Anyone who's read "Children of the Ice Age" or "10, 000 BC" knows that about 12-13,000 years ago, there was a rapid ice age that immediately followed a period of rapid heating. This ice age proceeded to cover the northern 1/3rd of the planet with tremendous amounts of ice, and forever changed our planet: It turned North Africa's deserts into lush Edens, made Europe unpassable, gave America's midwest all of Canada's topsoil, permitted some migration of peopl from Siberia into the Americas, spawned a massive die-off of some species, and hastened human evolution in other areas.
Now, for the bad news: This didn't happen over a period of decades or years as was previously thought, it took mere months...and can happen again.
How smug you will you feel when you try to drive your Hummer 2 over the new, improved (and very much frozen) Tennessee River?
Now researchers say it surprisingly may have taken place over the course of a few months, or a year or two at most.
"That the climate system can turn on and off that quickly is extremely important," said earth system scientist Henry Mullins at Syracuse University, who did not take part in this research. "Once the tipping point is reached, there would be essentially no opportunity for humans to react."
"If the Greenland ice sheet melted suddenly [as is happening today] it would be catastrophic," he said.
Now, can we please get serious? We're already at the tipping point, and I have a feeling that good ole Gaia won't let us superheat her critters much longer until she tries to knock us off....
Lest you have any doubts, you should probably respect something that can do this.
I'm pretty sure I did that in that last picture... but your logic is sound
ReplyDeleteThat is a terrific picture...pretty damned inspiring and/or frightening. In the words of Lewis Black "They don't even have that weather in the Bible"!
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