4.11.WHY A WARMER WORLD IS A BETTER PLACE TO LIVE

"That is to me the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?...Indur Goklany has assembled a massive collection of evidence to demonstrate two facts. First, the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide are dominant over the climatic effects and are overwhelmingly beneficial. Second, the climatic effects observed in the real world are much less damaging than the effects predicted by the climate models, and have also been frequently beneficial. I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence" Freeman Dyson

There are only advantages to having more CO2 and a marginally warmer world will make it a better place to live for the vast majority:

• Cooler and colder is always riskier as taught by the history of mankind. The great famines of 1315-22 (see note 120 p.102) (Baek et al., 2020) coincided with the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the Mount Tarawera eruption (Nairn et al., 2004; Hodgson and Nairn, 2005). Between 1310 and 1330, northern Europe saw some of the worst and most sustained periods of bad weather in the entire Middle Ages, characterized by severe winters and rainy and cold summers. This 1315-1322 period was marked by a dramatic death tool of up to 25% of the population in the cities and extreme levels of crime, disease, mass death, and even cannibalism and infanticide, followed by the famines of 1661-62 (known in France as the crisis of advent of the King Louis XIV) and also of 1692-93. All were due to the rain and the cold, with a little scalding (1693). At the time, after favorable harvests, the number of seeds one could eat per seed planted showed a ratio that could be as high as 7:1, but after unfavorable harvests it was as low as 2:1, that is, for every seed planted, two seeds were harvested, one for next year's seed, and one for food. By comparison, modern farming has ratios of 30:1 or more thanks to an extraordinary agricultural productivity due to fertilizers, mechanization, good weather and

CO2 bonanza. More generally, civilizations have historically endured hardships when the weather got cooler or worse became cold enough to create upheavals. The fall of the Ming dynasty450 when the last Ming Chinese

Emperor hanged himself in 1644AD (23 January 1368 – 25 April 1644) is a telling example, when the regime collapsed at the beginning of the 1640s, masses of Chinese peasants who were starving, unable to pay their taxes, and no longer in fear of the frequently defeated Chinese army, began to form into huge bands of rebels.

In this early half of the 17th century, famines became common in northern China because of unusual dry and cold weather that shortened the growing season; these were effects of the Little Ice Age. The famine and drought (but also occasional floods) in late 1620s and 1630s contributed to the rebellions that broke out in

Shaanxi led by leaders such as Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong. On 26 May 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng; during the turmoil, the Chongzhen Emperor hanged himself on a tree in the imperial garden right outside the Forbidden City. In Europe, the 1783 A.D. through 1784 A.D., Grímsvötn (Laki or Lakagigar) effusive eruption (14.7 km3 of basaltic lava) led to major disruptions, including famine and fluoride poisoning in several countries. In 1788 and 1789 there were poor harvests, this caused in France bread prices to rise in conjunction with falling wages, and hence led to further discontent and rural revolt. Even though the causes of the French revolution starting in 1789 and lasting 10 years are still debated among historians, the cold and unsettled weather for several years (Fuster, 1845) was the straw that broke the camel's back, as these events contributed significantly to an increase in poverty and famine. Noteworthy, in North America, the winter of 1784 was the longest and one of the coldest on record, a huge snowstorm hit the South; the Mississippi River froze at New Orleans and there were reports of ice floes in the Gulf of Mexico. There are other examples of a collapse of civilizations or of a meltdown of economies with massive societal disorders as colder is always risker for mankind. During the mid-seventies legitimate cooling scare, the CIA (1974) was perfectly aware of the risk and stated “The potential implications of a changed climate for the food-population balance and for the world balance of power thus could be enormous (...) In bad years, when the US could not meet the demand for food of most would-be importers, Washington would acquire virtual life and death power over the fate of multitudes of the needy. (...) More likely, perhaps, would be ill-conceived efforts to undertake drastic cures which might be worse than the disease; e.g., efforts to change the climate by trying to melt the arctic ice-cap”.

Demiurgic geo-engineering ideas were already around the corner, though better justified;

450https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Ming_dynasty

• Photosynthesis is stimulated by having more CO2 and plant productivity increases e.g. (Goklany, 2015; Schimel et al., 2015; Taub, 2010), both for the marine life as well as for all terrestrial ecosystems. Phytoplankton, sea algae and autotrophs are the substratum of all marine food web as zoo-planktons feeds with it and all the species further down the food chain depend on the primary productivity of the oceans and on the strength of the photosynthesis of the euphotic zone. Warmth and humidity of course favor the development of terrestrial ecosystems on land and there is no need of complex computer models to compare the exuberance and life of the tropical forest resting on warmth and rain and the dearth of the tundra or worse of polar regions where the cold annihilates most living species, where survive only a limited number of extremely well adapted forms of life. Naturally, “A warmer climate helps promote species diversity" says Munich zoologist Josef Reichholf;

• A warmer environment favors crops productivity and extension to higher latitudes. Since the end of LIA, the conditions have considerably improved to cultivate far more agricultural surfaces than otherwise possible (Goklani, 2015), rather than returning to a new cool period. Even a slightly milder climate extends the growing season, enhancing the food security of the populations. A more friendly climate also strongly decreases the cost of heating the housing and greenhouses where crops have to be protected to reach maturity;

• Many diseases that thrive during cold conditions, e.g. influenza and other respiratory afflictions, will be reduced by a warmer environment. This is worth noting as the positive aspects of a warmer climate on people's health are always underestimated (WHO, 2003). For example, Dr. Richard Tol, the director of the

Centre for Marine and Atmospheric Science, and a prominent economist with Hamburg University in Germany, dismissed the UN IPCC touted Stern Report on the economics of climate change as "preposterous". Tol has also asserted that the benefits of a warmer world are frequently overlooked. Tol noted that "warming temperatures will mean that in 2050 there will be about 40,000 fewer deaths in Germany attributable to coldrelated illnesses like the flu” according to a May 7, 2007 article in Der Spiegel (Stampf, 2007). Beyond diseases, one must just understand that people die more of cold waves and cold climate than of warmer conditions or even hot-waves. Mortality data from several countries, regions and cities with cold, temperate, subtropical and even tropical climates show that average daily mortality is even or sensibly higher in cold months than in warm months (Guo et al., 2014) and Vardoulakis et al. (2014) state “In UK regions, cold-related mortality currently accounts for more than one order of magnitude more deaths than heat-related mortality. In

Australian cities, approximately 33 and 2 deaths per 100,000 population are associated every year with cold and heat, respectively”. Goklani (2015) adds “The risk of death is higher in the winter not only in countries in cold climates, but also in Thailand and Brazil”. ;

• By slightly warming the Arctic region (not the Antarctic as seen in section), the contrast between cold polar air masses and hot and humid tropical ones is reduced and the encounter of these conflicting air-masses generates less adverse conditions that lead to less extreme weather events, contrary to what has been wrongly postulated by AGW theory advocates. Legates (2019) states “Warmer conditions, such as what we currently are experiencing, exhibit less climate variability than colder conditions. The Equator-to-Pole temperature gradient drives the poleward transport of energy in the climate system. Under a warmer world, the Tropics warm but the Poles warm even more. Consequently, the Equator-to-Pole temperature gradient lessens and the outbreak of much severe weather – driven by the interaction of cold polar air with warm tropical air – diminishes. Hurricane landfalls, for example, were much more frequent in South Carolina, New England, and China during colder periods”. Legates' statement is further supported by an extensive study by Liu et al. (2001) considering a 1,000-Year History of Typhoon Landfalls in Guangdong, Southern China, where they state “this article, we produce a 1,000-year time series of typhoon landfalls for the Guangdong Province in southern China, based on Chinese historical documentary records. Remarkably, the two periods of most frequent typhoon strikes in Guangdong (AD 1660–1680, 1850–1880) coincide with two of the coldest and driest periods in northern and central China during the Little Ice Age”. As rightfully pointed out by Leroux (1993), an increase of extreme events would result of a more severe and more regular confrontation of polar anticyclonic air masses arising from Mobile Polar Highs (MPHs) and colliding with warmer tropical or temperate air masses and would be a sign of a global cooling, not the opposite, which would just resume the neo-glacial trend that started some 5,000 years ago as displayed on Figure 35, p. 108. Such excursions of deadly MPH have recently happened such as the one that froze Moscow in 2011 (KZ, 2011) with temperature as low as -30°C, homeless people dying and others more lucky having only hands and feet freezing. This episode followed the 2010 Russian heat wave which was rightfully attributed by Dole et al. (2011) to natural variability due to a long‐lived blocking event, an anticyclone characterized by high atmospheric pressures

which refused to budge, forcing any cool air and rains to detour around it, acting as the equivalent of the winter MPHs but with an opposite effect. Leroux's disciples already see these events as the proof of the truthfulness of their Master's thesis and consider that they reflect a change in the global circulation, supposed to be speeding up, change that was according to them initiated in the 1970s. I agree with them that there is no connection with [CO2] changes, as these events have been observed many times in history. Interestingly, Nakamura et al. (2005) for the European heatwave of 2003 or Dole et al. (2011) for the Russian heatwave of 2010 concur that there was no means to forecast meaningfully these events just two week before they happened, even with super-computers permanently fed up with the latest data, on-site measurements, updated SSTs, aircraft real-time reports and more. How using similar software systems as those that are unable to predict 15 days ahead or even just a week ahead dramatic events like these heat-waves one could place any confidence into models supposed to tell us the what the temperature in 50 years will be? Let's be serious.

Schulze-Makuch et al. (2020) propose an interesting study where they recommend what has already been stressed here, i.e. that life generally speaking flourishes in warmer and wetter conditions (e.g. tropical forests) and struggles to survive in colder and dryer environments (e.g. Arctic, Antarctic, Siberia, etc.), which is really pushing open doors but given the hysteria about the minimal warming observed so far which would be more than welcome if it kept happening, is not a useless reminder. Schulze-Makuch et al. (2020) state “Life requires a certain range of temperatures, which is dependent on its biochemistry, and complex life on Earth has a narrower range than microbial life (Table 1). No empirical evidence is available, however, on what that optimum is, aside from the case of life as we know it on Earth. Based on our experience from Earth, the highest biomass and biodiversity is present in tropical rain-forests, and the least in cold polar regions (Brown, 2014; Kraft et al., 2011). Thus, higher temperatures than currently existing on Earth seem to be more favorable”.

Figure 123. Fraction of all-cause mortality attributable to moderate and extreme hot and cold temperature by country. Extreme and moderate high and low temperatures were defined with the minimum mortality temperature and the 2.5 th and 97.5th percentiles of temperature distribution as cutoffs. From Gasparrini et al. (2015).

As a picture is worth a thousand words, Figure 123 resulting from a study of more than 74 million cases by Gasparrini et al. (2015), show that cold, not heat, is by far the greater killer of humanity. Today, cool and cold weather kills about 20 times as many people as warm and hot weather. Excess Winter Deaths, defined as more deaths in the four winter months than equivalent non-winter months, total over two million souls per year, in both cold and warm climates.

Ironically, Arrhenius rejoiced of the possible perspective of a milder climate and stated “we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates" potentially making poor harvests and famine a thing of the past. Arrhenius was merely expressing a view that was firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness of the time: warm times are good times; cold times are bad. How could so many people forget this evidence? Especially among the most well educated part of the populations, e.g. researchers and climate scientists? Never forget that the consequences of the colder temperatures that plunged civilization into the so-called Little Ice Age for several centuries after 1300 were devastating. Summers were rainy, winters cold, and in many places temperatures were too low for grain crops to mature. Famines and epidemics raged, and average life expectancy dropped by 10 years. In Europe, tens of thousands of villages were abandoned and entire stretches of land depopulated. Is that what you would prefer?

When common sense is so much defeated, one must admit that their climate-science does not smell science at all but stinks politics all over the place. Science has been tragically corrupted and sacrificed on the altar of a new world agenda

made of social control of populations and world government projects in the hands of international bureaucrats, resorting to fears, be it COVID-19 or CO2, in order to frighten people and make them willingly submit to the agenda of the dominants. The next Mencken's quote looks tragically actual because even though it comes now already from some bygone past, it is yet still so relevant so many years later. His past insights to those whose lives are addicted to the seeking of power, or control, or fame, or money is still as valid today, as it was 70 years ago. The threat to the world is not man-made global warming or climate change. The threat to the world, as is always the case, is a current group(s) of humans who want to impose their values and visions on others.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." And, "The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it." H. L. Mencken451

Furthermore, it has become increasingly clear that high solar activity protects us from deadly viral mutations that appear related to an increase of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) and lead to further widespread pandemics. A recent paper from Kamath and Kamath (2020) states “Almost all the previous pandemics occurred during solar minimum years when the Sun spots were lowest or absent and when the solar activity was at the lowest. This study suggests that the present Covid 19 pandemic is triggered by the mutated viromes in bats from latitudes above 30 degrees N. The increase in cosmic ray flux during the solar minimum of solar cycle 24 has contributed to this”. This conjecture is also supported by Wickramasinghe (2020) who sees a direct relationship between the cosmic ray spike measured in late November 2019 and the on-spread of the recent pandemics.

Measurements of GCRs intensity and their modeled distribution (at various altitudes and latitudes) are performed by Matthiä et al. (2013) who show how geomagnetic shielding (strongly related to the solar wind) and primary particle intensity mainly influence the potential disruptions caused by GCRs on Earth. In that respect, one can conclude that GCRs have a double whammy effect, first acting on the global cloudiness and albedo changes and leading to cooling and unsettled weather during low solar activity cycles and second by triggering the onset of miserable sanitary conditions that plague mankind, which is just what can be observed over the last 2,000 years, when these circumstances were met. Over more recent timescales, Cliver et al. (1998) observe “During the past ~120 years, Earth’s surface temperature is correlated with both decadal averages and solar cycle minimum values of the geomagnetic aa index. Extrapolating the aa‐temperature correlations to Maunder Minimum geomagnetic conditions implies that solar forcing can account for 50% or more of the estimated 0.7–1.5°C increase in global surface temperature since the second half of the 17th ∼ ∼ century”.

Beyond this short-term effect and immediate consequences of the solar activity on our well being on Earth, this brief reminder of the role of the GCRs leads us not to forget our place in the Galaxy (Shaviv, 2003; Redd, 2016; Xu et al., 2016) as we are indeed traveling on this Earth spatial vessel and following our Sun located in the Orion-Cygnus Arm, between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms, orbiting the central part of the barred Milky Way Galaxy (which resemble UGC 12158) at a distance (orbiting at a radius) of roughly 25-26k light years for a diameter of our own orbit of roughly 15-16 kpc. This is our true fate, mankind keeps thinking that it can act on and control everything, climate included, when we are just passengers of a spatial body that can hardly care less of our future and undergoes its own life.

Finally, this warmer world might remain wishful thinking if Ollila's (2017a) analysis and model happen to be straight on, and it could well be. Ollila combines the natural variability of the climate reconstructed since the Little Ice Age with an anthropogenic contribution that he adjusts for a climatic sensitivity of 0.6° (thus still reasonably high). He takes the Sun into account in an estimate of natural variability according to 4 scenarios, and includes astronomical resonances (in particular the 60-year cycle) and accounts for past climate to within 0.09°C, which is much better than the complex IPCC CMIPx models. By taking into account the continuation of an increase of 3 ppm per year (i.e. more than 50% of the average 2 ppm observed), he concludes, in all scenarios, to a decrease in temperature from 2020 onwards. Projections between now and 2100 give the same temperature as in 2020 if the TSI does not change, but it would be 0.1 to 0.3°C lower if the TSI were to fall, which would logically be expected from solar activity cycle studies (Zharkova et al., 2015, 2019; Zharkova, 2020).

The Atlantic optimum that dates back to the 4th millennium B.C., happened just before the neo-glacial started (figure 35), and is known from forests reconstructions and palynological studies (Kalis et al., 2003; Marquer et al., 2014, 2017; Roberts et al., 2018; Zanon et al., 2018) and shows that a mixed forest of oak, hazelnut, alder and linden trees covered

451https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken – This quote is not an endorsement of Mencken ideas, more generally speaking.

the whole of northwestern Europe at that time. The average temperature was then higher than today's, because the plant associations characteristic of this period never reappeared. Comparing, over the entire Holocene, forests extension and the observed associations of vegetation gives a reasonable clue to whether the Holocene Climatic Optimum (HCO) was higher than now and by how much. With respect to vegetation and forest extension, Marquer et al. (2017) state that "The overall results indicate that climate is the major driver of vegetation when the Holocene is considered as a whole and at the sub-continental scale, although land use is important regionally". Then Kalis et al. (2003) Fig. 12 p. 14-15, can be used to see how the forests extension has kept decreasing since the HCO.

Finally, while exchanging with Michael Calvin MacCracken452, he asked me the following question “While criticisms are always useful to consider, does your book offer an alternative hypothesis for why such strong warming is presently occurring?”. My answer to him was the following: your reasoning starts from a supposedly observed " strong warming". Is it indeed? Is the current Modern Optimum (MO) very different from the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), the Roman Warm Period (RWP), or the Minoan (MiWP)? Do we have reasonable tools to answer that question as we are going to compare short measured time-series (maximum since 1724) to much longer reconstructed temperatures. What I'd like to stress here, is that there is only one certitude, the MO is still very far from the Holocene Climatic Optimum (HCO) that happened naturally in between [-9000/-6000 BP]. There are several strong evidences: a) the extension of the forests, well studied in Europe over the entire Holocene (Kalis et al., 2003; Marquer et al., 2017) and the associations of vegetation (mixed forest of oak, hazelnut, alder and linden trees covered the whole of northwestern Europe at that time) sensitive to the cold that could never re-establish themselves, because the MO remains way colder than the HCO, (Heiri et al., 2015; Roberts et al., 2018; Zanon et al., 2018) b) study by Bohleber et al. (2020) who investigate the neoglaciation history of high-elevation glaciers throughout the Alps showing a clear gradient in the onset of neoglaciation progressing from the higher summits of the Alps (> 4,500 m) that were ice-free before -9000 BP, down to 3,400 m around -6000 BP and finally since around -4000 m have gone down to a level of 2,700 m being characteristic of the neo-glacial regime. Within this ne-glacial that we're still in, two counter-trend warming are very visible and evidenced by changes in the altitude of the tree-lines (Nicolussi et al., 2005) see Figure 124, namely the RWP and the MiWP, the MWP is not very distinctive whereas the MO is starting to show off c) the global atmospheric and oceanic circulation that remains characteristic of the neo-glacial, i.e. the ITCZ is strongly shifted South and prevents the African monsoons to move North as they did when the Sahara was green 6000 years ago, see Figure 34.

Figure 124. Sequence of dated past neoglaciation events at high-elevation locations in the Alps. Note the general correspondence between glacier maximum age and its altitude. The blue shaded area indicates the period of continuous ice cover. Also shown are the tree line reconstruction from Kaunertal (Nicolussi et al., 2005). After Bohleber et al. (2020).

It is remarkable that Bohleber et al. (2020) state “Our dating of the ice just above bedrock indicates that the ice body at WSS453 formed earlier than (5.9±0.7) ka cal and has been glaciated continuously ever since. This implies that even the WSS summit location at 3500 m altitude was ice-free during an interval prior to (5.9±0.7) ka. (...). Likewise, at around 5.3–5.1 ka cal, no ice existed at nearby Tisenjoch, at 3210 m. The end of the so-called “Holocene Climatic Optimum” is also observed in Austrian stalagmite records, indicating the onset of a cooling period around 5.9 ka. During those warm periods, the tree line was up to 165 m above the 1980 tree line in Kaunertal , (…) summits around 3000–4000 m were likely ice-free during the Mid-Holocene or covered by glaciers distinctly smaller than today”. Another confirmation is

452https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_MacCracken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_MacCracken personal email exchange over “RG” on December 29th, 2020. 453WSS stand for the Weißseespitze summit glacier

given by the work of Rosenthal et al. (2013), who used, among others, Mg/Ca measurements in the benthic foraminifer Hyalinea balthica for reconstructing Intermediate Water Temperatures (IWTs) in various places. From thereof, these authors state “Our reconstructions show that IWTs at all depths were substantially warmer in the early and middle Holocene than during the late Holocene (Fig. 1). Specifically, IWT at 500 m was ~10°C between 10.5 and 9 thousand years ago (ka), increased to a maximum of ~10.7°C between 8 to 6 ka, and began decreasing after 6 ka, reaching ~7.8°C at the core top (~100 years B.P.)”. Not only do they confirm that the HCO was much higher than current MO using different proxies, strengthening all evidences available, but they also assert that the MWP was also warmer than now, latter observation that is also asserted by a completely different technique by Huang et al. (2008), using borehole temperature flux calculations.

Thus my take on Michael Calvin MacCracken's premise "such strong warming" is that the MO is still way colder than the HCO was and that I would not rate it unusual when compared to the MWP, the RWP or the MiWP each probably a little warmer than the previous one as in a “bear market trend” (see Figure 125). As far as the RWP is concerned, one remembers that Hannibal crossed the Alps in 218 BC by the "Col de la Traversette" (2,947 meters) the highest of the Alps with his elephants at the end of October (see p. 183) and that in no way, he would succeed doing that now, and certainly not this year (2000) with meters of snow there since early October. Still with respect to the RWP, as we reported, p. 102, Theophrastus (371 B.C.-287 B.C.) wrote that date palms could grow in Greece if they were planted, but that they could not bear fruit. This is the case today, suggesting that average summer temperatures in the southern Aegean in the 4th and 5th centuries BC were at least at a comparable level to those of today (see page 102). The illusion or the deception that current Modern Warming (MW) would be extraordinary both in magnitude and / or in its rate of change is unsupported by any evidence.

So having compelling evidences that the MO is not exceptional, what is the cause of it? First, one must observe that it started long before man-made emissions became significant and the reader remembers that Trutat (1876) stated long ago (see p. 12) «Since I have been exploring the Pyrenees, I see the glaciers melt before my eyes and in the Lys valley and in the area of Oo, they are receding at a frightening speed» and this was noticed in many places and is not a regional observation (Nussbaumer et al., 2011; Fig. 4 and 5). Then one must dismiss the fact that the warming which started for natural reasons, say 1800-1850, accelerated recently simply because SLR measured have not accelerated or marginally (see Figures 61 and 62).

Figure 125. One reconstruction of the air temperature of the Northern Hemisphere, i.e. at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet, derived from Greenland ice cores, GISP-2. It provides a brief context to show the wider natural range of temperature over the last 11,000 years, some variations exceeding ±3°C over a century or so (e.g. 8.2 kyr event). Also notice that At the beginning of the Holocene, the Central Greenland ice core record shows 10°C (18°F) of warming in 144 years, from 11,755 BP to 11,611 BP (May, 2020). From climate4you.com454 but also matches perfectly Fig. 5, p. 1219 given by Akasofu (2010) and Ball (2016). Data from ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/

Establishing that the system is not geocentric, i.e. that carbon dioxide does not regulate the temperature nor the climate on Earth is not enough, the second part of the question raised by MacCracken is “does your book offer an

454http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2 TemperatureSince10700 BP with CO2 from EPICA DomeC.gif

alternative hypothesis” as most of the time, even though all evidences point to the fact that AGW fails, AGW folks will return to it by saying “we do not have a better alternative, thus what else?” this is what MacCracken does by adding “Going back tens of millions of years and more, there is really no way to explain the large changes in climate that have occurred without changes in atmospheric composition playing a significant role. And so now humans are changing atmospheric composition by a significant amount”. This statement does not stand examination as one should remind that if we just go back 20-25 millions years ago (see p. 130), the distribution of plates and mountain belts is already so different that the global atmospheric and oceanic circulation must have been entirely incomparable to the one presently observed. From the western Alps to the distant Himalayan, there were subduction zones, epi-continental seas with a very large tethys and para-tethys, molassic basins, etc., instead of the current mountain belts. This appears as a much more potent climate-change driver (e.g. acting on monsoons and the entire circulation) than any CO 2 or other atmospheric change. I am always amazed when I read papers where the authors address very distant geological configurations and try to make CO2 changes the scapegoat for worlds apart that share next to nothing together, e.g. Klages et al. (2020).

So unless one is able to come up with an heliocentric system, even though the geocentric does not fit the bill, it will not be enough to deter the AGW proponents from supporting it, and they will always be reverting to it.

Then what is the "alternative hypothesis", the new heliocentric model? First, one needs to put things in a broader perspective, since the HCO, Earth's climate has been in a downtrend (for 6,000 years) mainly because the tilt (41kyr cycle between 22.1° and 24.3°) is reducing NH summer insolation and the 500-600 years fluctuations that have been reminded, i.e. RWP, MWP, and the MiWP, (the MO being just one of them) are super-imposed on the longer term global cooling trend. The MO may have been very marginally increased by man-made emissions, but the atmospheric sensitivity to CO2, albeit probably not null, is way smaller than asserted by IPCC. The anthropogenic contribution, if any, may in fact come much more from large scale irrigation and thus from a small observed increase of the RH of the lower troposphere (Pangburn, 2018) p. 265, water vapor being a much more potent GHG than CO2. In the end, there is no need to be looking for an extraordinary "alternative hypothesis" for this MO more than for the three preceding cycles that have already been mentioned (RWP, MWP, and the MiWP).

So many factors play a role and the Sun is the elephant in the room that IPCC refuses to see. We are probably gravely mistaken to consider it as such a stable star, the solar constant might only have its name constant, furthermore supposedly acting for the IPCC only through its TSI changes, when albedo changes are related to the solar wind, the global electro-magnetic activity of the Sun (not just TSI) and its influence on the Earth's geomagnetic field and GCRs action on the nucleation processes as convincingly evidenced by so many authors. These changes, coupled a) with variable volcanic activity throughout the ages both in terms of intensity, frequency and clustering of the manifestations, and b) with the reaction of the biosphere itself (see page 156) (Després et al., 2012; Bianchi et al., 2016), lead to more than enough triggers to modulate the low-pass filter oceanic calorimeter that stores long term heat and appears as one of the main drivers of the climate.

Thus, so many factors are intertwined, that an heliocentric representation is not going to be simply substituted to a geocentric one as what happens when a brutal paradigm shift occurs when people realize they've been mistaken for long. In fact one may envision slow progresses where each factor acting on the climate will progressively be evidenced and their relationships established until a satisfactory global scheme will be fathomed. CO 2 may have a place in that very complex climate framework to be established, but not only will it not be in the driver seat, but that could only be a very remote back seat. It stands forefront as the gas of life, this is its ultimate role, the real wizardry of that planet.