Evolving in this low oxygen environment, the first life appeared around 3.6Ga. A few hundred million years later primitive plants (cyanobacteria) had evolved the ability to split carbon dioxide into its constituent components of carbon and oxygen using solar radiation as an energy source. This biochemical process is known as photosynthesis. The plants used the carbon to make the materials of life, releasing the oxygen back to the atmosphere. As a consequence, the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere slowly rose. The solar energy was not lost: the greater part was stored by the plant in the chemical bonds of its organic compounds.

Excepting only the energy of radioactive elements, photosynthesis is the most efficient energy storage system that we know.

Between 2.5Ga and 1.8Ga, photosynthetic processes continued to evolve and become more efficient, leading to a dramatic increase in the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere. This is referred to as the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE (if one can consider a process lasting several hundred million years an event). Today the atmosphere contains around 20% oxygen.

The reverse process to photosynthesis is called respiration. In respiration, plants power their life activities by burning their stored carbohydrates in oxygen, releasing CO2 back to the atmosphere.

Iron makes up 10-15% (by weight) in basaltic rocks. The early crust was dominated by rocks of basaltic composition.

Iron has two valency states: ferrous iron, written Fe 2+ (or 2 electrons short of the full set) and ferric iron written Fe 3+ (3 electrons short). The metal thus has great capacity for combining with elements of negative charge, particularly oxygen, ever hungry for a positively charged valency partner. If only a small amount of oxygen is available, iron forms low-oxidation ferrous compounds. Where there is abundant oxygen, it forms high-oxidation ferric compounds. There is an important distinction between the two: ferrous iron compounds are generally soluble in water; ferric iron compounds are not.

In the low oxygen atmosphere of the first 2 billion years of earth history, chemical erosion of basaltic rocks at surface produced soluble ferrous iron compounds which, washed to the sea, slowly accumulated in the oceans of the world. Trillions upon trillions of tons of dissolved iron. During the GOE, over a relatively short geological span of a few hundred million years or so, that reservoir of ferrous iron became oxygenated to ferric iron which, being insoluble, settled as chemical sediment to the ocean floor to form thick iron rich sequences of great thickness and lateral extent. In later geological periods, chemical sediments were dominantly carbonates; in the late Archaean and early Proterozoic, it was ferric iron.

These distinctive iron rich sequences are known as Banded Iron Formations (BIF) and are found in all the preserved shield areas of the world. Brazil, North America, India, Africa, Russia and Western Australia. They are the source of ore for over 90% of our iron and steel. BIFs contain around 30% iron but can be locally upgraded, by natural processes, to 60-65% iron. Western Australia alone exports almost one billion tons per year of high-grade iron ore.

Banded iron formation in the Karinjini National Park, Hamersley Range, Western Australia. Image by the WA Tourist Department

But another process was at play during the GOE.

Atmospheric oxygen is chemically corrosive. The GOE supercharged erosion of all exposed land surfaces especially as back then there were no land plants to bind soils and constrain river channels. Beginning around 2.5Ga, increasing floods of sediments poured off the land to fill shallow basinal seas around continental margins with thick sequences of sandstone and siltstone. At the base of these sequences, interspersed with terrigenous clastic sediment, are Banded Iron Formations.

Abundant, cheap iron and steel support the skeletal frameworks of our civilisation. From bridges to buildings, ships to railroads, trucks to turbines to tanks, we owe our ready supply to the Great Oxidation Event, and the fossil remains of plant material with which to smelt it.

The post The Great Oxidation Event appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

My first job in industry was with the exploration arm of a large international mining company. It involved a lot of core logging.  The department was organised along strongly hierarchical lines. Geologists at point in the field were regarded as mere data-collecting operatives, core logging automatons capable of so many feet per day, unimportant pawns on the board. We were not expected to think. Our data were passed up the line for interpretation by office-based superiors. Said superiors then passed down instructions on where the next hole should be drilled, or the next sample taken. From time to time, they would make trips to the field for brief supervisory visits.

When this happened, we pawns referred to them as “seagulls” – as in: “they fly in, shit on everyone, then fly out again” (1).

But never, of course, to their faces.

Seagulls, with attitude

Fortunately, not all my early career supervisors were seagulls.

After a few years, I moved on to work for much smaller (junior) exploration/mining companies. There, geologists worked in small teams where the more experienced among us could effectively mentor those with less. This is the best kind of mentoring: learning on the job, watching what experienced geologists can achieve and carefully noting how they do it (and, sometimes, how not to do it).  At every level, all were expected to contribute. Critical decisions were discussed within the team. Never a democracy of course, but all opinions were heard and we felt involved in the process. The result was steep learning curves, identification with the company and committed efforts to contribute to its success.

It is important to listen to what someone says, but much more instructive to observe what they do. 

Outside mentoring schemes, such as that organised annually by the Australian Institute of Geoscientists (AIG), are well meaning programs but have limited effectiveness. Early career geologists sign up because they hope to advance their job prospects by expanding their network of contacts. Nothing wrong with that, but it does nothing to advance practical exploration skills.

It is long since I heard the term seagulls used in the pejorative sense of this post. Perhaps that’s because I eventually became a seagull supervisor myself, although I always strove not to deserve that epithet.

Are exploration groups managed better these days, or are we just more polite and deferential? Has the Aussie larrikan spirit been lost in a sea of conformity?

******

(1) I made a quick search on the internet for information on my use of the word “seagulls” but in vain.

I found many pages on the “spiritual” meaning of seagulls, but I doubt many summer holiday beach goers see them that way.

The PETA website piously protests phrases implying animal abuse (e.g. “Killing two birds with one stone” or “There’s more than one way to skin a cat”). But these are powerful metaphors, removing them from the lexicon would merely impoverish our language with no benefit to animal welfare. And who would want to skin a cat these days anyway, apart from a taxidermist or (allegedly) a dodgy Chinese restauranteur?  

But PETA have nothing to say about seagulls. I conclude my usage is an Australian original, popular in the 1970s.

The post Seagulls appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

Structural engineers need to master this stuff to stress-test bridge design. Economic structural geologists need to master this stuff to define ore controls.

FOR A .PDF OF THIS POST, CLICK BELOW

STRESS AND STRAIN

The post The Mathematical Description of Stress and Strain under Brittle Deformation appeared first on Roger Marjoribanks.

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 consumption and known reserves, the power station will run out of coal by around the year 2300.

With the closures and projected closures of coal mines across Australia [4], Tarong is set to become the longest-lived and cheapest source of electricity 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 made a living drilling water bores for farmers. Nobby had told Bill that around the headwaters of the Yarraman and Meandu Creeks (north-flowing tributaries of the Burnett River, 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 the South Burnett Region 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 tasked with geologically logging this hole. It was collared on the top of a low ridge in the Meandu Creek area: a hill clothed in dry grass, scrub and stands of Eucalypt trees with some clearing for pasture on the lower slopes. All now long swallowed up by the later mine.

Prior to drilling, although outcrop was poor, I attempted to make a surface 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 only. Along the new drill access track the dozer blade had exposed outcrop of a soft, rubbly, buff-coloured sediment which I confidently identified 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 (layer 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 is very 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 Queensland pub in late ’67 or early ’68.

That geologist was Bill Johnstone. His decision to follow up on Nobby’s 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 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 $16 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 (4) 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 almost one new coal-fired power station per week and currently emit 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 $16 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 (5).

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 (6).

Meanwhile global coal consumption and atmospheric CO2 levels reached record highs in 2025 (7).

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 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 (8) 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 (9) 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 (10), (11).

We are living in a golden age of agriculture.

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% ! (12).

Humanity is thriving. There is no “existential crisis”.

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.

In 2019, in a performative stunt for Time Magazine, António Guterres conclusively demonstrated that the oceans are not boiling. The poor chap 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 defining feature of their profession. And few politicians ever see a passing bandwagon parade that they don’t want to join. No doubt the majority of the members of these groups are sincere and well-meaning people who see themselves as noble Saviors of the Planet. But they have neither the wit nor the wisdom to realise that the wheels of their band wagon are wobbly and about to fall off and the cheering crowds are thinning as activists move on to more fashionable causes. Where once they shouted, “Climate Action Now”, today they shout, “Free Palestine” or ”Globalise the Intafada”.

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 (13), 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 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 (14), but for the heavily invested old, the process can take much longer. Dissenters soon learn that objection carries a cost that their conformist colleagues never pay.

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 (15).

It is instructive at this point to pause and consider…

A brief History of Earlier False Science Scares 

Eugenics theory, defined and named by Francis Galton in 1883, was born out of late Victorian ideas of Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism. Committed Eugenicists believed that that people like themselves (educated, middle-class white men) had achieved their privileged status as a result of their superior genes, while the poor were poor because they had inferior ones. Since genes are hereditable, the eugenicists held that the human gene pool would be improved by restricting the breeding of the industrial working-class poor through various coercive means, while at the same time offering money and other incentives to rich white folks to persuade them to have more children.

Throughout the western world Governments moved to implement eugenics programs on the belief they were “Following the Science”. Tens of thousands of compulsory or coercive sterilisations of poor working class women were carried out in the United States and Sweden with the full approval and encouragement of the law.

But the most enthusiastic adopter of eugenic theory was the National Socialist Government of Germany between 1933 and 1945. The Nazis added mass murder (both sexes, all ages) to their eugenics toolbox. The belated realisation in 1945 that path of Eugenics had led to the gates of Auschwitz finally discredited eugenic theory. A better scientific understanding of how heredity actually works 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).

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.

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 full details of the late 20th Century Fat Scare in an earlier post of mine called Fear of Fat.

But that which turns around, comes around. What replaced the eugenic pogroms of the first half of the 20th century and the fat scares of the second half to terrify the inhabitants of the 21st? -  Climate Change.

As the American philosopher George Santayana gloomily observed in 1906:

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

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 double down on their alarmist predictions. They do not see reality as evidence of their extremism, but as evidence that they were not extreme enough.

So, in these dog days of 2025-26, 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 popularised the quote in a speech to the House of Commons in 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 cynically changed its name from Global Warming to Climate Change. The change gave an easily remembered alliterative handle to their cause and was rapidly adopted by doomsday cultists.  It had the additional advantage of allowing climate scientists to attribute any future extreme weather event – heat or cold, flood or drought, calm or storm, over-abundance or scarcity – to rising CO2 levels. It was a theory immune to falsification because, for every bad event that happened, they were able to argue “rising atmospheric CO2 levels caused it”. Correlation means causation, right? But a theory that can explain everything, predicts nothing.

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

(4) Averages obscure individual reality. If Elon Musk walks into a bar, everyone there becomes a billionaire, on average. No one experiences a global average temperature: a global average telephone number would be about as useful. 

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

(6) In the northern Autumn of 2025, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney indicated he would approve completion of the 2000km 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 to refineries in the western and mid-western United Sates.

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

(8) 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…

(9) 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

(10) 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/

(11) Another reason for the ever-increasing yields of all major food crops is the ever-increasing use of nitrate (NH3) fertiliser, a product known as urea. Elemental nitrogen is the major component of the atmosphere – abundant, ubiquitous and free. It is converted (hydrogenised) to nitrate by the Haber-Bosch Process, which gets its hydrogen from natural gas. The cost urea is essentially the cost of natural gas.

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

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

(13) 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.

(14) On 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 and 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 already yesterday’s thing. But Science memes last a good deal longer.

(15) 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 foundational book of all modern physics, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by the notoriously non-collegial Isaac Newton in 1687; the theory of the Evolution of Species by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1856 [1]; the grand unification of electricity and magnetism (electromagnetism) in a paper by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865 [2], the Special and General Theories of Relativity by Albert Einstein in two papers published in 1905 and 1916 [3]; the discovery by Edwin Hubble [4] that billions of galaxies exist beyond our Milky Way; the theory of Alfred Wegener published in 1912 that whole continents can move across the face of the earth [5]; and the discovery of the helical molecular structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson, published 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 cited as Castelvecci et al.: but the two little words “et al.” are doing a lot of heavy lifting. 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 Charles Darwin, in his 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. If you are Head of a Research Department mandate that all papers emanating from your unit carry your name as co-author (see HERE). Droits de Seigneur (Professorial rights).

6.  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.

7. 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.

8. 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].

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

 12. 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” St. Mathew Gospel, 25:29

Hyper-authorship, pal review, salami slicing, pay-to-publish, droits de seigneur, 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 17th century English translators put the idea much better).

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 circles the sun and not, as the scientific and theological paradigms of the time held, the other way round. Those who promoted Copernicus’ mathematical arguments were fiercely persecuted (6). 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 saved his life by making a public recantation, but was put under lifetime house arrest, and his books on astronomy were banned. But the battle was by then won. Although the Church’s ban on his works remained for the next 200 years, this was more bureaucratic sluggishness than anything else.
2. In 1883, English polymath Francis Galton, influenced by Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection and late Victorian ideas of Social Darwinism, 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 and North America, politicians such as Sydney Webb, Arthur Balfour, Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain; literary figures such as George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells; scientists Leonard Darwin (Charles Darwin’s son), Marie Stokes (who so wanted perfect grandchildren that she disinherited her son for marrying a short-sighted girl), A.J. Haldane (evolutionary biologist), Sir Ronald Fisher (biostatistician), Sir Cyril Burt (posthumously disgraced for scientific fraud), Julian Huxley, Charles Spearman (proposer of a fully inheritable factor “g” for innate intelligence), Arthur Jensen (enthusiastic follower of Spearman) and the economist John Maynard Keynes, supported the movement from the 1900s to through to the 1960s. In 1931, the British Eugenics Society managed to put up a Bill in the UK Parliament for the “Sterilization of Mental Defectives”. Fortunately, it was rejected. 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. In the USA, forced sterilisations began in the early 1900s. In 1927, in an 8:1 opinion on the test case Buck v Bell, the Supreme Court of the United Staes ruled that a forced sterilisation carried out by surgeon John H. Bell on Carrie Elizabeth Buck was constitutional. The victim, Carrie Elizabeth Buck was no imbecile, but a poor, powerless black woman incarcerated by the State of Virginia for the “crime” of feeble mindedness and promiscuity: the sole evidence being that that she was an orphan who, at the age of 18, 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, ever innovative, added mass murder to their inherited eugenics toolbox. The post-war realisation that the path of Eugenics led to the gates of Auschwitz discredited the Eugenics movement. A better understanding of how heredity actually works put the final nail in its coffin.
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 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 (8). 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 idea had by then become the near 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: always the bellwether of  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 few dissenting scientists (presumably from the 1.1% minority of the survey) were sidelined, cancelled or fired. The Mathew Effect in operation. But eventually – it took 50 years – publication of heroic clinical trials involving hundreds of thousands of people tracked over periods 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 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. For more information and detail on the great fat scare (lipophobia) of latter half of the 20th century, go to my earlier blog post Fear of Fat 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. On her lower half: ghillie brogues, knee-high hose with tassels and sgian-dubh, tartan kilt secured by a broad black belt from which suspended on silver chains a long and hairy sporran. On the upper half: black jacket with silver buttons over which was thrown a tartan plaid secured at the shoulder by a large cairngorm and silver brooch. On her head a black Glengarry cap with red checker trim (cath dath), tassel, 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 in the world 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, perhaps mockingly, called it a philibeg, or little skirt. Both Rawlinson and the Chief wore the new dress, and it’s 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 design of dark tartan in forest green and navy-blue. This quickly led to their nickname the Black Watch (in Gaelic: Am Freiceadan Dubh). But the nickname had a double meaning by referring to the black hearts of those who would fight for the English.

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 an army line Regiment and their plaid replaced by a kilt, topped with the red jacket with contrasting regimental facings of the British soldier.

For the subsequent history of the Black Watch and other Highland Regiments, see footnote [4].

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 [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 excuses. The designs, along with 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. He 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 event was a great success. The Highland Scots 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 wealthy Lowland Scots) flocked to the Highlands to buy similar estates where they could act the role of Clan Chiefs and slaughter the local wildlife – bigger, more numerous and wilder than anything available in England. They bought land and built their neo-Gothic homes and hunting lodges, as V & A had done, from Clan Chiefs eager to sell out their tenants for a dollop of cash. There, wealthy upper-class Englishmen pretended to be Clan Chiefs while the Clan Chiefs pretended to be upper-class Englishmen.  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; families sought employment in the rapidly-industrialising Lowland cities or emigrated to North America or the Colonies. The Highlands became depopulated and remain so this day, an event known as the Highland Clearances.

Scattered across lonely highland glens, crumbling walls of roofless cottages are all that is left of the lost population.

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.

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, especially if he has good legs (but thick knee-length hose with broad turn backs covers many deficiencies).

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. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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 no life expectancy more than 70 years?   Definitely not.

 ******

The post The Invention of Scottish History 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.

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