CO2 is bad for the environment, right?
But what is the environment? What is bad? Does anyone know?
While it isn’t a new issue here, I often wonder whether — if we assume anthropogenic CO2 can cause warming — whether that “warming” might go unnoticed if it accompanied a return to a glacial period.
A new paper argues that this may be happening:
Mankind’s emissions of fossil carbon and the resulting increase in temperature could prove to be our salvation from the next ice age. According to new research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, the current increase in the extent of peatland is having the opposite effect.
“We are probably entering a new ice age right now. However, we’re not noticing it due to the effects of carbon dioxide”, says researcher Professor Lars Franzén.
Looking back over the past three million years, the earth has experienced at least 30 periods of ice age, known as ice age pulses. The periods in between are called interglacials. The researchers believe that the Little Ice Age of the 16th to 18th centuries may have been halted as a result of human activity. Increased felling of woodlands and growing areas of agricultural land, combined with the early stages of industrialisation, resulted in increased emissions of carbon dioxide which probably slowed down, or even reversed, the cooling trend.
“It is certainly possible that mankind’s various activities contributed towards extending our ice age interval by keeping carbon dioxide levels high enough,” explains Lars Franzén, Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Gothenburg.
The paper can be read here.
When I studied Paleontology at UC Berkeley in the early 70s, Dr. Durham argued that it was silly to talk of “the Ice Age” as if it was a thing of the past, for all the data to that point (he had all the graphs and charts) showed that we were in a mere “interglacial” period, and that it was coming to an end. In other words, what we call the Ice Age is still with us, and our temporary respite is coming to an end.
Such theories were pretty much abandoned for political reasons once it became clear that people need to be made to live in fear of “Global Warming,” but that was what the scientists were saying when I was in college. (No wonder I’m so cynical!)
I’m not the only one to remember:
This warm spell is already 11,600 years old, and it must surely, in the normal course of things, come to an end. In the early 1970s, after two decades of slight cooling, many scientists were convinced that the moment was at hand. They were “increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age,” said Time in 1974. The “almost unanimous” view of meteorologists was that the cooling trend would “reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” and “the resulting famines could be catastrophic,” said Newsweek in 1975.
Don’t expect me to get too excited by any of this. I’m freezing my butt off as it is here in Michigan, and I am quite confident that I will never live to see this place become home to alligators or tropical pythons.
But for the sake of argument, what if the world wants to naturally get colder? Is that a world we should want? What if the people driving around in cars are actually helping stave off a return to Siberian-style climates? Can the hair shirt-bicyclists honestly lay claim to be saving the world? I was one the other day, laboriously pedaling through the worst snow and ice imaginable, and he looked like he was about to fall over. Such fanaticism requires determination, and saving the planet is hard work.
But what if the “selfless” bicycles are making the world a worse place than the “greedy” drivers?