Climate Change: The Big Picture
I clipped a bit from an interesting article at Maggie’s Farm. I might quibble with a few things in the article, but I agree with the Big Picture. It’s my understanding that there are nature cycles of global warming and cooling. We appear to be near the end of a cycle of cooling and entering a cycle of warming. I’ll also re-post a very interesting video below that does not address the causes of climate change, but the best economic assessment of how to compassionately prepare for climate change.
Major “cool periods,” or Ice Ages, occur about every 200 million years, and last several to tens of millions of years. The most recent advance of our current ice sheet peaked about 10,000 years ago (this one tends to advance and reteat every 15-18,000 years). We, in our micro view, often term the most recent advance “The Ice Age” – the one with Wooly Mammoths etc. But we are, historically, in the middle of the big one now. Will another little ice advance occur and bury NYC? Definitely. We are in the longest cold period in the earth’s history.
Check out this site for historical climate changes. As you can see by the graph on the right from Scotese, we have been in a heavy duty cold spell for quite a while. When our climatologists look at climate, they tend to look at the micro picture, but that is like trying to predict the stock market by looking at one day’s fluctuations.
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