A Punk Eek Theory for Climate?

Something is rotten in the state of science:
The ghost of Stephen Jay Gould is lurking in climatology.

George Orwell is alleged to have said, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” Today’s entry is a contender: a “study” alleging a pattern of Punctuated Equilibria* in Earth’s “climate evolution.”

*Punctuated Equilibrium was a theory rescue device proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the 1970s to explain away the lack of fossils of transitional forms that Darwin had predicted. Darwin’s required transitional fossils have not been found, the two said, because evolutionary time was “punctuated” by explosive speciation with long periods of stasis (equilibrium) in between. The emergence of new species in traditional Darwinian gradualism might be portrayed as a long string of random letters gradually evolving into words. By contrast, speciation in “punk eek” happens in periodic bangs with millions of years of boredom in between:

…!…………………!………………………….!…………………………………………….!…………………..!……………………………

Intellectuals in Big Science and Big Media will have a field day with a new “study.” It has everything: evolution, climate change, evolution, jargon, acronyms, evolution, graphs, charts, evolution, equations, climate politics, misanthropy and evolution. What’s not to love? An internet search already shows some news media latching onto this “study” and publicizing it. Little do they remember that many evolutionists were upset at Gould and Eldredge for admitting publicly that the lack of transitional forms was the “trade secret of paleontology.”

So if the legacy of punk eek was embarrassment for Darwin, what will it do for climate science?

Huge tipping events have dominated the evolution of the climate system (Phys.org, 9 Aug 2023). [Note: The byline at Phys.org claims this press release is from the University of Copenhagen, but nothing about it appears on that university’s website. The authors of the study come from France, England, Poland, China, and America. That is why we could not quote Hamlet precisely in our subtitle, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”]

An analysis of the hierarchy of tipping points suggests that during the last 66 million years, two events set the scene for further climate tipping and for the evolution of the climate system in particular. If the anthropogenic climate change of today leads to complete deglaciation, the evolution of Earth’s climate will be influenced on a geological time scale, the authors suggest.

Where did the authors come up with their “suggestions”? Tell us without any if’s, and’s, or but’s please. This is science, you know. No fair raising the perhapsimaybecouldness index to make an argument.

Let’s see how many times they can use the e-word.

Inspired by a theory of evolution

The new insight into the history of climate change was inspired by the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which ranks evolutionary changes into hierarchies.

The idea was introduced in the 1970s by Eldredge and Gould as an alternative to classic evolution theory. Punctuated equilibrium proposes that some evolutionary changes determine the evolution of a species more than others. It also explains why species have a tendency to adapt in short evolutionary spurts, rather than gradually over time.

Rousseau and colleagues speculated that a similar approach of ranking the importance of historical climate changes through tipping events might prove equally beneficial. For that, they applied advanced statistical methods to two series of climate data with clear signs of critical transitions.

The results indeed suggest that the idea of hierarchies in the evolution of the climate system can lead to new insights. The analysis reveals that two major events out of ten dominated the evolution of the Earth’s climate system over the last 66 million years.

That’s eight uses of “evolution” out of 13 in the short article, and 4 uses of “suggest.” If suggestion is an appropriate tactic for a scientific paper (as opposed to empirical proof), then observers should be able to engage in it as well. The high repetition rate of the e-word “suggests” a case of inebriation with Darwine.

So if the authors believe that Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law occurs in short bursts instead of in gradual change, is that how stuff happens with climate, too?

The Source Paper

A punctuated equilibrium analysis of the climate evolution of cenozoic exhibits a hierarchy of abrupt transitions (Rousseau, Bagniewski and Lucarini, Nature Scientific Reports, 23 July 2023).

The paper only refers to evolution 15 times, but with the same idea. Just as species “emerge” by the Stuff Happens Law (and with a bang, according to punk eek theory), big climate swings emerge at so-called “tipping events” (TE). Tipping events occur at tipping points (TP).

Here, we wish to take a different angle on the problem. Instead of focusing on the individual tipping points, we attempt to capture the global stability properties of the system. We take inspiration from the application of the Waddington epigenetic landscape to describe morphological evolution and from the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which associates periods of stasis (characterized by relatively stable morphology) with the emergence of new species through abrupt changes (named cladogenesis) from a previous species.

This is an argument from analogy. In science, finding similar patterns across phenomena sometimes leads to productive discoveries. But there is nothing in any biological theory of evolution (gradual or punctuated) that translates to climate change. The climate does not undergo mutations. It does not reproduce. Therefore, it does not participate in natural selection. But Stuff Happens, and so in that regard, a similarity may exist (see “Looking for Laws to Make Evolution Scientific,” 24 April 2023).

Classic book on Darwinism by the late journalist Tom Bethell.

What if evolution is not true? Then the entire thesis of the paper is a house of cards. And if the Earth is not as old as they think (remember dinosaur soft tissue, decay of the Earth’s magnetic field, flat continent-spanning megasequences of strata, etc.) then the house of cards falls down. Or, it never stood up in the first place. The authors are imagining things that never happened. No amount of jargon, equations, graphs, citations, peer review, publicity or bluster can make a fake god send fire.

The paper uses the acronym TP (tipping point) over a hundred times. We think the traditional meaning suggests a more appropriate use for the paper.