Quote:
Originally Posted by tecoyah
My point in placing this thread in GD was to highlight the actual phenomenon, not to explain the cause. Truly, had that been the intent Politics would have been a far more fitting place to post. As I personally feel this is real, and occuring at a rate measured in Human lifespan, rather than centuries or thousands of years, I wanted to get people discussing the effects it is likely to have, and discuss adaptation of the species in the long run.
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I read somewhere that at the present rate of decline that most of the glaciers in Glacier National Park will be gone in about 30 years. It looks like we are in some sort of warm up period, whether it is a small hundreds of years cycle or one of the larger thousands of years cycles remains to be seen.
We don't seem to be able to predict the weather more than a couple of weeks out so I don't have a great deal of confidence in our global predictions. From what little I understand about the subject, warm up periods are not all bad. For example it is speculated that the increased moisture from global warming causes some desert areas to bloom which allowed our ancestors to walk out of Africa.
I guess if this is a big cycle then ocean levels will eventually rise changing some coast lines and isolating some land masses and eliminating some islands. As I understand it, the increase in fresh water entering the Atlantic Ocean may cause a change in the Gulf Stream which could result in Northern Europe having a colder climate.
I suspect that for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere that it is better to be in a warming trend than a cooling trend. The area my house sits on in Southern Ohio was once covered by glaciers in the last Ice Age. I would be very surprised if things change so dramatically in our lifetime but who knows, I suppose it is possible that we are living at a time of big climate change. I don't think I would base my decision on where to live on these changes any more than the people in Southern California are moving away because of the predictions that earthquakes (plate tectonics) will eventually put them in the Pacific Ocean.