Climate Change: Global Warming
New, is this phenomenon, of the normal rotation of nature's ever-changing face? It's long been known that the earth has undergone a series of Little Ice Ages, where the climate gradually (quickly in weather-geological patterns) changes from much colder than what is considered to be normal, and then gradually back again to what people living currently consider to be normal.Core samples from truly aged trees, like grizzled old pine trees (bristly-cone pine) on mountain tops in Washington State of dwarf size because of the hostile terrain they grow in at those inclement elevations, but of great age, dating them back to a time before the birth of Christ, give scientific evidence of large fluctuations in climate and weather conditions.
Similarly core samples from icebergs have delivered scientific information also indicating years of greater or lesser precipitation activity around the globe, including cataclysmic events whose fall-out has been so widespread that minute particles have been trapped in the ice for future discovery. Like the immense Krakatoa explosive event when the sun was obscured across much of the globe for a prolonged period of time as a result of the scattered particulate matter from the eruption.
There is agreement and disagreement from among the scientific community at large whether we are living through a gradual and hugely significant time of climate change which may visit catastrophe upon the world through global warming. The Arctic ice cap appears to be melting at an alarming rate, and so are ice shelves, ice fields and huge glaciers. The glaciers are calving, their bulk declining, and the offshoot of all this melting activity will mean a dramatic rise in sea levels.
Which in turn will be truly catastrophic for human habitation built upon flood plains. Countries where a sizeable portion of their geological landscape is at or even below sea level will see an unbelievable shrinking of their territory and human settlement in those areas will be completely flooded.
Conversely, the annual melting of portions of mountains' glaciers result in an annual wash of meltwater into plains and valleys housing many countries' prime arable lands, ensuring that crops are well watered, and that the soil remains firmly in place. Without that yearly wash down of mountain glaciers into fresh-water streams coming off mountains, crops will dry up, and arable soil will become dry, blowing away in the wind, creating creeping desertification.
So, are all these potential calamities a certainty in the future of mankind? Are these phenomena really newly-introduced into global weather systems, or are they a result of the rotation of nature's ever-changing face? Are they a compendium of cyclical change and mankind's interference with normal cycles by the accumulation effect of the burning of fossil fuels?
Henry VIII skated on the Thames during his reign, at the tail end of one of the Little Ice Ages.
In the 1470s, when Leonardo da Vinci was a very young man he wrote this:
"And the day would come when spendthrift Nature would be without water, which would sink into the interior of the earth; "the rivers will be deprived of their waters, the fruitful earth will put forth no more her light verdure; all the animals, finding no fresh grass for pasture, will die, and food will then be lacking to the lions and wolves and other beasts of prey, and to men, who after many efforts will be compelled to abandon their life, and the human race will die out. And then the earth's surface will be burnt up to cinder, and this will be the end of all terrestrial nature."Perish the thought. Yet we cannot really afford to abandon all thought that we are reaping the whirlwind.
(C.A. - the Codex Atlanticus, in the Ambrosiana library, Milan, Published in facsimile in eight folio volumes, for the Reale Accademia dei Lincei, by Ulrico Hoepli, Milan, 1894-1904.)
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, October 05, 2006
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