What Caused a 1300-Year Deep Freeze? 258
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Things were looking up for Earth about 12,800 years ago. The last Ice Age was coming to an end, mammoths and other large mammals romped around North America, and humans were beginning to settle down and cultivate wild plants. Then, suddenly, the planet plunged into a deep freeze, returning to near-glacial temperatures for more than a millennium before getting warm again. The mammoths disappeared at about the same time, as did a major Native American culture that thrived on hunting them. A persistent band of researchers has blamed this apparent disaster on the impact of a comet or asteroid, but a new study concludes that the real explanation for the chill, at least, may lie strictly with Earth-bound events."
The prevailing theory... (Score:5, Informative)
Not exactly a new theory (Score:2)
I remember hearing Wally Broecker talk about the ice dam + flooding hypothesis back in the mid-1990s (or possibly earlier).
Waste of time (Score:5, Informative)
This comes from a good Journal, but reading it was a waste of time.
If Al Gore-like shamans lived back then... (Score:4, Funny)
If Al Gore-like shamans lived back then, the insufficient fervor of the rival shamans in keeping the fires going all day and night would've been blamed for the freeze.
Anybody failing to keep their fire going would be shamed and punished — unless they paid tribute (to buy global freezing offset credits) to the right shaman, of course.
AAAAALLLLLL GOOOOORRRRRE! (Score:3)
DRINK!
*eyeroll* (Score:2)
Don't you Foxbots have anything better to say than AAAAALLLLL GOOOOORRRRRE!?
Not really much here (Score:5, Informative)
New Argument: We performed radiocarbon dating on tools found at the 29 sites described in the Old Argument and found that only 3 of the 29 sites were around 12,000 years old. The tools at other sites were much older or younger. Therefore, the deep-freeze was probably not caused by a cosmic collision.
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What Caused a 1300-Year Deep Freeze? (Score:3)
This was caused by my ex- wife..
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if only you were the first post, we could have avoided a hundred others and a lot of useless debate!
go quicker next time
Global Dynamo. (Score:2)
Aftereffect of the Human-Robot War (Score:2)
.
Did that article actually make sense to anyone? (Score:2)
I've written worse, granted. But the whole article seemed to be dismissing the impact cause, and declaring other causes were not evaluated and seeming to postulate a new understanding. And then, in the end, it really seemed to simply be an article questioning the carbon dating, and pointing to sedimentary record as a preferred method of dating and demonstrating an impact wiped everything out.
Huh...what?
Re:Climate change is for pussies. (Score:5, Insightful)
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There's evidence that we could spend some money now to reduce the warming, thereby reducing the total cost.
Cite?
Is there some study that attempts to quantify the costs of emission controls and weigh them against estimates of the cost of dealing with rising seas and changing weather patterns? I've been looking for that for some time and haven't seen it. I'd be particularly interested to see what portion of the cost of climate change is now inevitable. Granted that such a study would have to be wildly speculative, but careful, intelligent, informed speculation can be useful.
However, I suspect that there is no
Re:Climate change is for pussies. (Score:5, Informative)
Tundra soil is not particularly fertile and the processes that enrich soil can take hundreds if not thousands of years. I suppose if you have enough compost to cover Canada and such.
and that ignores the obvious desertification that would happen across huge swathes of currently productive land.
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Tundra is not marginal. Tundra will become forest, forest will become fertile farmland.
Desertification is not 'obvious'. Key to global warming is more water vapor feeding back any heat increases. Likely increased average rain with increased temperature.
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at the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you did cite an Arizona State study, so I must, out of principle, ignore your entire post altogether.
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I see what you did there.
Re:Climate change is for pussies. (Score:5, Informative)
Tundra is marginal for most crops. Tundra is typically a thin, acidic soil. Given a couple of hundred thousand years, it probably would pick up a bunch of new critters and plants and become more organically active, but most of us are not that patient.
Re: Climate change is for pussies. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Climate change is for pussies. (Score:4, Informative)
Desertification is not 'obvious'. Key to global warming is more water vapor feeding back any heat increases. Likely increased average rain with increased temperature.
You seem to be making a common mistake when talking about climate change:
You're confusing global "average rain" with local "average rain."
We know, without a doubt, that climate change will shift weather patterns and create deserts.
We're also seeing signs that climate change is shifting weather patterns and greening existing deserts.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that useless land and useful land switch places in a 1:1 ratio.
That still leaves one big problem: what do you do with all the people and infrastructure that are in the new desert?
It's a problem whose only solutions are extremely expensive.
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what do you do with all the people and infrastructure that are in the new desert?
Why do the people have to leave? People have been migrating to warmer places for the past century.
It's actually kindof stupid that our cities are on top of some of the most fertile ground.
If Chicago or New York all of a sudden became 10 degrees warmer it would probably boost their
population. The only thing that would have to move north would be the farmers and there is
minimal infrustructure there.
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But we have already seen the problem in your 1 tiny world. New Orleans is already under water and you were too stupid to move it the first time. You already have cities in stupid places, it will only get worse. What if the climate changes and New York ends up with massive frequent flooding and all those extra people?
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What if the climate changes and New York ends up with massive frequent flooding and all those extra people?
Sea level rise would be much more catastrophic for NYC than frequent flooding. Much of NYC, especially Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens are below, at, or just a few feet above sea level. Most of the infrastructure (electric, natural gas, telephone/telecom, steam -- yes steam, subways, etc. etc., etc.) is actually underground. During hurricaine Sandy, Significant swaths of NYC were flooded [weather.gov], leaving hundreds of thousands without power, some for weeks. A general sea level rise of even one meter would put muc
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I work right on the water, in a location that's indicated on that map to have experienced over 4ft of inundation. Maybe those figures actually represent deviation from normal high tide and not actually inundation. While there was indeed flooding around here it didn't exceed 12" and only affected a few waterfront areas. Go a few hundred feet and there was no flooding at all. The flooding also didn't persist for the duration of the storm, instead receding once the tide went out.
I'm not suggesting that the ris
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Leaving aside Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and on, so what your saying is the all of the real urban pest holes in the United States will finally be cleared out once and for all... and the down side is??
Throughout history, cities have been the engines of commerce, innovation and growth. I'm one of those urban pests (born and raised in a large city), as are fully half of the US population. Are you saying that half the population of the US should be put down as pests?
What I think you're really saying is that you don't like diversity and are somewhat xenophobic. Do you even have a valid passport? Have you ever traveled anywhere? I pity you your small-mindedness.
Also, just for the record, the word "your"
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You yourself call us small-minded and xenophobic. And then, as normal, give a grammer lesson to the "hick", fueling the stereotype that you hold. Well done.
Thanks for your thoughts. Just to clarify, I only called that specific AC small-minded and xenophobic. I rather imagined that he is a suburbanite, rather than a rural/exurb dweller. No stereotypes here. As you said, his was a "douchebag comment." My derision was for him alone.
I don't have issues with people who don't live in or don't like cities. I judge people on what they do and what they say, not on where they live. There's a lot to be said for living in rural areas. It's not the sort of life
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I work right on the water, in a location that's indicated on that map to have experienced over 4ft of inundation. Maybe those figures actually represent deviation from normal high tide and not actually inundation. While there was indeed flooding around here it didn't exceed 12" and only affected a few waterfront areas. Go a few hundred feet and there was no flooding at all. The flooding also didn't persist for the duration of the storm, instead receding once the tide went out.
I'm not suggesting that the rising sea level isn't a problem. I'm suggesting that it isn't the urgent issue it keeps being presented as. The rise is so gradual that people will almost certain adapt long before it could turn into a critical problem. As it stands, in a few residential neighborhoods affected by flooding some have moved out and others have taken measures to defend against flooding.
This is the sort of thing we're going to see increasingly around the world, and eventually some of these spots may be completely given up to the sea. However, for the most part it's not going to occur at a frantic pace that would pose a humanitarian nightmare. People will simply adapt or move.
The problem with some aspects of trying to take action now is that it's too soon to even know how we should be responding. It's the typical nonsense I face with management. They're so frantic to get started on a project, to do anything, that we end up wasting an inordinate amount of time and money simply fixing problems caused by rushing. And in many cases the original goals go unfulfilled anyway.
Interesting and valid points. Thank you. I don't believe we should rush into "solutions" until we understand the impact of those solutions. However, as you may recall, hundreds of thousands of people below 42nd street in Manhattan (due to the 14th street ConEd power facility failure) were without power for days, some for more than a week. The Battery Tunnel was closed for days, as were several subway lines whose tunnels below the East River were inundated as well.
As for me, I live at least 100 feet abov
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Also, melting the polar ice caps is probably not a good idea since Greenland and Antarctica melting would raise sea levels by several feet. 11 million people in Bangladesh will move to India rather than wade around in salt water. Miami will be underwater along with a good amount of Florida. In general, there will be a lot less dry land. Since most of the biggest cities are actually ocean ports, they probably be underwater as well.
One commonly overlooked fact is that most of Antarctica is below sea level. Th
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From what I've seen a lot of people in Bangladesh already spend much of their time wading around in salt water. If the sea level rises enough, it might actually push them onto dry land.
Of greater concern is that if Florida goes undersea from south of Sea World, you Northerners will be overrun with returning retirees!
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Tundra is not marginal.
Yes it is.
You seem to lack a basic understanding of what it is. Permafrost has been frozen for many thousands of years. The biological processes (re: bacteria) that break down organic materials into nutrients that make for fertile soil are not active and present. They take time to occur and spread and actually create thick deep rich soil, the kind you need for farming.
Tundra will become forest, .
No, it wont.
Or rather, it's not a given, and even if it DID occur, you're talking about a process that will take several centuries on its own
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I suppose if you have enough compost to cover Canada and such.
Who needs compost when you can just drill/frack more natural gas and turn that into fertilizer?
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It is literally seeping out of the melting permafrost so there should be no shortage. Here is a fun video of someone setting the air on fire after poking a hole in the ice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
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I suppose if you have enough compost to cover Canada and such.
You can have every politician on the North (and South) American Continents. It would be a pretty good start.
Maybe lawyers as a phase II project.
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I suppose if you have enough compost to cover Canada and such.
You can have every politician on the North (and South) American Continents. It would be a pretty good start.
Maybe lawyers as a phase II project.
This isn't compost, it's toxic waste!
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Desertification is not obvious. Reports are that the models show that some areas turn into deserts, and others into jungles. So you might need to switch from wheat to rice or sugar cane. Or you might need to go into date palms.
OTOH, desertification CAN be handled, if you have enough energy. (Check out the California central valley. Used to be a desert.) But you need enough energy to move water around, and possibly to desalinate it. (YARG!!!) Jungles, though, are more difficult to deal with. It's be
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Processes that enrich soil; adding rock dust from glacial recession, adding organic matter from waste, introducing red worms to this environment; 1 year.
Plenty of rock dust out there, way too much organic material goes to the dump. Wherever man lives, there is plenty of compostable material just going to waste dumps. Make a beginning, the end wont be that far.
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but, damnit, where will my Quarter Pounder come from if they stop making more due to lack of feed?
wait... Quarter Pounders do come from livestock, right?
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They'll just grow it in a vat instead.
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I'm only posting these comments to clear up misinformation. If people wouldn't post misinformation, there would be no need for me to clear it up, would there?
Don't you see how ironic is it that this whole thread started with someone urging everyone to stop talking about climate change, and that in itself started a whole conversation about climate change? If you don't want to talk about it, just don't bring it up! Just don't look! Just don't look!
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Why do you think it wills top at a couple of degrees? AS long as we keep spewing more green house gases, more energy will be trapped. Once we completely overwhelm the system,. then the human species, at best, will be living in mud huts eating grubs.
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More to the point, we have no idea what feedback loops will open up or open wider due to changing the global climate's local stability point; the latter is what we think of as the current climate. Methane release due to higher global temperatures is a positive feedback loop.
Re: Climate change is for pussies. (Score:5, Insightful)
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You missed the part where Slashdot delayed his post. Check the date. He originally wrote it in 1836.
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Re: Climate change is for pussies. (Score:4, Informative)
This is not a agenda free site.
Amazing that they don't seem to know that the reason there is a process to estimate terrestrial temperature using tress is because a solar astronomer named A. E. Douglass wanted sun spot data for periods from before modern times when sun spot data was recorded. He worked out that because sun spot activity effected climate, which resulted in larger tree rings for years with high sun spot activity, that he could use old growth trees to determine sunspot activity for earlier periods.
Later in the 1990s climate change supports started using his data, which he had already proved was linked to sunspot activity to support AGW. How did he prove his theory? He used the scientific method. He compared periods of known correlation and then predicted future activity. When his prediction came true he then used what he had learned to map previous sunspots periods. So climate is linked to sun spot activity. You can even see it now. the early 2000s was a low sunspot activity period, and there was no average temperature rise. The 1930s were high sunspot activity periods. The 1930s were warmer than the 1990s'
Climate scientist could learn a lot from A.E. Douglass, since their methods seem to be ignore data that doesn't fit the hypothesis, create models that don't really match predictions, and blame people who then don't believe you.
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Temperature? Peace of cake! Nasty insect born diseases and drastically reduced supply of food and fresh water? There will be a much less than 6 billion of us left after it all goes down.
Re:Put this in perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
No-one is suggesting the human species won't survive.
Large numbers of individual humans might not.
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Don't be ridiculous. They'll survive just fine. Their property holdings may not. It's not going to flood overnight. There will be ample warning.
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: a small vehicle that is used for traveling on water
: a vehicle of any size that is used for traveling on water
You are going to need (Score:2)
a bigger boat.
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Flooded land = reduction in available resources. Some places are going to lose out big time. Do you think the people losing out are just going to shuffle over, and the people next to them will make room? Plenty resources for everyone! That's is so not going to happen. Flooded country is going to look at unflooded country and decide its time they shared. Unflooded country is going to think hell no, we're not taking 10 million immigrants.
What will happen is upheaval, famine and, yes, war. Same way tha
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On the other hand, warmed land = increase in available resources, as much land which is presently too cold to be much occupied becomes more pleasant. And, frankly, it's not like humans actually occupy a huge percentage of the available land mass.
What will happen is significant shift in wealth tied to real estate. Owners of large swaths of less-valuable interior land will get rich, while owners of coastal land lose their shirts.
It's certainly likely that in some parts of the world these changes will lead
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So its just a case of "we're going to be alright, the regions that aren't were probably going to be fighting about something sooner or later anyway, so meh, whatcha gonna do?"
You should read some history. It's not uncommon for those who end up in a war zone to imagine "it could never happen here". All wars are about allocation of resources (Plenty are dressed up to be about other things, but the truth is they're not.) As soon as you have sudden scarcity of key resources, especially when they are unevenly
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Population density in from the coastlines is much lower than it is on the coastlines. So yes as oceans rise there will be places for people to move to.
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What will happen is upheaval, famine and, yes, war. Same way that humans always handle situations with limited resources.
As opposed to the last 100 years of utopia and global cooperation we have enjoyed.
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So that's ok then. Look forward to more of the same, just on a global scale never seen before. How bad could it be?
Yes, let's put this in perspective (Score:2)
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During the Last Glacial Maximum (only ~23,000 years ago), sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.
Good thing they didn't have any coastal cities 23,000 years ago. That would have sucked.
In fact, every species that's alive today has managed to survive dozens of glacial advances and glacial retreats
What about the species that aren't alive today? How did they do?
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Good thing they didn't have any coastal cities 23,000 years ago. That would have sucked.
There were plenty of coastal cities, well, villages in most cases due to lower overall population.
The main point however is that ... cities do die over time due to environmental changes, this is in no way 'new' or unique to modern society.
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What I have heard of so far in terms of likely submerged human settlements is the Black Sea before the Mediterranean spilled into it (possibly the origin of the Noah story), and land to the east of England.
Also quite a few indigenous villages now underwater around the coast of Florida.
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What I have heard of so far in terms of likely submerged human settlements is the Black Sea before the Mediterranean spilled into it (possibly the origin of the Noah story), and land to the east of England.
Partial list of submerged human activity:
Doggerland [wikipedia.org] was a rather large land area containing a not-insignificant amount of human activity, which now lies under the north sea.
Sundaland [wikipedia.org] is another large landmass that is now submerged, with an unknown but suspected to be significant quantity of past human activity.
Coquer Cave [wikipedia.org] off the coast of France is an interesting site, containing paleolithic cave paintings that can only be reached by diving.
The Black Sea is hypothesized [wikipedia.org] to have expanded in
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The main point however is that ... cities do die over time due to environmental changes
Wait - the GP's point is that we should expect massive impacts from anthropogenic climate change? Including losing entire cities? Seems like we should do something about that.
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Good thing they didn't have any coastal cities 23,000 years ago
Now we know what happened to Atlantis!
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Apparently they're not aware that this is trivial compared to what nature dishes out. During the Last Glacial Maximum (only ~23,000 years ago), sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.
So the billions of inhabitants of the world's major cities would have been much further away from the coast back then? I wonder how they got their fish?
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I wonder how they got their fish?
Long range snipe-fishing.
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But why let facts get in the way of us feeling important eh?
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Beautiful.
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The low-information voters and low-information journalists
Some of the reporters are probably dupes, but don't think for a minute that the owners and their cohorts, who own the seaside mansions, aren't going to do everything in their power to take money from the working poor to protect their investments. External (or existential) threat is the universal motivator and government action is the universal solution.
Yeah, we're in an upswing. That's what everybody who studies the glaciation cycles has known for
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How nice for rising sea levels to only affect the US.
Wait.. you mean there are other places?
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ACtually we'd lose a fair bit. :P).
What's the %, something liek 15% of the US population lives near the coasts?
along with many of our most productive and economically important cities?
something like a quarter of Louisiana would go away, along with a fair bit of Florida.
San Franciso bay would increase in size by like 20%, and if it got much higher potentially even spilling into the central valley (and they complain about lower production right now...
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something like a quarter of Louisiana would go away, along with a fair bit of Florida.
So there's some good news at least.
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except if the people don't drown, they move to you.
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The low-information voters and low-information journalists also seem unaware that the natural and normal state of the earth
Pray tell, 4 digit "high minded" fool. Whence is apt to take the reins of this big blue space ship? Sentience is a game changer, fucko.
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Seven digit fool, you need to spend a little time in a dictionary because what you wrote, makes no sense.
You need a noun in there, and "whence" is not a noun.
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Apparently, zombie wingers mindlessly repeating this talking point are not aware that rapid changes in climate closely correlate with mass extinction events. And apparently think it's going to be as easy for 7 billion people to move around to adjust to said changing climate tomorrow as it was for 700 million people to d
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Good luck convincing 7 billion people to adjust their daily lives because a contested model say they need to do so today.
Pre-emptive climate intervention is also predicted to be much more expensive than the wait-and-see approach, in addition of potentially having little to no effect long term; cutting emissions 20% still means we emit CO2 and concentrations will increase.
Also, we're not seeing rapid changes in climate. We're seeing atmospheric CO2 increase while the climate itself goes its own model-defying
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Yes every species that is alive today survied, but that doesnt mean they will survive another glacial retreat. In fact many species that are currently not here have died out.
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Every species that's alive today, including polar bears, managed to survive that massive 400-ft increase in sea level.
You do realise that entire sentence is tautology? How did the species that aren't alive today manage? Not so good, I'm guessing. But they'd be useless at supporting your argument, so we'll just ignore them.
No-one is saying that this spells the end of humankind. But what it does suggest is a nasty period of upheaval heading our way. And yes, that might even impact on you personally. You might not care about that, maybe you think you'll be dead and gone before it gets really unpleasant. But others wou
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Wow are you stupid. and you (hilariously) use that stupid fox trope of "low information so-and-so"....
during the last glacial maximum the ice sheets were 2 miles thick (or thicker) as far south as California's yosemite valley, and similarly far north in the southern hemisphere.
"all managed to survive" ... not without some losses I assure you.
no, we're not still emerging from the last glaciation.
and no, no polar caps is not the normal state, nor is that really a relevent thing. how do you determine normal? b
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Bill O'rockly on Foxosaurus News says that theory is a bunch of brontosaurus droppings.
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A longer, more speculative answer can be found here. [tor.com]
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The science is working, if the scientific knowledge keeps enabling new revolutionary technologies (genetic engineering, nanotechnology, metamaterials, energy storage technology, quantum computers...) like it has been doing for as long as scientific method has been applies in large scale (radio, electricity, plastics, advanced alloys, computers, telecom, crude genetic engineering, satellites...).
That's a pretty good benchmark really. Just being able to read opinions of all the anti-science people proves scie
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It doesn't matter what you call it, the physical effects are real and will have to be dealt with one way or another.
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My respect for Slashdot moderators has fallen even further....