Ice, Ice, Baby
One got hot in the ’80s and the other is a white rapper
Despite all the concern about climate change and its impact on glaciers, The News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington has a report about the glacier on Mount St. Helens. The story highlights the problem of cherry-picking facts to support a thesis: the other side can do the same thing.
It seems that the glacier on Mount St. Helens is expanding at a rate of three feet per day.
How can this be happening in an age of unprecedented global warming?
Perhaps a little historical perspective can help….
The most recent Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago as the Pleistocene Epoch drew to a close, drawing rave reviews and ending a streak that would stand until it was topped by the Broadway run of The Producers.
Today, in the 21st century, we are in the Holocene Epoch (from the Greek “holo” meaning “hollow” and “cene” meaning “scene”) which many paleontologists believe helps to explain the recent proliferation of reality TV shows …
Every epoch (or in technical terms, “really, really, long time”) has experienced glacial advances and retreats. Glaciers were originally thought to operate in 40,000-year cycles, but with advances in modern science, are now believed to advance and recede in 100,000-year cycles. Since the last glacial cycle ended 10,000 years ago (give or take a few days), there’s a chance we can look forward to a gradual shrinking of the world’s glaciers for the next 90,000 years.
The worst part about this? It’s probably inevitable there will be a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.
Indeed, history can and does repeat itself. In more recent times, global temperatures have continued to fluctuate. Proxy data tell us there was a Medieval Warm Period that lasted from 800 A.D. to 1300 A.D. Since there are no accurate records, scientists use proxy data to estimate temperatures going back over 1,000 years. Proxy data include such things as tree rings, fossil records and first-person accounts from Joan Rivers.
After the Medieval Warm Period, the global climate cooled by nearly two degrees centigrade during the period from 1400 to 1900. Climatologists refer to this period as the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age strongly objects to this term and has repeatedly maintained it’s not the size of your glaciers that matters; it’s how you use them.
Source: The Sky is Falling: A Global Warming Survival Guide, by Mark Jabo and Cal Orey.
Climate change is not nearly so scary, when you remember that it’s been going on since the Earth was first formed.
Doomsday scenarios aren’t nearly as scary either when you remember that there were predictions of the world coming to an end found in cave drawings done by early Cro-Magnon man. Interestingly, the drawings were signed: Og and Tipper.
I’m not saying that proves anything … just that it’s a little weird, in an X-Files kind of way.
The really scary news this week: a reunion tour by The Spice Girls.
global warming, climate change, Al Gore, Tipper Gore, Mount St. Helens, Vanilla Ice, Mark Jabo, Cal Orey, The Sky is Falling, Spice Girls, Ice Ice Baby, Tell Me What You Want
June 29th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
LOVED this post. It literally made me Laugh Out Loud. Why is that I always fall for men with dry humor? Too bad I’m a lesbian.
June 30th, 2007 at 12:04 am
I don’t know what’s scarier - global warming, the news of the Spice Girls reuniting or that picture of Vanilla Ice (urrgghhhh, bad times).
Seriously though, the key with climate change is to look at what has been the major drivers of climate change in the past then see if they may be causing global warming now.
The sun is the major driver of climate change. In 2005, Sami Solanki at the Max Planck Insitute compared solar activity & temperatures over the past 1150 years and found temperatures closely correlate to solar activity. When sunspot activity was low during the Maunder Minimum in the 1600’s or the Dalton Minimum in the 1800’s, the earth went through ‘little ice ages’. The sun has been unusually hot in the last century - solar output rose dramatically in the early 20th century accompanied by a sharp rise in global temperatures.
However, Solanki also found the correlation between solar activity and global temperatures ended around 1975. At that point, temperatures started rising while solar activity stayed level. This led him to conclude “during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source.”
The usual suspects in natural climate change - solar variations, volcanoes, wobbles in Earth’s orbit, cosmic radiation variations - are all conspicuous in their absence over the past 30 years of long term warming. In contrast, atmospheric CO2, a known greenhouse gas, is spiralling to record levels.