Planetary Weather &
Habitability
Snowball Earth · Ice-Cap Cycles · Societal Collapse · Carbon Storage · Ammonia as Clean Fuel
This post places the entire blog's subject matter — megalithic civilisation, catastrophe, devolution — within the widest possible frame: the planetary climate cycle that both enables and destroys complex societies. The clean energy section addresses the present moment in that cycle.
Ice Ages, Interglacials & the Milankovitch Cycle
Living through the receding and amassing ice caps is a regular condition of life on Earth. To consider this widest frame of climate change is to have free perspective on habitability — which ensures justifications for both the current status quo and the historical megalithic demise on a rational basis. Considering only the modern world's small time frame, we have a limited basis for causes, where the decline of ice caps may be attributed to heightened population, the excelling of technological means, and subsequent global warming affected by CFC release and ozone layer breakdown. But in the widest frame, ice cap cycles are not an emergency. They are the rhythm.
Milankovitch cycles — the periodic variations in Earth's orbital eccentricity (~100,000 year cycle), axial tilt (~41,000 year cycle), and precession (~26,000 year cycle) — are the established astronomical driver of ice ages and interglacial periods. NASA confirms these cycles cause variations of up to 25% in incoming solar radiation at mid-latitudes. We are currently in an interglacial warm period. The next glaciation would naturally commence in approximately 10,000 years — but current greenhouse gas concentrations may delay or prevent it entirely, according to research published in Climate of the Past (Ganopolski, 2024, doi: 10.5194/cp-20-151-2024). The Younger Dryas impact event at approximately 12,800 BCE — confirmed by platinum layer evidence across four continents — was a superimposed catastrophic event on this background cycle, triggering a 1,300-year mini ice age within the current interglacial. That event is addressed in full in the Apkallu post on this blog.
The rise of a successful society is dependent on the declination of the ice caps — where alteration of the environment causes melting, populations and technologies expand. A society is effectively rewarded by disregarding nature and often essentially accelerating the melting, in what may be an inevitable demise of long-term prosperity. This is not a modern observation. It is the pattern of every civilisational arc in the geological and archaeological record.
The Habitability Spectrum — Snowball Earth to Water WorldWhere Civilisation Is Possible & Where It Isn't
Paradoxically the most stable. Predictable winter storm gales. Seismic activity mitigated by ice-mass loading. No cyclones, no typhoons, no category-5 hurricane infrastructure destruction. The technological requirement to maintain civilisation is extreme cold management — significant but consistent. The megalithic society may have been engineered for exactly these conditions: subterranean infrastructure, resonant heating, food provision through controlled systems independent of surface agriculture.
The window in which complex surface civilisation is possible. Stable enough for agriculture, warm enough for diverse populations, cold enough for predictable seasons. We are near the peak of this window. The megalithic civilisation built its greatest achievements in the early interglacial recovery after the Younger Dryas. We are in the same window's latter phase — with the added variable of anthropogenic acceleration toward the Water World end of the spectrum.
The most chaotic state. Without polar ice as a thermal buffer, the atmospheric heat differential between equator and poles collapses — producing extreme, unpredictable storm systems. Weekly cyclones, daily weather events requiring technological response. The economic gap between those who can afford to condition their local environment and those who cannot becomes unbridgeable. Maintaining a computer, a hospital, a supply chain, in real weather — becomes the civilisational challenge.
The interesting matter of fact is that a society may prosper today at the detriment of the long-term sustainability of a general populous. The Earth without ice caps ensures promptly a peak of chaotic weather in which technological requirements to achieve a norm are also at a peak. The gap between the economic range of poor and wealthy would be most extreme — where the ability to condition a local control over the weather, and ensure a standard of living-well, is held at a decreasingly feasible rate as human hostility rises.
On the scale from the Water World to the Snowball Earth, the Snowball Earth is the most secure. You can guarantee only winter storm gales — predictable, manageable, engineered for. The Water World is the least secure: the unpredictability is the threat, not any single event.
What the UN Has Not Done & What It Should
When considering both societal progression on a technological foundation, and where technological progression is a factor of the inclination or declination of the ice cycle — this has not been formally assessed. Not by the United Nations, which claims some authority on the science of climate change. An assessment executed on the basis that a conclusive standard may be ascertained by any society — so that a medium is reached where sustainability is normalised throughout new and impending conditions — should always have set economic factors which are public concerning supplies, labour and wealth.
The IPCC's mandate covers anthropogenic forcing — human-caused additions to the greenhouse effect. Its models and reports are calibrated to the 1850–present baseline and focus on decadal to centennial timescales. What it does not formally model is the intersection of anthropogenic forcing with the Milankovitch background cycle — specifically, whether current warming will prevent the next glaciation entirely, and what the societal implications of a permanently ice-free interglacial would be across civilisational timescales. That assessment does not exist in the formal literature.
All societal projections assume the continuation of the current magnetic field orientation. A geomagnetic reversal — the flipping of the Earth's magnetic poles, which has occurred multiple times in geological history and for which we are currently overdue by several hundred thousand years — would eliminate every microchip on the planet in a single event. The magnetic shield that protects electronics from solar radiation would invert and temporarily collapse during the transition. No climate model or societal sustainability assessment formally incorporates this variable. It is the unknown that makes all other projections contingent.
Looking to the future should be familiar, when simultaneously looking at the incredible feats of the megalithic society evident until only 14,000 years ago — and when the last most extreme weather event of a cataclysmic meteoric impact finally ended what had been a thriving technological society. That society survived multiple Milankovitch cycle transitions. It did not survive a superimposed impact event. The lesson is not that climate change is manageable. It is that civilisational resilience requires engineering for the worst-case scenario, not the average.
It would not be a stretch to assume most people will give up trying to alter conditions in a Water World and live wholly with nature as any animal does, if and when maintaining some kind of computer is near impossible in the avoidance of real weather. Indeed the societal norms held dear as a rational standard for technological excellence may ultimately become the alien standard — where the prevailing non-globalised inhabitants of remote jungle islands appear more humane than not, and most evidently sustainable by any standard.
Australia's Position — Victim of Northern Hemisphere Pollution, Potential Leader of the TransitionThe Ozone Hole, UV Exposure & the Asymmetry of Atmospheric Damage
Australia occupies a uniquely unjust position in the planetary climate equation. The CFC pollution that created and sustains the Antarctic ozone hole was produced almost entirely in the northern hemisphere — by the refrigeration, aerosol and industrial chemical industries of Europe, North America and the Soviet Union. The atmospheric consequences, however, fall disproportionately on the southern hemisphere.
The Antarctic ozone hole — first detected in the early 1980s, confirmed by NASA in 1985, caused by northern hemisphere CFC emissions — has resulted in a thinning of ozone above Australia of approximately 5%, with near-complete ozone loss over Antarctica in spring. Ozone-depleted air from the polar vortex periodically migrates northward, passing over southern Australia and New Zealand. Australia already receives higher natural UV radiation than the northern hemisphere because the Earth is closer to the sun in January (southern summer) and because the southern hemisphere atmosphere is cleaner — less industrial particulate matter to scatter and absorb UV. The combination of higher natural UV and ozone depletion produces Australia's world-leading skin cancer rate: the highest per capita on Earth. The 2023 ozone hole reached over 26 million km² — nearly twice the area of Antarctica, the largest in years. The 2024 hole extended ozone depletion through to December, exposing Antarctic marine ecosystems to UV index 14 during summer — more than double pre-ozone-hole levels. (University of Wollongong, October 2024; Australian Antarctic Division; University of Melbourne Pursuit; NASA)
The Montreal Protocol (1987) has slowed CFC accumulation, and the ozone layer above the northern hemisphere is projected to fully recover by the 2030s. The Antarctic hole — the one that damages Australia — is not projected to close until the 2060s. Australia suffers the damage for another four decades from pollution it did not produce. This is not a minor diplomatic irritant. It is the clearest possible demonstration of the asymmetry at the heart of the planetary habitability problem: the societies that produce the pollution are geographically insulated from its worst consequences. The societies that bear the consequences are geographically, politically and economically least positioned to force change.
Australia is simultaneously the most UV-damaged inhabited continent on Earth and the country best positioned — geographically, geologically and in terms of renewable resource endowment — to lead the clean energy transition that could prevent further acceleration of the Water World trajectory. That position has been systematically suppressed by coal and gas industry lobbying for three decades. The suppression of ancient high technology at Giza — described across this blog — and the suppression of modern clean energy technology share the same structural logic: incumbent power protecting incumbent infrastructure.
Ammonia as the Transition Vector — The Global Players & Australia's Role
Within the clean energy transition, green and blue ammonia as a hydrogen carrier represents the most viable near-term pathway for decarbonising industrial energy in the Asia-Pacific — the region responsible for the largest share of current and projected coal consumption. Ammonia can be produced from hydrogen and nitrogen, shipped as a liquid at moderate pressure, and co-fired in existing coal plants at 20% blend ratios, reducing emissions without decommissioning the plant or retraining the workforce in entirely new systems. The technology is proven. The obstacle is political and industrial incumbency.
Japan — the world's most advanced ammonia co-firing programme. JERA (Japan's largest power generator) has demonstrated 20% ammonia co-firing at the 1,000 MW Hekinan coal plant and targets 50% by 2035. Japan's Green Innovation Fund has allocated ¥2 trillion to the hydrogen and ammonia transition. South Korea — Korea Southern Power Co's 2,044 MW Samcheok plant is targeting ammonia co-firing under the Korean Clean Hydrogen certification scheme, with Korean consortium partners actively seeking supply agreements with Australian producers. Saudi Arabia / NEOM — ACWA Power and Air Products' $8.4 billion NEOM green hydrogen and ammonia project targets 1.2 million tonnes per annum of green ammonia for export by 2026, powered by 4 GW of solar and wind. Western Australia — uniquely positioned with existing gas infrastructure (Perth Basin), proximity to Asian markets, world-class solar and wind resources, and brownfield oil assets convertible to carbon storage. The ARENA-backed Murchison Green Hydrogen Project targets 900,000 tpa of green ammonia. The WAH2 Clean Ammonia Project (NH3 Clean Energy) entered FEED in August 2025, targeting first production 2029. Pilot Energy's Mid West Clean Energy Project — combining Cliff Head oil field conversion to 2.5 million tpa carbon storage with blue hydrogen and clean ammonia production targeting 1 million tpa — received Korean Clean Hydrogen certification in October 2024 and Declaration of Greenhouse Gas Storage Formation in June 2024. (CSIRO HyResource; World-Energy; Energy Magazine; pilotenergy.com.au)
The co-firing model is the critical bridge. A coal plant burning 20% ammonia immediately reduces emissions by 20% without capital replacement of the generation asset. For South Korea and Japan — both heavily coal-dependent and both geographically unable to build sufficient domestic renewable capacity — Australian clean ammonia is not an ideological choice. It is an engineering necessity. The obstacle is not technical readiness. It is the coal and gas lobby's sustained pressure on Australian federal energy policy, which has delayed investment decisions, limited government support for project financing, and created the regulatory uncertainty that makes institutional investors reluctant to commit to first-of-kind projects.
Australia's DCCEEW 2024 National Hydrogen Strategy projects $50 billion in private sector investment and 16,000 jobs by 2030 from the hydrogen industry. ARENA's Hydrogen Headstart programme, announced as the largest government investment in Australia's developing renewable hydrogen industry, provides grant support — but the gap between market price for renewable hydrogen and production costs remains the primary commercial barrier. Australia's first hydrogen minister was appointed in WA in 2021. As of 2025, not a single large-scale green ammonia export facility is in production in Australia. The projects exist. The approvals are being obtained. The technology is proven. The financing gap — sustained by policy uncertainty produced by fossil fuel lobbying — is the single point of failure. (DCCEEW National Hydrogen Strategy 2024; Energy Magazine, March 2025)
The connection to this blog's central thesis is not rhetorical. The suppression of ancient high technology — the pyramid as clean energy system, the Barabar chambers as resonant therapeutic infrastructure, the fish-farming hydraulic network as zero-combustion food production — and the suppression of modern clean energy transition share the same structural logic: incumbent power structures protecting incumbent infrastructure at the cost of civilisational resilience. The Annunaki who built Giza were, on the evidence, operating a zero-combustion energy system powered by the Earth's own frequency. We are, twelve thousand years later, still burning things.
The common thread across these posts: a pre-catastrophe civilisation operating at zero combustion across energy, food and healthcare — and the 12,000-year devolution that followed its destruction. The clean energy transition is not progress toward an unknown future. It is recovery toward a demonstrated past.
The blog's broader argument converges here. The megalithic civilisation that preceded the Younger Dryas impact — the society that built the Giza complex, the Barabar chambers, Göbekli Tepe — was, on the evidence, engineered for planetary climate instability in ways that modern society is not. Subterranean infrastructure immune to surface weather events. Food provision systems independent of agriculture. Energy generation from the Earth's own resonant frequency rather than combustion. The fish-farming hypothesis, addressed in earlier posts, posits a food supply delivered to an urban population through a hydraulic and electrical system that requires no surface exposure whatsoever.
That is not a society that would have been destroyed by the Water World trajectory. It is a society built for it. The current clean energy transition — ammonia co-firing, carbon storage, hydrogen production, resonant frequency therapeutics — is not the future. It is, in the widest frame, the recovery of a past that understood these problems better than we currently do.
The question is not whether the clean energy transition is possible. It demonstrably is. The question is whether the political and industrial forces that benefit from the current trajectory will permit it to happen at the speed the planetary cycle requires. History suggests they will not — until the Water World makes the question irrelevant.
Originally published March 2022. Substantially expanded to incorporate Milankovitch cycle academic references, the Pilot Energy Mid West Clean Energy Project and its Korean consortium agreements (2024–2025), the broader Western Australian clean ammonia sector context, and the connection between planetary habitability theory and the present clean energy transition. The clean energy section presents publicly available scientific and commercial information only. humanityqualifies.blogspot.com · Jason Steven Jowett
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