It's common when discussing the Earth's climate, the photosynthesis cycles, and carbon dioxide, for people to bring up the Amazon and other tropical rainforests. You will see these vast forests described as the lung of the Earth, and that's not completely without merit; rainforests, found mostly in a belt across the equator, do produce a lot of the planet's oxygen budget as well as sequester a lot of carbon.
These rainforests are not, however, the real champions. That title goes to the northern taiga, the "Great North Woods" of American and European history, which even today stretches from Alaska to Hudson Bay, from Scandinavia to Siberia. These vast stands of conifers have stood since the last major glaciation and still stand today; I can look out my office window and see a tiny part of it.
Trees can give us a great look into relatively recent geological history, and now we learn that a Swiss stone pine (Pinus cembra) log, just emerged from a retreating glacier, is giving us a look at a Europe of 6,000 years ago, when it was much warmer than today. For the climate scolds, this is indeed an inconvenient tree.
A recent video from the German language channel Report24news features Dr. Johannes Steiner, who discusses the discovery of ancient biological material (a large tree log) under retreating glaciers and its implications for the current climate narrative.
In 2014, a massive Swiss stone pine (Zirbe) log weighing 1.7 tons was found in the retreat area of the Pasterze glacier at an altitude of 2,060 meters. The tree from which the log originates is dated to be 6,000 years old.
Dr. Steiner points out that no trees of this size can grow at that altitude today because it is currently just too cold, suggesting that 6,000 years ago, temperatures in the Alps were significantly warmer than now. That’s evidence that climate alarmists would prefer to censor.
That's a tad more than a suggestion, but tentative language is required in science, as all findings are subject to revision if new data is uncovered. But this seems a pretty solid indicator of a much warmer Europe. That being the case, it would appear that the Europe of 4,000 B.C. was a pretty pleasant place; that's good for people, it's good for our crops, it's just good.
The presence of such biological material is undeniable evidence that glaciers have historically expanded and retreated in natural cycles long before industrial CO2 emissions.
Dr. Steiner argues against the “climate catastrophe” label for warming, asserting that historically, “cold periods” were the true catastrophes marked by famine, while “warm periods” (like the Medieval Warm Period) facilitated cultural and biological growth where societies flourished.
We knew that already, but the climate scolds seem to have to get this hammered home every so often.
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Europe, 6,000 years ago, was in the Neolithic, populated mostly by hunter-gatherers. It was warmer and, in many places, wetter than now - as much as 1 to 4 degrees warmer than now. There were large tracts of forest, both the taiga mentioned above and farther south, temperate forests of mixed conifers and hardwoods. Some early agriculture was already happening in the river valleys of South and Central Europe. The British Isles were already isolated, as the retreat of the last major glaciation had flooded Doggerland, that now long-lost land route from the Continent to the British Isles. Scandinavia, the Baltic, and much of northern Russia and Siberia were already populated by the great taiga as the moister post-glaciation climate favored trees over the fading mammoth steppe.
It was a pleasant place - warmer than now, more fertile in many areas than now; this may have led to the wider, faster adoption of agriculture over hunting and gathering, leading to the first of mankind's three great technological and societal revolutions.
There's a wealth of data indicating all these things. And now, as though in punctuation, is one more: A Swiss stone pine, revealed by a retreating glacier, that obviously grew where it could not grow today. It grew on that mountain slope in a warmer, more fertile Europe, and was covered by a glacier fed by a climate growing colder - until today, our continued post-glaciation warming revealed it.
Science can be a lot of fun if you look at the data dispassionately, without a political bias. The climate scolds, as we've been seeing in recent months, seem to be losing some ground in the marketplace of ideas; in this same discussion, Dr. Steiner points out that even in green Europe, the claims of the scolds about anthropogenic climate change are losing ground.
Moreover, Dr. Steiner references a February 2025 Special Eurobarometer (557), noting a shift in public perception. He claims that in several EU countries (e.g., Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland), over 50% of people now believe climate change is driven by natural causes rather than human activity.
In Austria, the percentage of people attributing climate change to natural causes has reportedly risen by 13% since 2021, reaching 43%.
Facts are stubborn things. So, as we have seen, are long-buried Swiss pine trees.
