Thursday, April 22, 2010

About Those Shrinking Polar Ice Caps

...over which the blogosphere's most naive blogger has his knickers in a knot, here's some choice quotes (somewhat paraphrased) from a brief history of the planet. Bear in mind that planet earth is believed to be some 4 billion years old.

"144,000,000 years to 64,000,000 years ago there were no polar ice caps."

Understand that homo sapiens emerged in Africa only 200,000 years ago, so obviously they didn't have anything to do with the absence of polar ice caps.

"32,000,000 to 24,000,000 years ago glaciation begins in Antarctica.

"24,000,000 to 5,000,000 years ago Antarctica becomes permanently frozen."

I guess the world stopped then too, if they can confidently declare a continent's climatic condition to be 'permanent'. But the world is coming to an end,  ya know.

"1,800,000 to 10,000 years ago, 30% of the earth's surface was covered with ice."

"10,000 years ago to the present, global warming begins." 

And gee. I wonder how that can be construed as 'Anthropogenic' global warming?  The 10,000 years ago mark happens to roughly coincide with the development of agriculture independently in several parts of the world, though. Maybe it's all those domesticated grains we've been producing ever since then. Oh, but Antarctica is permanently frozen, so I guess the warming must be about to stop.  Here comes another ice age.

Fact is, there have be 26 glaciations (ice ages) in the northern hemisphere, all of them advancing and retreating from the North pole in the past few million years, but humans have only been around for a fraction of that time, and our use of fossil fuels, far less.

Relax, Saskboy. The science is not settled.

Oh.  And try growing your own food when the soil is under 4 km of ice. It's a lot easier when it's warmer.

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