“Before there were enough
people to make any difference at all, two million years ago,
nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing,
okay?”
“All this argument is the temperature
going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues.
“Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the
early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re
coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting
more carbon dioxide into the air.”
Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the
Vikings out of Greenland after they’d farmed there for
a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier
run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer
than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in
making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”—assorted
clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens,
and tree-ring data—helps reconstruct the climate in those
times before instrumental temperature records existed.
No comments:
Post a Comment