শনিবার, ১ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১২

Grim Picture of Polar Ice-Sheet Loss

Okay, from the Wikipedia article on Greenland then:

DNA of trees, plants, and insects including butterflies and spiders from beneath the southern Greenland glacier was estimated to date to 450,000 to 900,000 years ago, according to the remnants retrieved from this long-vanished boreal forest. That view contrasts sharply with the prevailing one that a lush forest of this kind could not have existed in Greenland any later than 2.4 million years ago.

So the most recent time Greenland could have supported significant plant life was 450,000 years ago. More recently than expected, still not recent.

The Wikipedia article does not say that Greenland's climate has changed dramatically many times over the last 100,000 years, it says that ice cores from Greenland have shown that the world's weather and temperature can change rapidly and that this has happened often over the last 100,000 years. This is not a reassuring finding, as it implies that the seemingly stable climate that we've enjoyed over the last few thousand years can change very quickly if pushed.

Yes, we all know that older folk have been ignoring warnings about global warming since the seventies. That's not something to brag about.

Yes, the climate has not been the same and will not remain the same forever. This is not an excuse to continue polluting. All people die sometime, right? So shooting them in the head now doesn't really matter, does it?

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/K8fXI7QJkM4/story01.htm

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