And then warm...and then cool...and then warm...and then cool. All over our globe, over the eon's. It's an ever changing world we live in.
We should be thankful we live during such temperate times. Imagine, just ~400 years ago during the "Little Ice Age", most of the rivers and lakes in Europe were frozen.
How the Little Ice Age Changed History
By John Lanchester
March 25, 2019It is easy to forget just how variable the climate of the earth has been, across the geologic time scale. That is partly because the extent of that variability is so difficult to imagine. A world entirely covered in ice, from pole to polethe so-called snowball earthis something we find it hard to get our heads around, even though the longest and oldest period of total or near-total glaciation, the Huronian glaciation, lasted for three hundred million years. A world without ice is also hard to visualize, though it is by comparison a much more recent phenomenon: perhaps only thirty-four million years ago, crocodiles swam in a freshwater lake we know as the North Pole, and palm trees grew in Antarctica. The reality is that our planet oscillates between phases with no ice, phases with all ice, and phases in the middle. The middle is where we happen to be right nowa fact that is responsible for our faulty perception of the earths climate as accommodating and stable.
In the roughly five thousand years of recorded human history, there has been one period in which we have had a real taste of our climates potential for moodiness, beginning around the start of the fourteenth century and lasting for hundreds of years. During this epoch, often known as the Little Ice Age, temperatures dropped by as much as two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Compared with the extremes of snowball earth, that might not sound like much, but for people who lived through it the change was intensely dramatic.
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Very nice report.
Thanks.
“...and it was uphill all the way.”
Caveman Gruff; to his grandkids