NORTHERN PLANNER

Few would disagree that Global Warming has moved from a peripheral issue to one of the defining challenges for mankind. But on the grand scale of Earth’s history, it’s still pretty cold. The polar ice caps have come and gone many times.

The last ‘Ice Age’ never ended, we’re still in it. It just happens that we’re in an ‘interglacial period’ or a bit of a lull. No one is entirely sure why these lulls ebb and flow, but if nature was allowed to run its course, we’ll be plunged into a worldwide freeze again before it gets very, very hot.

When stuff like this is so finely balanced, it puts our messing with the climate into perspective.

All it takes for an Ice Age to come about is one bad summer where less ice melts than usual. More heat from unmelted snow gets reflected, even less ice melts, less heat again, more ice and on it goes.

They believe that at one point, the entire planet was covered in ice and it took a volcanic eruption to to reverse it. Meteroligists believe this gave us the most chaotic weather ever, with winds whipping up tidal waves to skycraper levels.

Incidentally, there was brief reverse of our Ice Age lull in the 15,000’s, when the Arctic Ice Sheet went as far as the Orkneys, and  humans were responsible for it’s end thanks to the Black Death. The catastrophic loss of life resulted in abandoned farmland being covered by trees, and the extra carbon dioxide absorbtion dropped the temperature.