Starting in the fourteenth century, cooling temperatures disrupted our economic and social structures— and may have given rise to the modern world.
By John Lanchester
March 25, 2019
It is easy to forget just how variable the climate of the earth has been, across the geologic time scale. That is partly because the extent of that variability is so difficult to imagine. A world entirely covered in ice, from pole to pole—the so-called snowball earth—is something we find it hard to get our heads around, even though the longest and oldest period of total or near-total glaciation, the Huronian glaciation, lasted for three hundred million years. A world without ice is also hard to visualize, though it is by comparison a much more recent phenomenon: perhaps only thirty-four million years ago, crocodiles swam in a freshwater lake we know as the North Pole, and palm trees grew in Antarctica. The reality is that our planet oscillates between phases with no ice, phases with all ice, and phases in the middle. The middle is where we happen to be right now—a fact that is responsible for our faulty perception of the earth’s climate as accommodating and stable.
And
The Little Ice Age, though a period of hardship, also spurred significant adaptations and shaped historical events, demonstrating the profound influence of climate on human societies.
So Humans adapted to Climate Change back all those years...But today we are bombarded with Doom and Gloom by the One-Nutted HC Nutters ...
