Global Balming

Here at SOS Forests we are presently grinding out the history of forests, but an important Lesson from History should not swim by unremarked upon. When the planet was warmer, as in the Mesozoic Era, it was more lush. Warmer means more evaporation from the oceans, more rain, longer growing seasons, more bio-productivity, more bio-diversity, more Life.

In the Mesozoic, and later in the Tertiary, the planet was a lot warmer than it is today, by 30 or 40 degrees Fahrenheit. It was a green and growing planet, with all kinds of new flora and fauna evolving happily. Then global temperatures crashed. We will be discussing this further in coming posts, but eventually it got so cold the planet nearly froze, or mostly froze, in the Ice Ages. In which we are still involved. We live in a short-timer interstice between 100,000 year episodes of Refrigerator Planet.

Put another way, in the 400 million years since the Lower Devonian, when seaweeds and fish first crawled onto terra firma, it has almost always been warmer than now. The Ice Ages began about 2 mya, so for 99.5 percent of the History of Life on Dry Land, Planet Earth has been warmer than now. It has always been rainier too, except for during the worst of the Ice Ages, again.

About 6,000 to 8,000 years ago our Interstice experienced something called the Climatic Optimum. It may have been 2 to 5 degrees F warmer than now. It was the Golden Age of Agriculture, when scads of plants and animals were domesticated and hybridized. We still eat plants and animals from the Golden Age. There was another mini-Optimum about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, when Civilization really took off. Those were good times, climatically speaking. Mesopotamia, the Levant, and North Africa were green and rich with fields, farms, and forests. The American Southwest had a farmer culture, as did most of the Western Hemisphere. Today, they are all big deserts. Warmer means more rain. Warmer makes deserts bloom. Warmer makes forests spread like wildfire.

If global warming happens, as predicted by so many “scientists”, sea levels may rise. I do not know, but I doubt it. Apparently modern sea level is no different than it was 6,000 years ago, during the warmer Optimum. If all the sea ice on the planet melted, it wouldn’t change the sea level. Try this experiment: put an ice cube in a glass of water. Mark the water level. Cover the glass to prevent evaporation. Wait for the ice to melt. Mark the water level again. There will be no change! It’s simple physics, having to do with the relative densities of ice and water.

If all the glaciers on land melted, excluding Greenland and Antarctica, the sea level might go up a few centimeters. Polar landmasses are unlikely to melt, since throughout geologic history there have always been ice caps on polar landmasses. When part of Pangea was over the South Pole, there was an ice cap, even though the rest of the planet was much, much warmer on average than now. About 50 mya, when southern Pangea, Gondwana, broke up and the Antarctic Plate drifted back over the South Pole, the current ice cap formed there. It’s not going to melt soon, trust me.

Sea levels have been falling since the Pangean breakup in the Cretaceous Period of the Upper Mesozoic Era, over 100 mya. Sea level relative to continental plates has less to do with land ice and more to do with subsidence of spreading sea floors and the deepening of the abyssal.

If, however, for some inexplicable reason the waters do rise, then some folks may have to move inland or uphill. But the interior will be so much nicer, what with more temperate and lush conditions, that moving a few yards or miles inland will be desirable. The coastal littoral is windy, foggy, salty, stinky, muggy, buggy, and miserable, anyway.

The “scientists” say global warming is going to happen, no matter what we do. According to the “experts”, even if we banned fossil fuels today, the balmy trend is unstoppable. Therefore, it makes no sense to move back into your soggy urban tenement, sub-sea level, behind flimsy dikes. Assume the higher ground. Go North, Young Man, and take your Best Girl with you.

When you get there, buy some cheap land in the desert. If everything goes according to plan, you’ll be living in a tropical paradise in few short decades.

The rest of you, please burn as much fossil and contemporary fuel as you possibly can. We need to build up CO2 levels to avert the coming Milankovitch Cycle, the rapidly approaching onset of the next Ice Age (we will discuss the great Yugoslav scientist’s findings further in an upcoming Forest History post). We also need to apply surface soot to any high-albedo snow surfaces that start to build up in boreal regions. The best thing to do is stoke the fires while we still can.

Warmer is Better. Fight the Ice.