Great White North
Coming your way. My cousin Guy, another one of the scribbling Crittendens, applauds the theorized onset of a Little Ice Age. He would, he’s a Canadian. HazMat Editor’s Blog:
I agree with this article, for the most part, and it repeats or picks up some info I’ve written over the years about the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age and so on. The one thing I disagree on is the idea that a cooler world might be a bad thing. While it’s true that agricultural production would fall in certain northern climes (that aren’t all that productive to start with), cooler periods tend to spur an abundance of life, especially in the tropics. When we think of past ice ages, we tend to think of glaciers and snow covering the northern part of North America and Europe, with little if anything surviving. While that may be accurate for those areas, “artist renderings” and film depictions get us thinking about this the wrong way. Just south of these cold areas life practically exploded.
So, let the Ice Man Cometh, I say!
Lawrence Solomon’s article on sun spot activity and climate change is posted in its entirety at Guy’s link. Solomon posits disaster with a little cooling, but I’m with Guy. I like a little variety. Earth hotter, Earth colder, ice north, ice south, ocean up, ocean down. It’s kind of a traditional Earth thing, as the article notes. Us talky monkeys have been pretty good at dealing with it over all, and presumably are just getting better.
I also liked this part:
As put by geophysicist Philip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and former president of the National Space Society, “It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age.”
That could be inconvenient. That’s supposed to be settled science. Speaking of which, I also like the bit at the end about none of this being fully understood.
Topics: warmalism
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:03 pm on Tuesday, June 3, 2008
One Response to “Great White North”
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June 4th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
I don’t know about the explosion of life, but it does seem to me that real climate change (whether warmer or cooler) has always resulted in technological advances in all sorts of areas as we “talky monkeys” learn to cope.