Michael

Earth is in the Late Cenozoic Ice Age — the global temperature of 15°C is still far colder than the long-term historical baseline of 24°C. Yet this week the United Nations launches COP31 in Türkiye, a lavish two-week gathering that puts the climate agenda back on the world stage. But this is only temporary. The world no longer cares. This global warming agenda has been running for 40 years and brought little more than fear, of economic collapse and industrial chaos. However, the physical reality remains: Earth is technically in an ice age, defined by permanent ice at both poles year-round. Humans evolved and still live within the Quaternary Glaciation, which began 2.58 million years ago. And 10% of the world's land area remains covered by glacial ice. By comparison, the combined footprint of every town and city on Earth accounts for only 1 to 3% of total land area. Glacial ice covers 15 million square kilometers (5.8 million square miles) — roughly a third of its extent during the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum (26,000 to 19,000 years ago), when ice sheets reached their most recent maximum. The Antarctic is the largest and thickest ice structure on Earth by far, reaching up to 4.8 kilometres in depth (3 miles) and holding 90% of the world's ice volume. It accounts for around 85% of total global glacial ice and remains the planet's single largest source of fresh water. Spanning roughly 14 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles), Antarctica covers about 9.3% of Earth's total land surface. Overall, land covers only 29% of Earth's surface, while oceans cover 71% to an average depth of 3.7 kilometers (2.3 miles). Forests cover roughly 31% of land and the deserts 33%. Critically, the oceans hold roughly 86% of the active global carbon reservoir and 91% of retained heat energy; by contrast, the atmosphere holds a mere 1 to 2%. For four decades, public policy has been driven by forecasts of soaring temperatures and runaway crisis. Yet these predictions are still only scenarios. In the real world, outside the newsroom narrative, planetary dynamics continue. The Late Cenozoic Ice Age has endured for 34 million years, initiating the original glaciation of Antarctica. The primary drivers were tectonic shifts across interconnected continents. These crustal plate movements redirected ocean currents and fundamentally altered global thermal distribution. Orbital anomalies — the Milankovitch cycles of eccentricity, tilt, and precession — combined with the thermal isolation of Antarctica as Australia and South America drifted northward, locked in these cool planetary conditions. Modern human civilization and every major agricultural breakthrough developed entirely within the current Holocene interglacial, which began just 11,700 years ago.

When the IPCC’s high-emissions baseline scenario (RCP8.5) was introduced in 2011, it projected extreme end-of-century runaway warming, which the media framed as reality rather than low-probability extremes. Yet today’s global average temperature of roughly 15°C is still around 9°C colder than the 24°C average spanning the 538-million-year Phanerozoic Eon (Judd et al, Science 2024). Nevertheless, RCP8.5 drove eye-popping news headlines for fifteen years. It was invoked annually at COP climate summits — costly junkets where delegates and jet-setting officials gathered at luxury destinations to mandate global energy policy. Now, as the IPCC tacitly moves away from these extreme upper-bound scenarios ahead of its Seventh Assessment Report (AR7), the ceiling for high-emissions projections has been quietly lowered, even as open debate remains sidelined. Instead of runaway temperatures, the planet has experienced broad net greening, documented extensively by NASA satellite observation. CO₂ — currently hovering around 420 parts per million — remains among the lowest atmospheric concentrations in Earth’s geological history. Dry air is 99.9% nitrogen, oxygen and argon; tropical water vapor exceeds CO₂ concentrations by up to a hundredfold, while planetary cloud cover covers roughly 68% of Earth's surface at any given time. The push to rapidly dismantle traditional hydrocarbon fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas — targets the foundation of the Industrial Revolution and modern prosperity. Hydrocarbons still supply roughly 81% of the world’s primary energy today. By contrast, wind and solar account for only around 6% of primary energy, despite trillions of dollars in cumulative subsidies and mandates over recent decades. By forcing a premature retreat from reliable hydrocarbon energy systems across Western nations, UN-aligned policies have fostered economic stagnation at home while transferring vast industrial capacity to Beijing. China now controls over 80–90% of the global supply chain for wind turbines, solar panels and critical battery components — powered overwhelmingly by the world’s largest fleet of coal-fired power stations. Today, China produces over half the world’s steel and accounts for more than a third of global human-caused CO₂ emissions. FIGURE: Phanerozoic global surface temperature curve over the past 485 million years, showing present-day temperatures near geological lows (Data: Judd et al, Science 2024).