Wandergate : The Century-Long Silencing of Earth Crust Displacement
Part 1
By Kyle Bennett
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I think it is about time to coin a new “Gate”, to describe a very old problem with mainstream science: the silencing of the theory of earth crust displacement. One of the ways it has been marginalised as an explanation of long term climatic change is because dubious, and sometimes patently absurd, alternative theories have become more popular among the scientific establishment. They have clung onto these absurd theories tenaciously, using their power and authority. In many ways this mirrors the psuedoscientific global warming movement, where an unproven, physically impossible theory of climate change has gained a hold over academia. In short, the sham-science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was prefigured in the “cover-up” of polar wandering, which goes back well over a century. Following the revelations of Climategate, where the corruption and intellectual trickery of scientists studying man-made global warming was exposed, the authority and integrity of “Earth Scientists” is being increasingly questioned. The Climategate debacle simply confirmed what researchers have been saying for many years, as Christopher Booker details in The Great Global Warming Swindle, for example. In a nutshell, CO2-induced global warming, and the greenhouse effect itself, are highly dubious, unproven ideas. They have only gained a hold over academia due to the political nature of the whole movement, and the almost limitless funding available for scientists who suppport the theory. As shown in Slaying the Sky Dragon, the actually concept of a greenhouse effect is nonsensical, and violates Newton’s 2nd law of thermodynamics. |
The greenhouse effect was never discussed by top thermal physicists prior to the AGW movement because it simply doesn’t exist. The idea of “radiative forcing”, where energy is reflected back down to the earth surface and then further warms it, is kind of like saying water can flow up a hill.
Similarly, geologists have proposed alternatives to polar wandering in order to explain the rise and fall of Ice Ages, and why the Arctic and Antarctic were once tropical. (I discuss this in more detail in my upcoming book, Polar Wandering and the Cycle of Ages — you can read the introduction here [ go to Part 2]). They have also tried to account for the rapid shifts between tropical and glacial climates, found in many parts of the world, but have failed miserably. But this failure has been “covered-up”, using many of the tricks now associated with Climategate.
One of the tricks of AGW proponents is hiding and avoiding inconvenient facts about past climates when they conflict with their theories. This was done by the infamous Michael Mann, with his Hockey Stick, which doctored the history of climate change over the last few thousand years. The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) – when it was warmer than today – was “removed”. As so-called climate sceptics rightly asked: How can we attribute the high global temperatures today to human activity, when it was even warmer in the Middle Ages, before the Industrial Revolution? Fraudulent research papers were written by Mann, which claimed that the MWP wasn’t warm at all, based on discredited proxy data. His Hockey Stick graph was then used to prove that 20th century global warming was unprecendented, and therefore man-made. He used unscientific statistical processing of his raw data to create this scary looking graph, which the likes of Al Gore featured prominently in the feature-length cartoon An Inconvenient Truth.
This trick of hiding climatic evidence has long been used by Ice Age theorists who ignore and ridicule Earth Crust Displacement. The orthodox view is that Ice Ages are caused by a drop in global temperatures. But as Hapgood brilliantly showed, this is simply factually incorrect. Many parts of the world were as warm during the last Ice Age in North America than they are today, while some places were actually warmer, including Siberia and the Arctic Islands. This is a fact. Mammoths, horses, bisons and other herbivores lived on the most northerly island archipelagoes of the Arctic, right up to and including the height of the Wisconsin glaciation of North America. This evidence comes direct from mainstream geologist themselves, although they usually avoid discussing its implications. But despite this, many geologists still claim that the whole of the Arctic region was much colder in the last Ice Age, and covered in ice sheets. The evidence is ignored, and geologists tend nowadays to rely on computer simulations of what the climate Arctic should have been like during the Ice Age. A lot of evidence for a warm Ice Age Siberia turns up during investigations by mainstream geologists, but they nearly always find a way of disregarding it, such as saying it is “unreliable” or “inconclusive”. Warm-climate pollen is said to have been “long-distance transported”; radiocarbon dates on wood and plants are dismissed as unreliable without any justification, other than that they conflict with the orthodox view.
Another absurd example is the Ice Age history of Europe. The mainstream scientific media still perpetuate the myth that Europe was covered in mile-thick ice sheets at the Last Glacial Maximum, despite so much evidence contradicting this, as I show in my upcoming book, Polar Wandering and the Cycle of Ages. Again, most of the maps of the Ice Age are based on computer simulations, which are based on the assumption of a global ice age, not on actual evidence. The general public are blatantly misled, and rarely notice that they are looking at a pretend, computer-generated scenario. (As an example, see the Wikipedia page for “Ice Age”, which has a CLIMAP map of Europe, clearly misleading their readers, and giving the impression that the map is emirically accurate). So the deception over the Medieval Warming Period is a storm in a tea cup compared to the deception over the Ice Age climatic history of Europe and Siberia. Comuter simulations were being relied upon to defend the dubious idea of a global Ice Age long before AGW was invented. And now they use the same tricks to “predict” global warming, and to simulate the effects that CO2 has had on the climate in the past. Oh what a tangled web we weave…
The rest of the “tricks” in the Wandergate: Part II (below on this page). But first we need to go back in time to the orgins of the whole saga, and what seems to be the fall from grace of the earth sciences, which have become less empirical, more dogmatic and more compromised by the funding system. He that pays the piper calls the tune. In contrast, many Victorian scientists were wealthy aristrocrats, who, although not without prejudices, were at least less dependent on funding. Nowadays research expeditions to the Arctic are funded by governments, big foundations and oil companies, who all have their own agendas and generally a poor track record on honesty!
So let’s start at the beginning: 1866. As I discussed in an earlier article (Earth Crust Displacement and the British Establishment ), Hapgood’s theory of Earth Crust Displacement was originally developed by the President of the Geological Society, Sir John Evans, in a paper titled “On a possible Geological Cause of Changes in the Position of the Axis of the Earth’s Crust”. As Geikie explained in The Great Ice Age (1887):
“Mr Evans has ingeniously sought to account for the remains of large trees that are found in Greenland, and for the traces of glacial cold in this country [i.e. Britain], by considering whether it might not be possible that the external crust or shell of the globe had actually slid round its fluid or semi-fluid nucleus, so as to bring the same areas of the external surface under very different conditions. Thus it was suggested that lands, which at one time basked under a tropical sun, might, in the slow course of ages, be shifted to some more northern region, while countries which had for long years been sealed up in the ice of the Arctic Circle might eventually slide down into tropical latitudes.”
This idea received strong opposition from Sir Charle Lyell, the “Father of Geology”. Lyell believed that the earth was a solid lump or rock, without a molten mantle, so was against both Continental Drift and Earth Crust Displacement. Geikie goes on to describe how Evans’ theory was overshadowed and effectively silenced by Sir Charles Lyell, who proposed an alternative theory to explain how the Arctic could once have been tropical:
“But the theory which has taken firmest hold of the geological mind, is that which the late Sir Charles Lyell upheld so strenuously. This theory maintains that the climates of the past may be accounted for by that continuous change in the distribution of land and sea which has been going on all through the geological ages. There is no fact more patent that that sea and land have frequently changed places.
“Lyell conceived, that, if land were massed chiefly in the region of the equator and the tropics, the climate or the globe would be such that tree-fern might grow luxuriantly on any islands that might happen to lie within the Arctic or Antarctic Circle. For the land, heated to excess under the equatorial sun, would give rise to warm currents of air, which, sweeping north and south, would carry with them the heat of the tropical, and thus temper greatly the climate of higher latitudes.”
The major flaw in the theory of Lyell’s described above is that it is utter nonsense, as Geikie explained in the following paragraphs, where he completely destroys Lyell’s argument. It is entirely wrong, as energy is in fact mostly transported to the poles by ocean currents, so having a lot of dry land near the equator would actually make the polar regions slightly colder, as there would be less energy soaked up by equatorial waters. It shows a complete misunderstanding of climatology and thermal physics, and should never have even been proposed, least of all by the “Father of Geology”! But Lyell also appears to be the Father of Wandergate, as he clearly opposed earth crust displacement for ideological reasons because he believe it contradicted his doctrine of Uniformatarianism. As Geikie concludes:
“But, however extensive such changes [in the global distribution of land and sea] may have been, yet their influence could not so far affect the general climate of the globe as to confer at one and the same timeupon the whole norhtern hemisphere, down to low latitudes of the temperate zone, a severe arctic climate, and at another period a climate warm and genial, with no extremes of heat and cold, but a kind of perpetual summer.”
But bizarrely enough, Lyell’s theory overshadowed the brilliant work of Sir John Evans, whose theory of polar wandering/earth crust displacement as a cause of climatic change is based on sound thermal physics and climatalogy. Indeed, many years later none other than Albert Einstein agreed that the physical principles were correct. As Einstein told Hapgood, regarding his theory of Earth Crust Displacement:
“I find your arguments very impressive and have the impression that your hypothesis is correct. One can hardly doubt that significant shifts of the crust of the earth have taken place repeatedly and within a short time.”
So why did Lyell’s idea become so popular, other than due to his authority and power over academia? I think that question answers itself. It’s hard to imagine that anyone as intelligent as Lyell could believe such an idea. Even in Lyell’s day, this would be easily proved incorrect by physicists. So it seems that the main reason he proposed and defended this theory was to overshadow Evans’ work, which Lyell believed was a threat to his philosophical doctrine of Uniformitarianism. Lyell was not just a “scientist”, which in the modern sense of the word simply means a specialist, academic researcher. He was a Knight of the Realm, an ideologue, a member of the British intelligentsia during the height of the Empire. So like the original “-Gate” – Watergate – this saga started right at the heart of the Establishment.
Wandergate: The Century-long Silencing of Earth Crust Displacement
Part 2:
By Kyle Bennett
In the first part of this series, titled “Wandergate: the Century-long silencing of Earth Crust Displacement”, I started to explore how the suppression of Charles Hapgood’s theory of polar wandering – usually known as Earth Crust Displacement – actually goes back almost 150 years, and represents the original Climategate. In fact, in many ways Climategate is simply an extension of Wandergate; a “collective flight from reality”, and a serious corruption of the raison d’être of Science: the search for truth.
The Part 1 finished off by discussing the work of the Father of Geology, Sir Charles Lyell, and how his dubious, nonsensical theories on long-term climatic change overshadowed the work of Sir John Evans, the President of the Geological the Gelogical Society. Evans was the first to fully develop the theory of Earth Crust Displacement, in a paper titled “On a possible Geological Cause of Changes in the Position of the Axis of the Earth’s Crust”, written in 1866. It was seriously debated by the Geological Society, as well as the Royal Society, which included such greats as Charles Darwin among its fellows. However, Lyell was instrumental in silencing the theory, without ever properly challenging its key arguments.
Later on, the theory of Continental Drift was used to provide an alternative to Polar Wandering, so as to explain the widespread evidence of glaciation in the Carboniferous. Although there is good evidence that continental drift does indeed happen, reconstructions of the former positions of the continents are little more than guesswork. But these guesses have become accepted facts, such as the semi-mythical Pangaea (and you don’t need me to explain the occultic connotations of that name, nor of the predicted future continent, Pangaea Ultima). But continental drift and earth crust displacement support each other, and are not rival theories. One of the tricks of geologists is to convince the general public that Earth Crust Displacement (ECD) was “beaten” by Continental Drift, making the former obsolete. Continental Drift supported ECD by demonstrating that the crust can and does slide around on the semi-fluid layers below. So like Lyell’s questionable theorising, continental drift was unjustifiably used to suppress and overshadow ECD, when in fact the Continental Drifters and Polar Wanderers ought to have worked together to create a unified theory of crust dynamics. So here’s Hapgood’s take on it:
“Since changes in the positions of the poles relative to the continents now apparently had to be accepted, perhaps continental drift would provide a less sensational way out than displacements of the whole lithosphere. It is quite true that the geomagnetic evidence very early indicated clearly that at the very least both things had happened; nevertheless, such is the frailty of the human mind, scientific or not, that displacements of the lithosphere have been pushed into the background, and all the attention has been paid to continental drift.”
This tendency to overlook ECD has continued. More and more evidence has turned up showing that glaciations were widespread in the Carboniferous and other geological Periods. It has been found in far-flung places like Ethiopia, Egypt, Antarctica, and Australia. These glaciations were widely spread across the latitudes, with the implication being either that glaciers reached down into the Tropics, or that the earth’s crust slid around, moving the continents in and out of the polar zones. The former can be discounted, as such low latitude glaciers would mean that no warm climate regions would be left on Earth. This is nonsense, as many warm-climate species survived throughout those Periods, such as species of Coral, cold-blooded reptiles, etc. So the only other option was to move the earth’s surface. But this option was unacceptable to geologists, so they proposed that all the continents must have been stuck together in those days, and all huddled around the poles (mainly the South Pole). This theory was popular, not because there was good evidence for it, but because it provided an alternative to polar wandering. And in a classic case of circular reasoning, they used this widespread evidence of glaciation as proof that the continents were stuck together.
So let’s look at the evidence for a supercontinent called Pangaea. The idea was first proposed by Alfred Wegener, and was little more than unfounded speculation. (Not that there’s anything wrong with speculation per se.) But lo and behold, it just so happens he was exactly right! How prophetic! Or rather a self-fulfilling prophesy, as geologists were already determined to prove the existence of a supercontinent before they even started looking. You find what you are looking for, as they say. But as the climatologist Michael Oard explained, continental drift reconstructions are little more than story-telling, with little basis in empirical science – just like the non-empirical science behind man-made global warming.
One way of reconstructing the drift of the continents is to estimate when they were once stuck together. If a geologist finds the bones of a species of reptile in South America and also in Africa, dated to the same period, they would conclude that these continents were stuck together then. But this is, frankly, useless evidence. All parts of the earth’s surface have risen and fallen frequently, changing land to sea and sea to land, so there would have been land bridges between the Americas and Europe. And there were land bridges, such as those connecting Northern Europe to Canada. So as there is solid proof that the Arctic region was often tropical in the past, reptiles could easily have migrated between the two land masses.
Another line of evidence was the discovery of similar rock formations on opposing shorelines, which were said to have split apart when the continents drifted away from each other. This is also very dubious evidence. With such vast lengths of coastline, similar formations are bound to turn up on different coasts, simply by the laws of probability. So using this evidence to help reconstruct the continental jigsaw puzzle is highly flawed.
The most well-known argument is that some of the continents have similar shapes, indicating they were once stuck together. This is claimed to be solid proof, but is not. It is often claimed to be so obvious as to be self-evident. But the thing is, the shape of continents simply do not match at all. Besides, I’m not sure how playing with jig-saw puzzles can amount to a rigorous scientist method, even if it is a planet-sized one! Out of the entire coastline of the world’s continents, only a part of South America and Africa bear any resemblance, and even this is a very poor match. The other problem is that the continents have changed their shapes enormously over the years due to the rise of fall of the land. Vast swathes of the major continents were once ocean floors, so the continents would not have looked anything like they do now. And as Hapgood pointed out, the difference between the thick continental crust and thin oceanic crust has been greatly exaggerated in order to support the idea that the shapes of the continents have remained broadly unchanged. Put simply, their jigsaw-puzzle reconstructions required that the continents remained the same shape. If the shape of the jig-saw pieces kept change, the game would be unplayable.
The last line of evidence is from palaeomagnetism. Using this information, geologists can reconstruct the movement of the continents. This subject is too complicated to deal with fully here. But what we can say is that these reconstructions are dubious, usually based on computer modelling and a lot a statistical trickery to make the data fit the theory that the continents were once stuck together, before slowly drifting apart. What the palaeomagnetic data does in fact shows is that ALL the continents have been rapidly moving around and much faster than continental drift allows. This has been recognised by many modern researchers, including Joseph Kirschvink of the Californian Institute of Technology and Adam Maloof, who both support a hyphothesis of rapid polar wandering (shifts of the whole lithosphere, see “True Polar Wander”), moving the continents back and forth between the tropical and the poles.
One of the tricks used by geologists is to hide the detail of the palaeomagnetic data by simply averaging out all the pole positions recorded over, say, 20 million years. This hides any rapid polar wandering, and can then be used to construct slow, steady “polar wander paths” which fit in with the narrative of slow drifting apart of the continents. Gelogists euphemistically call this averaging out of the data “smoothing”; I have a less polite name for it, which I won’t repeat here. It is similar to the tricks used by Climategate scientists such as Michael Mann, who doctored the history of climatic change over the last few thousand years (for example, “getting rid” of the Medieval Warm Period) in order to support the claim that twentieth century global warming was unprecedented (preceded by a “smooth” period of stable temperatures), and hence man-made.
So to summarize, geologists have bent over backwards to prove that continents were all stuck together in a number of supercontinents, because this was the only alternative to rapid polar wandering, by clustering all the land masses around the pole so as to explain why glacial evidence is found in all four corners of the planet.
But in fact, even if their hypothesis is correct, it does not really explain the glacial evidence. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Polar Wandering and the Cycle of Ages, even allowing for the existence of supercontinents, those glaciations were too widespread to be compatible with the survival of tropical species of the Carboniferous. Here’s an excerpt from my book:
“[The Carboniferous Period] was a time of abundant life, including amphibians, sharks, coral species, and a wide array of plants…..There were warm-climate forests in those times, such as the ‘coal swamps’ whose plants were then compressed over the eons into fossil fuels. There were also ice sheets during the Carboniferous and the Permian periods, in places such as Ethiopia, Arabia, Egypt, Australia, India, Madagascar, Oman, Yemen, Antarctica, South America and South Africa. One of the main lines of evidence for the existence of the supercontinent of Pangaea is the widespread distribution of glaciations in the Permo-Carboniferous, implying that those continents under glaciation must have all been fitted together in the southern polar zone.
“But even if there really had been a supercontinent of Pangaea around that time, these glacial deposits would still have been distributed over a very wide range of latitudes. For example, if Antarctica was near the pole, forming part of what became Gondwanaland once Pangaea broke up, then places such as Ethiopia would have been in or near the Tropics, based on the alleged size and shape of Pangaea. The conundrum is thus similar to that in the late Neo-Proterozoic, where glacial evidence is spread all over the earth. Furthermore, a British geologist called Jane Francis notes that there was a massive ice cap in the Sahara 400 million years ago. She also claims that about 300-250 million years ago the “whole” of the southern hemisphere was covered in an ice cap, or a number of smaller caps, for 80 million years.
“So the million-dollar question is: where would all these biologically advanced, warm-climate creatures and plants go, who are known to have survived throughout the Carboniferous? If the world really did become covered in ice down to very low latitudes, all these families of species would have become extinct. All those groups of species which made up the coal swamps would have become extinct, and plant-life would have been destroyed……..”
So it would be fair to say that the history of Continental Drift is a highly speculative science, which has been abused by geologists seeking an alternative to the heretical theory of earth crust displacement. It mirrors Climategate in that its basic arguments are pretty groundless and easily refuted. It then depends upon statistical manipulation, computer modelling and overlooking the rapid climatic changes which strongly support the hypothesis. Likewise, Climategate revealed how these same tricks have been used to fit the historical climatic evidence into the global warming “narrative”, with inconvenient facts being hidden by statistical manipulation, and sometimes outright lies.
Ok that’s enough for one blog! In the next blog of the series, Wandergate: Part III, I’ll look at the more recent dubious alternatives to polar wandering, and how they are supported by almost no evidence whatsoever. They are founded upon the dogmatic assumption (not a theory, only an assumption) that the poles do not rapidly move. I’ll look at how the super-warm climates found in the Arctic’s geological record have been explained by scientists using completely indefensible theories. They are as indefensible as the theory of Anthroprogenic Global Warming, and in fact predate AGW by many years. Would AGW have ever have gained acceptance if the earth sciences hadn’t already have been corrupted for many years?
You can also view this article at http://kylebennett.blog.co.uk/