read.

The first of the three blockbuster films in the movie franchise series Back to the Future, was released only two years later. Their creator and Director – Robert Zemickis – could easily have been inspired by Gregory Benford’s book. The films feature a genius scientist (Emmet “Doc” Brown), who is most definitely passionate, so any influence from Gregory Benford’s book was maybe not too deep.

However, the idea behind Gregory Benford’s “Law” is hardly original. In the 5th century BC, Greek historian Thucydides wrote: “Ignorance is bold and knowledge is reserved”.  In his 1928 book Skeptical Essays, British philosopher and mathematician Betrand Russell wrote: “Passion is the measure of the holders’ lack of knowledge”. Both these authors put the idea much more succinctly than Gregory Benford.

We can all nod and smile at this, thinking perhaps of passionate youth confronting their elders with their new-found insights. The elders just smile calmly with the close-lipped smile of reason and knowledge. Greta Thunberg immediately springs to mind.

The “smile” of youthful passion (and ignorance) – 16-year-old Greta Thunberg addresses the United Nations on Climate Change, 23rd September 2019. 

The close-lipped smile of reason and knowledge (with a touch of hubris) – 45-year-old Sky News host Rita Panahi, posing.

But of course, passion is a psychological trait that does not necessarily accompany youth or age, ignorance or knowledge. Youthful passion can sometimes reflect real insight denied the more orthodox thinking of their elders, and there is no reason why someone with deep knowledge should not be passionate in arguing for their subject. Aphorisms can only go so far.

The post Benford’s Law (2) appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

In any given set of large (i.e. spanning several orders of magnitude) random numbers, one might expect that all the digits from 1 to 9 should appear, statistically, at each position in the number sequence around 11% (100/9) of the time[1].

In 1881 Canadian astronomer Simon Newcomb, and again independently in 1938 American physicist Frank Benford, noticed that, in sets of large numbers obtained by measuring natural physical phenomena, digit 1 appears as the first digit of the number on average 30% of the time, 2 appears in this position 26% of the time and so on through to digit 9, which appears in the first position a mere 5% of the time. Benford called this the “Law of Anomalous Numbers” or the “Law of First Digits”, but it has today come to be known as the Newcomb-Benford Law or, more commonly, just Benford’s Law[2]. Benford’s Law is a statistical effect, so our set of measured numbers must contain many examples before the effect can be conclusively demonstrated.

The light bulb moment for Newcomb came when he noticed that the first few pages of his book of logarithmic tables (covering numbers 1,2 & 3) were much more thumbed and dog-eared than the final few pages covering numbers 7, 8 & 9 [3].

Counterintuitively, Benford’s Law holds true even for systems which we might expect to be randomly distributed, for example: the lengths of the hundred longest rivers in the world. It holds true no matter what physical characteristic of a system (mass, length, volume, radiation, dollars etc..) is being measured. The Law also holds true irrespective of the units being used (SI v Imperial, meters v kilometers, grams v tonnes, light years v parsecs) provided that the units employed give sufficiently large numbers for the thing being measured. The numbers can be to base 10 (our normal system of counting), base 60 (as used by the ancient Babylonians) or base 2 (as used by computers). It does not, however, hold true for artificially restricted numbers (telephone numbers, for example).

Why is this so? Clever mathematicians and statisticians have pondered this question and, although I do not fully understand all their explanations, the one answer that I do understand seems to lie in the positional number system that we use to represent large numbers.

In the following, remember that we read large numbers from left to right, but add to them (count) from right to left.

With our numbering system, we unconsciously use logarithms almost every day. The system is a not-so-secret code which specifies that a in a number expressed as a linear sequence of digits, the digits are arranged logarithmically. Each number position (slot) contains an order of magnitude more digits than the position immediately to its right. Thus, the five-position number 76543, when we break the code, represents (7×10000) +(6×1000) +(5×100) +(4×10) +3.

When we are counting with this system, each added unit goes into right-hand position of our growing number. When that position is filled, the units are converted to a 1 which is then transferred to the second position from the right.  Adding units steadily to the right-hand slot, it will take ten times as long to fill the second slot as it does to fill the first, and ten times as long again to fill the third slot as it does the second, and so on. When we stop counting, it is therefore much more likely the slot on the right will contain a 9 than any position to its left. Turning the argument around, it is likely that when counting stops, the left-hand position of our large number – the last slot to be filled – will contain a 1 than any slot to its right. The same argument can be made for all the other digits from 2 to 8.

Benford’s Law has found many practical applications in the detection of fraud. It cannot prove a fraud, but it can quantify a “that does look right” moment and so focus further investigation. Crooked accountants inventing false company profits. Bureaucrats working for corrupt Governments producing false GDP figures. Scientists publishing fake data. Fishermen lowering the weight of their annual haul to meet Government catch limits. Taxpayers doing their annual returns. In all such cases, liars are likely to produce numbers that do not correspond the Benford’s Law. The reason is that creators of large false numbers will instinctively seek to distribute their digits randomly along the sequence.

A good example (I take this from the statology.org website) is the collapse of the giant US energy company Enron in 2001. Forensic accountants, applying Benford’s Law to Enron’s public accounts, showed that they did not satisfy the Law. This could have, and should have, raised suspicions about Enron’s viability if said forensic accountants had carried out their work before the company collapse, rather than after. Enron’s auditor for many years – Arthur Andersen LLP, one of the world’s largest accounting firms with over 84,000 employees – deservedly followed Enron into receivership in 2003. Note that number 84000 – although large, it has only two significant figures.

The average crook

Law enforcement relies on being smarter than the average crook. That, unfortunately, is not always the case. More sophisticated liars can research Benford’s Law – as I have done – and make sure that their numbers pass this test.

Can Benford’s Law be applied to the mining industry? Mining and exploration companies can falsify their financial accounts like any other company. However, when they announce their resource figures these do not normally contain enough significant digits. No company ever presents their metal resource to the nearest ounce of gold or ton of base metal – a large element of rounding is always used, reflecting the inherent uncertainty of such calculations. A knowledgeable person would not need Benford to recognise BS when they see it.

Take the biggest mining fraud in history – the Busang scandal of the mid to late-1990s (for full details and analysis on the Busang fraud see my previous posts HERE and HERE).

In this fraud, a small group of contract Filipino geologists working for the Canadian junior exploration company Bre-X, added purchased alluvial gold to drill samples from the Busang gold project, located in the remote jungle of Central Borneo, in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan. The crushed and mixed samples were then sent to an independent laboratory to be assayed. From thousands of assays results reported regularly to the Toronto stock exchange over a three-year period, expert analysts calculated that the Busang deposit contained over 70 million ounces of gold. Hyperbolic, overexcited, financial journalists enthused over a potential for 200 million ounces. At its peak, the penny stock Bre-X soared to CAN$286.50, valuing the company at CAN$6 billion. The fraudsters made cash by trading in company stock.

But 70 million ounces is a round figure. All one can say is that it is a very big number for a single gold deposit. There is nothing for Benford to work on here. And the Borneo fraudsters were sophisticated; they did not just add a pinch of gold dust to each of around 10,000 drill samples (my estimate). Operating over several years in a secret jungle laboratory, they carefully weighed calculated amounts of gold to each sample to precisely create desired assay numbers compatible with a real hard-rock epithermal gold system.

The deception continued for several years. Geologists who knew the Indonesian exploration scene and fancied themselves knowledgeable in gold exploration (I was one) did not suspect fraud even though there were some puzzling aspects to the steady stream of data provided by Bre-X. The sheer scale, duration and sophistication of the fraud that would have been necessary was beyond our experience and our imagination.

The criminality was finally exposed in 1997 by the arrival of a geological team at Busang from the American mining company Freeport-McMoRan – the first outside experts to be allowed on site. They were there to carry out a due diligence study prior to Freeport making a takeover offer for Bre-X. But the unmasking of the fraud was too late for the thousands of Canadian mum-and-dad and corporate investors who collectively lost 6 billion dollars when Bre-X was delisted. No one was ever charged with the crime [4].

The post Benford’s Law (1) appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

Experimental science is focused observation guided by emergent theory. Geologists exploring for minerals are experimental scientists. They study rocks in the field with a series of experiments to test their ideas about the occurrence of metallic concentrations. But many exploration programs today deny these simple truths and believe the exploration geologist’s role is mindless acquisition of mass data as feed for computer programs. Given sufficiently large data sets (the organisers of such programs reason) the might of the micro-chip is all that is required to find an orebody.

Speak to exploration geologists and you will find two opposing views about how to observe outcrop or drill core.  Some seek merely to be unbiased objective recorders of what they see.  Others observe the rock in the wider context of their theories about region or prospect geology and ask questions of the exposure to help choose between these theories.

I characterize these two approaches with the metaphors of geologist-as-camera, and geologist-as-interrogator.

The Geologist as camera

I arrive at the exploration site to find a team of three young geologists engaged in making a geological map of their large exploration acreage. Using GPS, they walk predetermined traverses spaced 2-400m apart. Each aim to average 8km a day and between them, by taking alternate lines, they cover a large swathe of country before their next field break. Observations on each geological feature along the line of march are logged into a field-hardened tablet computers by going through a series of pull-down menus and checking boxes on pre-determined questions. The geologists have only the vaguest ideas about the geology of the property they are mapping. Two of them have never thought much about this: the brightest of the three specifically rejects the notion of understanding her observations: she sees herself as an unprejudiced objective observer: confirmation bias is not for her. Eventually all this data is computer-plotted to 2D images as linear sequences of point observation.  Another more senior geologist might eventually produce a 2D geological map by joining the dots. Probably there is a software program that can do much of this task for him (or her) and thus obviate the need for too much thought or hard work.

I travel to an exploration site on the other side of the country. Here, a much larger company have been drill testing a substantial metal deposit for several years. Four diamond rigs are going 24/7 and have drilled well over 300 holes. Stacked on pallets, several kilometers of core are waiting to be logged. Four geologists are hard at work logging core laid out in the open on long racks. It seldom happens that any one hole is logged in its entirety by the same person. Logging is done on to spread sheets in laptop computers using alpha-numeric codes on pre-determined menu options. There are more than 50 columns on their spreadsheet and the same digital form has been used since hole one. The geologists have never seen a drill section of the prospect (there are none). There are no detailed maps or level plans either. The geological model, such as it is, was produced a year before by an outside consultant who spent ten days on site. Back in the head office, a specialist Ore Reserve Geologist ignores 95% of the vast data base and calculates a resource based on assay numbers, virtual reality 3D string models and geostatistics. For the young geologists at point, labouring in the core yard, their job is 100-meter-a-day, core-logging automata is mind-numbingly boring. They count the days till their next field break, or until they have earned enough money to be able to resign and find some other more intellectually stimulating employment. Taxi driving, anyone?

After a long day core logging, Susan contemplates a career change.

These are anonymized projects, extreme examples perhaps, but based on observations of many actual projects, with many companies in many different countries over many years. Not all exploration projects are conducted like this of course, but I am sure readers will recognize the method of doing geology that I describe.

The geologists themselves are not to blame. In many cases it is their first job, they are on short-term contracts, and they are doing what their employer asks and expects of them. They probably wonder what the point was of much of the time they spent learning geological theory and critical thinking at university and have come to believe that the essence of their job as exploration geologists is to convert light signals from their eyes into digital computer feed according to pre-set formulae. A kind of biological digital camera.  Without a pre-existing context in their brain, each observation they make has equal importance, each pixel equal weight.

There is a better way.

The geologist as interrogator

All observation is made in a particular context. The context which should guide the exploration geologist is a matrix of different competing theories about the true nature of the geology being observed. This context provides the questions that must be asked of each outcrop or each piece of drill core. It defines the strategy to be followed in the search for those critical observations that allow selection between multiple working hypotheses. The idea of multiple working hypotheses was first propounded by 19th Century USGS geologist Thomas Crowther Chamberlin ⁽¹⁾. It is a methodology now used in all fields of science research ⁽²⁾, but geologists can be proud that the first clear statement and naming of this procedure came from their own profession.

Critical observations are those that fit into a pre-existing context or, just as importantly, those that do not. These are prioritized and not lost in a sea of trivial observation.

The method does not guarantee that you will arrive at the correct solution. Your evidence may be less than ideal, the expression in the rocks of geological events may be atypical.  Nature can be chaotic and unpredictable: the true hypothesis you should be testing may be the one that you – or perhaps no one else – have/has yet thought of. In all science, and especially geological science, neat, clean results where all observations slot in exactly to a model are rare and, when this happens, should be regarded with some skepticism. But despite all that, the method of multiple working hypotheses is still the best-known procedure for navigating apparent (or real) chaos and approaching the truth.

After a morning of fieldwork, Robert interrogates his lunchtime sandwich using the method of Multiple Working Hypotheses.

All geologists have biases. These were imprinted through university training and reinforced by early-career mentoring and reading geological literature relevant to the job.  Collecting data to choose between these hypotheses or to help formulate new ones is biased observation. But this bias is a good thing where it is up-front, acknowledged and constantly revised and re-focused in the face of evidence. Without bias, there is no way of separating signal from noise. This is a totally different kind of bias from the one that uncritically accepts only evidence that confirms a single pre-existing theory – one you might have fallen in love with – and ignores, or explains away, evidence which does not. That is Confirmation Bias, rightly condemned.

All scientists have a point of view. All views must have come from somewhere. Anyone who claims to make unbiased observation merely lacks self-awareness. Their biases are unconscious or lie in the biases of whoever drew up the detailed procedure manual which they follow.

The metaphor I use for this approach is the geologist as an interrogator of each rock exposure or core piece, asking a series of relevant questions that come from a range of competing views his as to what might be happening, with each question determined by the answer to the previous question.

Interrogating drill core.

The Scientific Method

The true nature of scientific investigation is focused observation guided by emergent theory. This is a long established and respectable idea and contrasts with seeking to find your theory in your data after you have completed your observations.

Collecting data should not be a fishing expedition that hopes to fortuitously hook new understanding or ideas on its line.  Its purpose should be to provide evidence to choose between a wide range of pre-existing hypotheses.  It therefore follows that the hypotheses must come first.

Seeking your hypothesis in your results is an acknowledged error in many scientific disciplines. So much so that it been given its own acronym – HARKing (Hypothesizing After Results are Known ⁽³⁾). In statistics-based research the same error is known as p-hacking ⁽⁴⁾.  Both techniques have been, and undoubtedly still are, widely used in science ⁽⁵⁾.

The parable of the Texas Sharpshooter provides a dramatic example of the HARKing method at work. As the cited Nature article ⁽⁵⁾ explains:

The Texan directs multiple shots at a barn door. He then selects the closest grouping of the random impacts and draws a target around them. A carefully cropped photograph is then used to establish his sharpshooting credentials.

The Texas Sharpshooter

The idea that theories should precede observation is the exact opposite of what is popularly believed, including by many scientists. Sherlock Holmes, for example, is usually quoted approvingly:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

But Sherlock’s patronizing throw-away line to Watson could not be more wrong. Contrast it with these quotes from real scientists – as opposed to a fictional one.

In Biology:

How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observations must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.  Charles Darwin, letter to Henry Fawcett September 1861.

In Physics:

We never draw inferences from observations alone, but observations can become significant when they reveal deficiencies in some of the contending explanations. David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, 1998.

“If (your hypothesis) disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. And that simple statement is the key to science. Richard Feynman, 1964

In the Philosophy of Science:

Half of Science is asking the right questions. Roger Bacon (1219-1292).

The facts that we measure or perceive never just speak for themselves but must be interpreted through the colored lens of ideas…. We can no more separate our theories and concepts from our data than we can find a true Archimedean viewpoint – a God’s eye view – of ourselves and the world. Michael Schermer, Scientific American, 2007

In Medical Research:

…you cannot find your hypothesis in your results. Before you go to your data…you have to have a specific hypothesis to check. If your hypothesis comes from analyzing your data, then there is no sense in analyzing the same data again to confirm it.  Ben Goldacre, Bad Medicine, 2008.

In Psychology:

I am more and more convinced that the only way to obtain clear answers from Nature is to ask her clear questions. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Professor of Neuro-Cognitive Modelling, University of Amsterdam, 2014.

 Final words

But despite this, it is my observation that the geologist-as-camera view is becoming increasingly common in exploration geology.  This slows down the acquisition of knowledge and can be disastrous for understanding.

One should always remember the quatrain:

Data is not information

Information is not knowledge

Knowledge is not understanding

Understanding is not wisdom ⁽⁷⁾

Without geological understanding, drill holes can be put in the wrong place, or ten are drilled where one would have sufficed. Without good geological models that reflect reality, the certainty required to convert an Ore Resource into a bankable Proven Reserve cannot be easily or cheaply achieved.

No one – beyond its most starry-eyed proponents – believe that AI will one day be able to fill in all the steps that lie between data and wisdom.

I cannot resist a final quote, this one from Albert Einstein:

Knowledge is knowing it’s a one-way street. Wisdom is looking both ways when you cross.

 ******

This is an updated and amended version of a previous post entitled The Camera and the Interrogator

(1) Revisiting Chamberlin: Multiple Working Hypotheses for the 21st Century. LP Elliot & BW Brook. BioScience 57 (7), 608-614  https://doi.org/10/10.1641/B570708

(2) The method of multiple working hypotheses. Thomas Crowther Chamberlin 1890 Science 15 92-96 (reprinted in Science 148, 754-759, 1965). https://doi:10.1126/science.ns-15.366.92

(3) HARKing - an acronym for Hypothesizing After Results are Known.  

(4) p-hacking - carrying out multiple sets of analysis on massive multivariate data sets until the one analysis is found that has “statistical significance” (i.e., p ≥ 0.05, meaning: 5 or fewer chances in a hundred that the result – or indeed any publishable result – was generated by pure chance. The “negative” or “null” analyses go to the filing cabinet or trash can): the “positive” result is published. This leads to what is known publication bias – see footnotes 5 and 6.

 (5) How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop. 2015 paper by Regina Nuzzo. Nature 526,182-185; https://doi.org/10.1038/52618a

(6) The cumulative effect of reporting and citation biases. 2018 by Y.A. De Vries (and five co-authors). Psychological Medicine 48, 2453-2455  https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291718001873

(7) These oft-quoted lines, which are usually attributed to American physicist Clifford Stoll or rock poet Frank Zappa, almost certainly were inspired by the 1934 T S Elliot poem, The Rock:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

 Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The post The Scientific Method and the Practice of Mineral Exploration appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

So, geologists observe, a cycle

Hath smaller cycles that on them prey

And these have yet smaller ones to bite ‘em

And so proceed ad infinitem

Thus, every Era in its kind

Repeats all those that come behind 

RM (after Jonathon Swift, 1733)

The Big Picture

An Ice Age is a significant period of time (tens of millions of years) when permanent ice exists at both poles. In the Earth’s 4,600,000,000-year-long history (4.6Ga) we have evidence for at least 7 Ice Ages, but there were probably more. Each lasted around 20-50 million years and together make up 4-5% of geological time. Ice Ages are not regularly spaced in time, and they show no apparent correlation with major tectonic or volcanic events or atmospheric CO2 levels.

What caused them?  It is likely that they were initiated by external astronomical events, but their duration and intensity controlled by earth-centric forces, such as the distribution of continents.  Speculative theories abound but we just don’t know.

The last of the Ice Ages, known to geologists as the Pleistocene Ice Age or Pleistocene Epoch, began around 2.6 million years ago. We live within a subdivision (I call it a Stage) of the Pleistocene called the Holocene (2) - a period of relative warmth. The Holocene is an interglacial and it began, rather abruptly, around 12,000 years ago (12Ka).

The Holocene itself is one of a series of at least 45 similar brief partial retreats of ice within the Pleistocene, each of which lasted for 5-15Ka. As you can see from Figure 2, the Interglacial that immediately preceded the Holocene is called the Eemian. The Eemian lasted for around 15Ka and reached its maximum warmth (much hotter than today) around 120Ka ago. The Interglacial before the Eemian called is called the La-Bouchet Interglacial, it lasted for 10Ka with peak temperatures around 220Ka. Before La Bouchet there was the Purfleet Interglacial with maximum warmth peaking around 320Ka (but note that these last three interglacials have been given different names in indifferent parts of the world where they have been studied).

We live in an Ice Age called the Pleistocene. We do not know how long the Pleistocene will last, but on the evidence of previous Ice Ages, it probably has many tens of millions of years to run. We do not know how long the Holocene Interglacial will last but on the evidence of previous interglacials within the Pleistocene, the return of  ice sheets to mid- and high-latitude land areas cannot be long delayed. 

A Deep Dive into Deep Time

Earth’s history is divided into four grand and vast periods of time called Eons. These Eons are then subdivided hierarchically into increasingly shorter divisions known as Eras, Periods, Epochs and Stages. Using geologist’s shorthand, where Ka is one thousand years: Ma is 1 million years and Ga is 1 billion years, the Eons are:

the PHANEROZOIC (0 to 543Ma).

 the PROTEROZOIC (543Ma-2.5Ga).

the ARCHAEAN (2.5Ga-4Ga) and..

the HADEAN (4Ga-4.6Ga).

With our short life spans and even shorter memories we have trouble comprehending these gulfs of time. This can lead us to overestimate the significance of the age in which we live. It is a form of human conceit and hubris.

It may help to realize that, on comparative geological/human time scales, the Hadean Eon commenced 20 years ago and the Phanerozoic 6 months ago. Eight days ago, towards the end of the Phanerozoic in an Era called the Mesozoic, dinosaurs roamed the land, sea and air and appeared masters of their universe (then the meteor struck). An Ice Age called the Pleistocene Epoch began around 20 hours ago. The evolution of our genus Homo from ape ancestors is a Pleistocene story. Five minutes ago, during a brief Stage of ice retreat and relative warmth within the Pleistocene called the Holocene, an explosion of human innovation enabled our civilisation to take off and thrive.

The lifetime experience of a single human being comes and goes in less than a second. Or like the snow that falls in the river, a moment white then gone forever.

Such a timetable should teach us humility.

Climate Change Over the Past 540 million Years (the Phanerozoic Eon)

The Phanerozoic began around 540 Ma ago. Its start is defined by an “explosion” of complex new life forms which, as the Eon advanced, evolved to spread from the oceans into every ecological niche on land, sea and air. If we exclude the ice ages, average global temperatures during the Phanerozoic were much higher than today, as were the concentrations of oxygen and CO2 in the atmosphere. Warmth, CO2 and oxygen are essential enablers and drivers of evolution.

Figure 1: 543Ma (million years) of Climate Change. The horizontal axis shows millions of years before present. On the vertical axis, temperatures are estimated from rock proxies. Average temperature during these 540Ma was 20°C, but range from 28° to minus 12° (In 2016 it was 14°). PETM=Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (55.8Ma); EEOC=Early Eocene Climate Optimum (42Ma); MECO=Mid-Eocene Climate Optimum (15-30Ma); EOT=Eocene-Oligocene Transition (40-33Ma); MMCO=Mid-Miocene Climate Optimum (15-13Ma); LGM-Last Glacial Maximum (21Ka); PAW= Post-Anthropogenic Warming (a projected future temperature from IPCC worst-case computer models). White stars indicate rapid cooling events: black stars rapid warming events. Reference: Christopher R Scotese, 2016 (Northwestern University) – Phanerozoic Temperature Curve. Palaeomap Project, Evanston II.

Three Ice Ages (Scotese labels them Icehouses) are apparent on the graph. The most recent of these is called The Pleistocene Ice Age and it began 2.6 Ma ago. The Pleistocene was preceded by 60 million years of slow cooling from the peak Hothouse conditions of the Late Cretaceous Period. The evolution of our species from arboreal primates began in the Pleistocene.

No one knows how long the Pleistocene will last but a comparison with previous Ice Ages suggests it still has tens of millions of years to go.

Climate Change over the Past 543,000 Years (the Latter Part of the Pleistocene)

Figure 2: The graph covers the period from 540 thousand years ago (540Ka) to present – the last 20% of the Pleistocene Ice Age. It shows air temperature (blue line) and atmospheric CO2 concentration (red line) above the Antarctic continent. The data comes from measurement of air bubbles trapped in ancient ice which has been recovered by means of deep drilling. Ice cores provide our best calibrated proxy data and offer around 20-year resolution. That data is broadly consistent with results from other types of proxy data from around the globe. Note: CO2 concentrations show good correlation with air temperature, but their highs and lows occur 500-1000 years after the corresponding peaks and troughs of temperature. This suggests that temperature controls CO2 with a multi-century lag, not the other way around.

During the Pleistocene, glaciers repeatedly advanced south and north from the poles, covering land and sea in mid to high-latitude areas with kilometer-thick ice, sculpting the earth beneath. Sea levels rose and fell by more than 100 meters. As a result, some species of plants and animals became extinct and new species (including ours) evolved. The habitats of almost all were widely redistributed. Again, and again and again.

If we bore down into the Pleistocene, we see a pattern of at least 45 advances and retreats of the ice. In the Early Pleistocene, the temperature peaks (interglacials) were regularly spaced at around 41Ka, but from around 1Ma the temperature peaks slowed to cycles at around 100 Ka. Note that the temperatures of these interglacial interludes, even at their peak, were much lower than what been normal for most of the Phanerozoic. The change from 41Ka cycles to 100Ka cycles is known as the Mid-Peistocene Transition. The longer 100Ka cycles are called Dansgaard-Oeschger Cycles after the two Danish scientists who first defined them. Figure 2 shows the last five of these D-O cycles.

It is widely accepted that the 41Ka and 100Ka cycles were caused by minor variations in the amount of solar radiation (insolation) reaching the earth as a result of cyclical variations in the earth’s orbit around the sun (known as eccentricity) combined with cyclical changes in the obliquity of the earth’s rotational axis relative to its the orbital plane. The two cycles are independent of each other. These astronomical events are called Milankovic Cycles after the Serbian mathematician/astronomer Milutin Milankovic who first defined them in 1914.

To summarise: we live in the Holocene, a Stage of the Pleistocene Ice Age. The Holocene is one of dozens of geologically-brief Pleistocene interglacials. Although the Holocene has overarching significance for the development of human civilisation, it has no particular geological significance. Any other point of view is human conceit (see footnote 2).

During the Eemian Interglacial elephant and hippopotami gamboled on mud flats of the River Thames. They retreated south when temperatures plummeted but, around 100,000 years later with the arrival of the Holocene, another species of large African mammal gamboled once again on the Thames.

Climate Change over the Past 12 thousand Years (the Holocene Stage of the Pleistocene Epoch (2))

Figure 3: Air and sea temperatures over the past 12,000 years measured from ice core data from Greenland and sea-floor sediment data from the Eastern Pacific. Greenland ice core data is from Vinther et al 2009: (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08355). Macassar Strait sediment data is from Rosenthal et al 2013: (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617). Compilation of the two data sets was done by Andy May. The correlation between two regions 9,000 km apart, using two different proxy methods, is compelling.

 Note the very steep initial rise in Holocene temperatures to a maximum around 6-9000 years before present (known as The Holocene Climate Optimum) followed by a slow and gradual decline to the deep trough in temperatures from around 200 to 800 years before present (known as The Little Ice Age). The upward temperature spike at extreme right is called the Modern Warm Period and it began around 200 years ago. It is only “warm” in comparison the preceding neo-glacial conditions. The graph shows that short-term temperature spikes like this are not unprecedented in the Holocene.

As you can see by comparison of figures 2 and 3, all the interglacials of the Pleistocene for which we have good data followed a similar pattern – a rapid 8-10° C rise in air temperature over a just a few decades, followed by a slow fall over the succeeding millennia. The relentless fall of global temperatures from the Holocene Climate Optimum matches this pattern and is an ominous pointer towards the next cyclical advance in the ice.

Will we survive the next ice advance?

 The Modern Warming Trend (which began around 200 years ago – a geological microsecond)- gives faint hope of a delay in the inexorable return of the glaciers. But when that happens, be it in 100-, 500- or 1000+ years’ time, as a species we will surely survive. After all, with lesser technology, we survived the last advance of the ice. But will our civilisation?

Our few descendants (as they shiver before a fire in their caves or trudge through the snow in their furs) will look back with puzzlement on the Global Warming concerns of their 21st Century ancestors (3).

The post Climate change explained in three graphs appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.