Deathly Chills
Our ongoing obsession with climate warming ignores a far deadlier threat: cold.
Previous versions of our ancestors who had settled along the Mediterranean faced ice ages but didn’t survive. A four-thousand-year deep freeze finished off the human outposts in Europe, since the long chill systematically froze out plants, animals that eat plants, and animals that eat other animals.
In a stunning revelation, scientists have uncovered evidence of a frigid apocalypse that unfolded approximately 1.1 million years ago, reshaping the fate of Europe's early human inhabitants. This chilling discovery sheds light on a period of immense climate upheaval that triggered a cascade of events, ultimately erasing an entire population of archaic humans from the continent.
We should hope that global warming is the form of climate change we are facing, since the alternative is much, much deadlier.
The historical and prehistorical episodes of drastic climate change occurred without humans burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is something that is worth stating at least as often as “man-made” is appended to every news article about global warming or climate change. The climate system is capable of undergoing massive, unpredictable change that lasts long enough to exterminate species in large numbers. In between, the global climate can remain stable enough—for long enough—for new species to arise and proliferate and specialize all over again.
Liquid water, along with a molten metal magnetic core, makes life on earth possible. When the earth is in one of its cold phases, the areas of the planet covered by liquid water recede, and so does life. Life abounds with warmth and heat, not with cold and ice. Roughly 80 percent of the planet’s species today live in the tropical zones, the natural home to biodiversity. Diversity at the polar regions is naturally limited.
For all we tell ourselves with great certainty about the threat of man-made climate change, we know precious little about the climate change that nature generates all by itself. We have only a limited understanding of how the climate system naturally varies. Very little research funding goes into investigating this natural climate variability. We find man-made climate change everywhere, since that is the only thing we’re putting any real effort into finding. Still, sometimes we come across evidence from our deep past suggesting our modern obsessions are ill-informed and misplaced.
I think we may want to be careful about drawing too many or too firm of conclusions from the paper in Science. I’ve not read the whole thing, pay walls being what they are, but as I understand things at the moment, what they’re describing is not a global climate swing, but a dramatic cooling of the Mediterranean and northern Europe, where, 1.2 MYA, lived pre-human hominins, possibly including such as H. antecessor, a putative ancestor of H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens. (Our own species was not there for the show.)
My understanding is this: The cooling that they think they’ve detected arose, the scientists involved believe, from a gush of fresh water into the oceans from massive ice sheet thawing. (Yes, this should sound eerily familiar.) This in turn wreaked havoc on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which recovered into more or less the form we see today—and which is the means by which the Gulf Stream and its warm-water current friends provide, via northward movement that takes them into a collision with northern Europe, thus warming Europe (and the UK—I guess I have to mention them separately after the Brexit thing) to temperatures well above what they would otherwise normally see then—and now, should the AMOC go AWOL again.
So, paradoxically, perhaps, it may be that a significant warming period actually produced as a side effect a massive cooling of northern Europe that cause real estate values there to plummet such that everyone just got up and left. At least those that didn’t die of hypothermia, etc. This is very much one of the models for possible impending disaster now, should warming continue unchecked, though there’s significant variability in concern, quoted odds, etc. from climatologists about the matter.
It would seem based on this that it doesn’t matter what causes the general warming; what matters is the magnitude thereof, and does it cross what might be a sort of threshold to where it causes (relatively) sudden deconstruction of AMOC. Which makes sense, but does little to help us understand whence our own warming Earth, but might give us motivation to address it *regardless of cause*. Unless we decide we don’t really much care for the French, Dutch, Danes, Lithuanians, Poles, Finns, and so forth. I myself have been feeling a little wobbly about the Swedes lately.
Disclosure: For a conglomeration of reasons, I don’t think we’ll be terribly successful in limiting the overall global temperature rise. Human nature is itself a big chunk of that conglomerate. And so I think we’re gonna be stuck living with it, *regardless of what caused it*. Or, in some cases, perhaps dying with it, I suppose. I’m fatalistic enough on the matter that I don’t get too worked up about it, though I’d like to see us be better stewards of the only planet we can realistically call home for the next several generations, at least. And even should it get to where we can pull up stakes and blast off (quite literally) for some other wandering bit of properly endowed galactic flotsam, I’d like it if we left behind something not entirely inhospitable to the creatures who don’t have opposable thumbs, highly coordinated use of their vocal cords, and knowledge of how to use an ATM.
Maybe. Time wasn't on my radar at the time.
ETA: reply to Toni inTexas, mis-posted.