Roger Gros

We live on a historically cold world, where the average planetary temperature currently sits at a chilly 15°C. We are rarely reminded that Earth remains far colder in the current age than its long-term average of 22°C–25°C, maintained across the 541 million years of the Phanerozoic Eon. A planetary warming of two or three degrees is unlikely to trigger an existential crisis; historically, it never has under conditions comparable to today. The blunt reality is that we are still living through the Late Cenozoic Ice Age—the most extensive global cooling event since the Karoo Glaciation, which lasted 105 million years across the Carboniferous and Permian periods. By contrast, our current ice age began 34 million years ago with the initial glaciation of Antarctica. Humanity and our symbol-driven culture evolved against this cold, drying backdrop. We now inhabit its most intense phase: the Quaternary Glaciation, which has persisted for the last 2.58 million years. At the Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 26,000 to 20,000 years ago, massive continental ice sheets reached depths of 3 to 4 kilometers (10,000 to 13,000 feet). Modern humanity is fortunate to exist during the Holocene interglacial—a 11,700-year warm period during which virtually every artifact of human civilisation, along with all historical empires, emerged. This deep timeline reveals that while modern mammals are an ice-age-adapted lineage, human civilisation thrives in the warmth. Yet the present climate narrative relies on an institutional framework that largely disregards Earth's geological history. Orbital mechanics dictate the macro-climatic epochs of our planet over millennia, yet contemporary debate focuses almost exclusively on micro-trends from recent decades. Earth continuously responds to these orbital variations, first mapped by Milutin Milankovitch. On shorter timescales, climate behavior is driven by natural variability in solar irradiance, ocean circulation, atmospheric water vapor, and volcanic activity; over deep time, it is anchored by the slow movement of tectonic plates. The global oceans, atmospheric water vapor, and cloud cover account for the vast majority of the planet's radiative warming. Furthermore, the geological record shows that deep ocean outgassing of dissolved CO₂ typically lags thermal changes by centuries, unfolding over millennia as ocean masses adjust. To focus entirely on a trace gas is to overlook the scale of these broader planetary systems. It also overlooks the gas's biological utility: NASA satellite records confirm a widespread expansion of global green foliage over recent decades, driven significantly by carbon dioxide acting as a plant nutrient. Ultimately, the UN inspired climate agenda collides with thermodynamic reality. A modern industrial society requires the continuous high energy density provided only by conventional fuels—a baseload capability that intermittent sources cannot replace.