Category Archives: Science And Society

Real Climate Science

This is what it looks like:

Although the origin of these YDB markers remains speculative, any viable hypothesis must account for coeval abundance peaks in NDs, magnetic impact spherules, CSps, and charcoal in Lake Cuitzeo, along with apparently synchronous peaks at other sites, spanning a wide area of Earth’s surface. Multiple hypotheses have been proposed to explain these YDB peaks in markers, and all but one can be rejected. For example, the magnetic impact spherules and NDs cannot result from the influx of cosmic material or from any known regular terrestrial mechanism, including wildfires, volcanism, anthropogenesis, or alternatively, misidentification of proxies. Currently, only one known event, a cosmic impact, can explain the diverse, widely distributed assemblage of proxies. In the entire geologic record, there are only two known continent-wide layers with abundance peaks in NDs, impact spherules, CSps, and aciniform soot, and those are the KPg impact boundary at 65 Ma and the YDB boundary at 12.9 ka.

And note, this, like volcanic events, isn’t the sort of thing amenable to modeling.