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| b---o... |
 Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2009 10:15 pm |
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October 31 2009
QUOTE: brutal Little Ice Ages such as the 500-year-long Little Ice Age that
started about 600 years ago. Fortunately, we weren't around during its
fiercest periods when Finland lost one-third of its population, Iceland
half, and most of Canada became uninhabitable - even the Inuit fled.
Thank your lucky stars to be alive on Earth at this time.
Our planet is usually in a deep freeze.
The last million years have cycled through Ice Ages that last about 100,000
years each, with warmer slivers of about 10,000 years in between.
We are in-betweeners, and just barely - we live in (gasp!) year 10,000 or so
after the end of the last ice age.
But for our good fortune, we might have been born in the next Ice Age.
Our luck is even better than that.
Those 10,000-year warm spells aren't all cosy-warm.
They include brutal Little Ice Ages such as the 500-year-long Little Ice Age
that started about 600 years ago. Fortunately, we weren't around during its
fiercest periods when Finland lost one-third of its population, Iceland
half, and most of Canada became uninhabitable - even the Inuit fled.
While the cold spells within the 10,000 year warm spells aren't as brutal as
a Little Ice Age, they can nevertheless make us huddle in gloom, such as the
period in history from about 400 AD to 900 AD, which we know as the Dark
Ages.
We've lucked out twice, escaping the cold spells within the warm spells,
making us inbetweeners within the inbetween periods. How good is that?
We aren't alone in having been blessed by good weather.
About 2000 years ago, around the time of Caesar and Christ, temperatures
were also gloriously warm, some say much warmer than those we've experienced
in recent decades. That period - the centuries immediately before and after
Caesar and Christ - are known as the Roman Warm Period, a time of wealth and
accomplishment when the warmer weather filled granaries and extended grape
and olive growing regions to lands that had previously been unarable.
Another period of unusual warmth came about 1000 years after the Roman Warm
Period, during the centuries before and after the year 1000, in what is
known as the Mediæval Warm Period.
In this period, again warmer than the present time, the world shucked off
the insularity of the Dark Ages to allow civilization to once again blossom.
England, then positively balmy, became a grape-growing region. In the North
Atlantic, the Arctic sea ice released its grip over Greenland, making this
vast island hospitable for Viking settlers.
In the Canadian Rockies, majestic forests - trees larger than those of
today - thrived before their decimation by the glaciers that came in with
the Little Ice Age.
Another 1000 years and we come to our time, known to climatologists as the
Modern Warm Period.
What a great time of technological and cultural advancement we've known, one
of unprecedented prosperity, human longevity, and human comfort.
For a brief period in the 1970s it appeared to some scientists that the
climate that had abetted our prosperity had turned - this was the fear of
global cooling that then made headlines.
Though many now mock those fears of climate cooling, the scientists were
eminent and the science was sound - after all, given Earth's history through
the eons, and the passage of 10,000 years since the last ice age, it was
hardly outlandish to believe that time of warmth was up.
It wasn't then - the decades after the 1970s have been about as good as it
gets. But it could be now.
In fact, some of the same scientists who in the 1970s warned of a new cold
spell still believe it could be imminent. Other eminent scientists with
compelling new evidence have recently joined them in predicting the end of
our Modern Warm Period. They and others note that the warming of the planet
stopped 11 years ago and that the planet has begun to cool.
If a new Dark Age does come, it could be rapid, marked by plunging
temperatures and extreme weather events. Such was the transition from the
Roman Warm Period to the Dark Ages and from the Mediæval Warm Period to the
Little Ice Age.
To date, we have seen no plunging temperatures, no uncharacteristically
extreme weather.
If we are living on borrowed time, as the history of the world would
suggest, this reprieve would be but one more blessing to count.
We should enjoy the warmth while we can, and hope that it persists so that
the world our children and grandchildren inherit will be no less warm and
welcoming.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/30/lawrence-solomon-enjoy-the-warmth-while-it-lasts.aspx
Warmest Regards
Bon z0
"It is a remarkable fact that despite the worldwide expenditure of perhaps
US$50 billion since 1990, and the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists
worldwide, no human climate signal has yet been detected that is distinct
from natural variation."
Bob Carter, Research Professor of Geology, James Cook University, Townsville |
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