I don't mean to deny that "ice is melting" of course. Ice tends to melt under the right conditions. Conversely, water can tend to freeze under the right conditions. Who knows, however, what percentage of the claims listed here actually have a basis in fact? It's a laundry list of claims of unspecified reliability that for all I know she got by doing repeated Google searches and copy n pasting from who-knows-what source.
And the sky is falling also. Perhaps those dedicated environmentalists that are worried by the impact of humans can do the right thing and off themselves immediately a la Hunter Thompson and help solve the problems they see.
She is from Vermont. Nuff said
Part of the problem is that these guys are trying to norm to one moment in a dynamic situation.
Full glaciation ended approximately 8500 years ago. All during the intervening time, glaciers have been shrinking, except during cooling episodes like the "Little Ice Age" of 1300-1850 A.D., that exterminated the Greenland Vikings and produced all those Dutch Masters winter scenes.
During the Climatic Optimum, about 4500 years ago, global temps were about 3 degrees centigrade higher than now. Climatic patterns were different: there were no trade winds, and prevailing southerly winds watered the Sahara and Arabia Felix, turning the western highlands of Ethiopia into a green hell of heavy rainfall and massive runoff. The Nile valley frequently flooded to the rims....nearly wiping out the Natufian culture that lived there, whose members were driven out of the valley and away from their (submerged) food sources.
At some time between the end of pleniglaciation and the Climatic Optimum, enhanced rainfall in eastern Texas produced meanders in the Sabine River that are about 10x bigger than anything seen in historical times -- the Sabine's flow rivalled that of the present-day Mississippi River.
Before they get their panties in a wad, these scientists need to have a look at the tenth volume of the Treatise on the Geology of North America (approx. title) of the Geological Society of America, produced about 12 years ago, the volume in question being the "non-glacial" Pleistocene geology of the continent. In the introduction is a discussion of the correlation of pleniglacial and interglacial episodes to the Milankovich Cycle. Inspection of the water-temperature ocean data derived from isotopic research will show that the current interglacial has approximately 800 to 1200 years to run. Then.......the glaciers will jump-start again as temperatures plunge, taking the world from full interglacial to full glacial conditions in about 10-20 years.
Something to think about: The Pleistocene epoch isn't over; we're still in it. This is now universally conceded by geologists and chronostratigraphers.
In just a few more generations, we will wish we had burned just a whole lot of petroleum products and soft coal.
Last point: all the carbon dioxide in the air is providing a huge boost to plant growth, the eastern third of the United States having substantially reforested in the last 100 years (old, plowed furrows still visible in the second-growth forest floor in places), courtesy of the uptick in CO2.
Question: Did our appearance rescue the plant kingdom from slow suffocation in a carbon-dioxide-depleted planetary atmosphere?