A recent Thunderbolts email update on the January 2012 conference in Las Vegas indulged in a spot of Doomsaying – was the Sun about to become over active? I don't know if this was inspired by some of the hype on the Internet involving 2012 and massive CME events with an origin in the Sun but it served to introduce the fact Robert Schoch is going to be a speaker at the conference – a figure well known to the public. He was previously attached to the Clube and Napier comet theory as it provided an explanation for a series of cold events in the Holocene and Pleistocene – such as the Younger Dryas episode. However, the Clube and Napier theory could not explain the sudden warming at the end of the Younger Dryas event, one of its biggest obstacles, and when Robert Schoch came across EU and plasma something clicked – it would seem. A sudden burst of activity on the Sun could explain that rapid warming that is as clear as day in ice cores and sedimentation cores. Bill Alley in his book on ice cores said it happened within 50 years – or less. That is very quick in geological terminology and may obscure further immediacy – weeks instead of years (with the emphasis on may). In other words, the warming appears to have happened as quickly as the onset of the cold weather at the onset of the Younger Dryas – and over the last couple of years a group of scientists, Firestone et al, have been trying to gain traction on their theory a comet or impact event was responsible for that even though similar events are known to have occurred on at least seven occasions during the Pleistocene and appear to continue into the Holocene on an irregular basis. Cyclemania might say otherwise but the various so called cycles do not seem to agree as closely as they should – or require adjustments. Schoch is not alone as Timo Niroma, a Finnish catastrophist (see In the News post a few days ago) turned to the Sun for inspiration and has plotted a lot of the solar cycles, working on the basis that planetary resonance also plays a role. It is therefore not a surprise that Schoch has turned his attention to plasma and the Sun belching CMEs in the direction of the Earth.
Schoch's talk at the conference has the title, 'The Catastrophic Termination of the Last Ice Age' which is not strictly the geologically correct term for what is the end of the Younger Dryas event and not the end of the last glacial which occurred many thousands of years previously – terminated incidentally by what was known as the Oldest Dryas event, lasting twice as long as the Younger Dryas. This might of course be an artifact of dating methodology but suffice to say the ice sheets had shrank long before the Younger Dryas event – in which some of them grew back again. In Scotland, for example, a glacier re-emerged on Rannoch Moor. It is recognised as a cold episode of climate from the flora that lived during the period, and is named after the dryas plant, the habitat of which is the tundra. However, it was preceded by two episodes of warming – divided by another brief cold spell, designated the Older Dryas event. It is in the warm Bolling and Alleroed periods evidence of humans in northern Europe first occurs following the end of the last glacial. The ice sheets had clearly receded. Hence, the end of the Younger Dryas is defined as the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene. It has nothing to do with the Ice Age itself. Now, Schoch is clearly addressing himself to the general public and by claiming he is referring to the end of the Ice Age he is somewhat double sided. Firstly, he is in particular concerned with the end of the Younger Dryas – but the same thing must apply to the end of the Oldest Dryas event too, which involved an equally rapid warming event around 16,000 years ago. He is not alone in skewing such information as even in the popular consensus model in which global ocean currents are blamed for cooling and warming the climate the Oldest Dryas event timescale is used to obscure the fact that the Southern Ocean warmed at the same time as the North Atlantic – but it suited the theory for the south to warm before the north. Anyway, Schoch's talk, as I understand the blurb, will concentrate on events around 12,000 years ago (specifically 9700BC) and will probably include his take on the strange archaeological discoveries made at Gobekli Tepe in SE Anatolia, circular stone structures on a high hill overlooking Haran. Schoch was inspired after watching David Talbot's video, Symbols of an Ancient Sky, as he remembered seeing similar donut like and intertwining shapes and the same humanoid figures and bird like heads on the rongorongo on Easter Island. In turn, he saw a comparison with the geoglyphs at Nazca – drawings made on the ground. Returning to 9700BC he has suggested that plasma hitting the surface of the Earth may have heated and fused rocks and triggered a global warming spell that in turn melted the ice sheets, vaporised lakes and ponds and caused earthquakes and so on, even affecting the rotation and axis of the Earth.