02-03-2004, 10:48 AM
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#73 (permalink)
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Junkie
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Quote:
Originally posted by Bill O'Rights
All I know is this. It is 6 degrees below 0(F) outside, right now. They're calling for our third major snowstorm this week, and I'm running out of places to put snow that I'm shoveling off of my sidewalks and driveway. Where, oh where, is this global warming that you speak of. Oh, and this coming from someone that prefers the cold to the heat.
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Quote:
For early humans living in Europe 30,000 years ago - when the cave paintings in France were produced – the weather would be pretty much like it is today for well over a thousand years, giving people a chance to build culture to the point where they could produce art and reach across large territories.
And then a particularly hard winter would hit.
The spring would come late, and summer would never seem to really arrive, with the winter snows appearing as early as September. The next winter would be brutally cold, and the next spring didn't happen at all, with above-freezing temperatures only being reached for a few days during August and the snow never completely melting. After that, the summer never returned: for 1500 years the snow simply accumulated and accumulated, deeper and deeper, as the continent came to be covered with glaciers and humans either fled or died out. (Neanderthals, who dominated Europe until the end of these cycles, appear to have been better adapted to cold weather than Homo sapiens.)
What brought on this sudden "disappearance of summer" period was that the warm-water currents of the Great Conveyor Belt had shut down. Once the Gulf Stream was no longer flowing, it only took a year or three for the last of the residual heat held in the North Atlantic Ocean to dissipate into the air over Europe, and then there was no more warmth to moderate the northern latitudes. When the summer stopped in the north, the rains stopped around the equator: At the same time Europe was plunged into an Ice Age, the Middle East and Africa were ravaged by drought and wind-driven firestorms.
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I guess I should have just posted this section for the readers with short attention spans--seems they never quite made it this far through the article.
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