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GLOBAL WARMY-COOLING
Stupid glaciers don’t know whether to shrink or expand:
The Alpine glaciers are shrinking, that much we know. But new research suggests that in the time of the Roman Empire, they were smaller than today. And 7,000 years ago they probably weren’t around at all. A group of climatologists have come up with a controversial new theory on how the Alps must have looked over the ages.
Damn Romans and their SUVs.
UPDATE. Global warming wisher John Quiggin reports glacial cold in usually-sunny Brisbane.
We know that they existed about 3000 years ago, because in the last 15 years someone found a body which had melted out of one of the glaciers after having been in it for about 3000 years.
Posted by Steven Den Beste on 2005 06 18 at 05:41 PM • permalinkI have just spent a week travelling around southern Queensland visiting drought stricken farmers. This big dry has been going on for five years, and is totally outside the experience of anyone still living. At one point I watched as a group of about twenty hard bitten dairy farmers became ominously silent, choking back tears as one of their wives described trying to prevent her son witness his father putting down the poddy calves, as she swore to herself to make sure he got an education so that he wouldn’t have to do similar things when he grew up.
On the other hand, I also got to learn of the technologies and farming practices adopted by many producers that have enabled them to better manage their land during the dry, enabling them to continue farming well beyond what they could have done a mere twenty years before. The old cliche of Australian farmers inappropriately using european cultivation practices has for years been effectively dead everywhere except in the halls of elite opinion and lefty school books, but this drought has ensured that no producers would ever seriously consider anything but zero or at least minimum till cultivation of their properties.
Many see this drought as an example of the effects of global warming.
Of course, the key point is that this drought is outside of the experience of anyone still living. Most current producers started farming in the fifties through to the seventies, which, based on Great Barrier Reef coral samples, was the wettest period in the last four hundred years. Despite statements that this drought is the worst since white settlement by some politicians, the drought of the 1890’s, the 1902-1905 drought and the drought in the 1930’s were all more severe, excacerbated by the absence of modern transport systems. The 1965 drought (remarkably enough, a La Nina year) was even more extreme, although only one year in duration).
So, the question is, is this part of a long term cycle, either interdecadal or longer, say a fifty year cycle? Or is it a long term transition to a drier south east Australia? (NW OZ is getting wetter BTW). And does man have any real impact at all compared with the natural cycle?
In the end, the lesson for me of the past week is that no matter what the cause, puny man can do nothing about preventing climate change from happening. Its too big. All we can do is learn to live with the change, and invest our technology and resources in helping us to cope with it.
Here’s a site showing a lot of growing glaciers. Reliability…? I link; you decide.
Bring the glaciers back. PLEASE!!!!!!
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 06 21 at 08:48 AM • permalink
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Hey, as long as the damned things don’t turn carnivorous?