I Care About The Environment

FORGET GLOBAL WARMING: WINTER IS COMING — AND IT WILL BE A DOOZY
JULY 16, 2018
By Gregory Wrightstone
The recurring theme of civilization’s relationship with climate is that the end of each warming period went badly for humanity.


“Winter is Coming” is the motto of the House Stark in HBO’s wildly popular “Game of Thrones,” referring to the looming deep cold that will be accompanied by terror and death. George R. R. Martin’s fictional account has a real-world counterpart that will confront humanity at some time in the not too distant future and it won’t be pretty.

For the last approximately 2.5 million years the Earth has been cycling in and out of long glacial periods, punctuated by much shorter warm interglacials. For the last one million-plus years the planet has been in 100,000-year cycles of ice advance and welcome warming.

The last ice age ended about 11,500 years ago, enabling humanity to prosper and advance. The most dramatic advances in civilization took place during warm periods very similar to our own current warming trend. Over the last 150 years, we have seen a rather modest temperature increase of ~1.5°F, one that is well within the natural variations in temperature over the last several thousand years. Before climate science became politicized, such warm periods were referred to by scientists as “climate optima” because, for almost all species on Earth, warmer is better than colder.

Glaciers come and go. It’s how the Earth has always been. I am more concerned over the dumping of plastics and trash in the oceans than the supposed .00025 of a degree warming by the end of the century.

When China and other countries start doing half as much to stop pollution as the US does I will complain we aren’t doing enough.

Also the methane released by this ancient ice AND the methane as a by product of all the fracking everywhere...will speed up climate change exponentially.

Not a good prospect 4 the future we still think we deserve...

So just out of curiosity, how long had that particular glacier been melting?