Every now and then I say something I assume all people know. They don’t. When this happens the response is one of the following:
- Good: Dude laid down a mind blowing factoid. Awesome! It’s like the cool TED talks before the whole TED talk thing went full retard and became a signaling exercise for politicians and degree fluffers.
- Bad: Dude committed heresy. Burn him at the stake.
- Denial: Dude said something that upsets me. I won’t think about it because it makes me sad.
- Airball: I like Cheetoes.
Based on an intro like that you’d expect I’ve got some deep revelatory statement to make. I don’t, I have a simple, dumb, obvious statement that shouldn’t be surprising at all.
Here it is: The environment right now, the situation where all of human history has happened; isn’t particularly sweet, easy, and awesome. In fact it’s pretty shitty. We’re in an ice age and living in an ice age probably sucks.
None of this is particularly surprising for someone who thinks in geologic or epochal time scales. It simply is. Yet human bias must be overcome to see it. We’re all prey to the deep seated idea that if humans live now and here, then this is probably the best time and situation. And by “all of human existence”, we tend to blinder ourselves down to one specific human’s lifetime… ours. I’d qualify that even further. I think people believe the best possible climate is the one present during their formative years. Your mindset was formed when you were a kid. Maybe you remember about what season you could play pond hockey, maybe you went surfing on Christmas and the tides were a certain height… whatever it was, that’s what sits in the back of your mind. It’s not merely “average” but “the way it ought to be”. Aren’t we the center of our own universe?
Making a leap of logic, I think that’s why it’s so easy for us (collectively!) to lose our shit over environmental change. Any change, no matter what type or direction, is viewed as a threat. It makes sense. If we think here and now (or possibly a near historic idealized “before time”) is just fuckin ducky… then all deviation is super un-good.
You know this observation doesn’t have to be just about climate but that’s where I’m going. I shouldn’t address the idea because it’s radioactive. I’m going to talk about climate of the Cenozoic and some dipshit is going to relate that to raging forest fires, in Australia, in 2020, in January, on Wednesday… as if that has anything to do with broad sweeping epochs. Me doing anything but hyperventilating as instructed is badthink and it’s dangerous. Before you know it I’m going to have an Autistic Swedish teenager bitching at me about soda straws. Such is the way of the world.
But, I’m doing it anyway. To quote Kipling “the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”.
Here’s the deal, almost always, in almost the entire existence of planet earth, it’s been warmer. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m saying the third planet from the sun is almost always warmer than all of human history.
Not many folks know this. I sorta’ always knew it. I don’t know why. I liked dinosaurs as a kid so maybe I picked up a bit of paleoclimate knowledge? Regardless, I take this knowledge for granted but it’s apparently not common at all.
I recently stumbled across a graph that showed the big picture pretty well. It came with a few statements that amused me. If you think a 0.1 degree variation between now and the average of the last century is enough merit throwing bricks at your neighbor’s SUV then strap in because you’ve about to see a roller coaster ride. Here’s the graph:
I got the graph from Watts Up With That. They didn’t pick it from a hat. They got it from Christopher Scotese’s geological interpretation of Phanerozoic global temperatures (which I didn’t bother reading).
Note: you learn something every day and I learned the word phanerozic. (Phanerozic is the current geologic eon. The one with lots of cool plants and animals. Not the boring eons that are all bacteria and organic chemistry. They suck! The phanerozic rocks! It covers 541 million years to the present. In case you’re wondering; a half billion years is a long time. Now you know what phanerozic means. You’re welcome.)
Anyway, back to the image. See the blue band? They call that Icehouse. We’re in that band right now. Look at the whole stretch of 500,000,000+ years. How much of that vast timeline is it in the blue band? Riiiiiiiight… almost none.
See the tiny little divot on the far right? That’s us. Our puny pathetic span on this planet is there. Oh no! What about the vertical line that leaves the uncommon Icehouse and blitzkreigs into the green center… where the earth has spent most of time? That’s labeled “PAW” and it’s a projection of possible anthropogenic warming. It’s the ultimate doom and gloom scenario. The saddest and weepiest pessimistic IPCC climate model.
So did that scenario happen? Oh hell no! In 2016 the actual global average surface temperature of the Earth is marked on the plot. It’s well in the blue. It’s about 14.5 degrees C. (Zoom in and you’ll see it. It’s in the blue. Brrrr.)
Yeah, in case you were wondering, the first rounds of IPCC climate models that said shit would be bad? Didn’t happen. Nope. Not at all. The thermometers in real life didn’t show what the IPCC warned us about. (Got that? They made predictions and they were wrong. File that in the back of your mind and keep it for whatever future use you might encounter.)
The write up covers things pretty well but the main point is ice ages are cold (duh), we’re in one right now, and ice ages are rare. How rare? We’re in “the fifth significant and severe ice age in Earth’s known history”. Five little blips in a half billion years of natural processes.
Maybe it’s semantics. What’s the definition of an ice age? If there was a field guide it would say this: “Look for the presence of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Find that and you’re in an ice age.” We’ve got that shit… thus it’s an ice age.
But polar ice caps are normal! The arctic ice is where Santa lives. A time without polar ice caps would be strange. Right?
Wrong! “[O]ut of the last 550 million years, the earth has had permanent ice caps on one or both poles only nine percent of the time.”
So, if Thanos gets his glove of power and goes berserk and melts every inch of the polar ice caps because he’s got a bug up his ass about some shit… what does that mean? It means “Oh no, the earth’s climate is now the way it is 91% of the time.” Also it means I didn’t pay attention to the last movie in the Avengers series… because I’m pretty sure ant man changed time or something.
It also means everyone would use the Northwest Passage instead of the Panama Canal. How cool would that be? I for one support our future Canadian economic overlords.
Anyway, I’m not saying it’s a good idea to mine eleventy billion tons of coal, put it in your back yard, and touch that shit off. I’m not saying it’s good to spew shit into the air. I’m not saying humans can’t fuck things up. I’m just saying we assume the world now is the kindest gentlest time of all… and it’s not. Plants and animal and fish and rabbits and lemurs and aardvarks probably do better in most scenarios. Probably monkeys on social media do too.
I can’t be certain of that. Maybe polar ice caps are why we’re not getting eaten by a brontosaurus analogue. Maybe warmer weather would give bacteria the upper hand? Maybe heat somehow favors big toothy proto birds instead of monkeys with iPhones? Maybe we’re allergic to trilobites?
Regardless, there’s a single fact to remember. It’s an actual fact. “Ice Ages are rare, but humans evolved during one, so it seems normal to us.”