Climate Blamed, Humans Exonerated
There exists various reports that Niagara Falls froze over in 1911 and in 1932. That isn't exactly ancient history. But it does represent events that were unusual,where the falls may not have frozen completely, but that freezing did take place on the exterior, reflecting the very cold ambient temperature, while under the frozen areas, water still continued to fall freely.
We continue to experience extremes of cold and relatively warm environments throughout our written history and well before. These are extraordinary environmental, atmospheric events, and we seem to have quite short memories, and a functional inability to link these episodic events of trends toward warming alternating with cooler trends with nature's normal cycles.
We're currently in a massive international disagreement among climate specialists and environmental scientists whether the Earth has moved into a situation of global warming or simply climate change; one way or the other our climate does appear to have assumed variations from what we consider to be the norm.
We can't be certain whether certain issues regarding these changes are attributable to human activities like the emergence of industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels, sending carbon into the atmosphere, or whether what we are experiencing represents normal and oft-repeated cycles in alterations of our atmospheric environment.
Perhaps with a little prod thanks to human activity, but perhaps it is the absence or presence of sun spots. No one actually knows for certain how to separate theory from reality; records and observation and brilliant deduction helps, but human nature being what it is, and nature being what she is, never the twain do fully co-operate.
A new study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveal a 50,000-year record of the remains of muskoxen discovered on Herschel Island. Scientists now studying the DNA from these ancient muskox bones newly revealed, in fact - as a result of climate change melting the permafrost, revealing the bones - have concluded that prehistoric hunters did not cause a steep decline 12,000 years earlier in this species.
Rather, they theorize that the Canadian North, a refuge over the millennia for this grazing relative of cows and bison that once was present throughout the entire circumpolar world, declined as a result of an ongoing climate-driven pattern of changes that doomed not only it but other animal species such as the woolly mammoth, as well.
The team of international scientists who undertook to study the 50,000-year evolution of this creature with its large, curved horns weighing up to 300 kilograms, illustrated that the animals' numbers "expanded and declined several times over the last 100,000 years or so", alerting the scientists to the reality of ongoing climate change being responsible, not human hunters.
A warmer, wetter climate that concluded the last ice age is now recognized as the likeliest cause of the beast's disappearance along the Planet's northern frontier. In this instance, too, humankind formerly thought responsible for an event of some dramatic proportions, turned out not to have been so.
The migration of humans to the new world meant that in some areas hunting in more recent centuries cleared off southerly-located muskoxen. But the real culprit in the clutch was climate, and nature's propensity for whatever cause to swing between one extreme and another.
Sounds kind of familiar.
Image results for niagra falls frozen
We continue to experience extremes of cold and relatively warm environments throughout our written history and well before. These are extraordinary environmental, atmospheric events, and we seem to have quite short memories, and a functional inability to link these episodic events of trends toward warming alternating with cooler trends with nature's normal cycles.
We're currently in a massive international disagreement among climate specialists and environmental scientists whether the Earth has moved into a situation of global warming or simply climate change; one way or the other our climate does appear to have assumed variations from what we consider to be the norm.
We can't be certain whether certain issues regarding these changes are attributable to human activities like the emergence of industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels, sending carbon into the atmosphere, or whether what we are experiencing represents normal and oft-repeated cycles in alterations of our atmospheric environment.
Perhaps with a little prod thanks to human activity, but perhaps it is the absence or presence of sun spots. No one actually knows for certain how to separate theory from reality; records and observation and brilliant deduction helps, but human nature being what it is, and nature being what she is, never the twain do fully co-operate.
A new study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveal a 50,000-year record of the remains of muskoxen discovered on Herschel Island. Scientists now studying the DNA from these ancient muskox bones newly revealed, in fact - as a result of climate change melting the permafrost, revealing the bones - have concluded that prehistoric hunters did not cause a steep decline 12,000 years earlier in this species.
Rather, they theorize that the Canadian North, a refuge over the millennia for this grazing relative of cows and bison that once was present throughout the entire circumpolar world, declined as a result of an ongoing climate-driven pattern of changes that doomed not only it but other animal species such as the woolly mammoth, as well.
The team of international scientists who undertook to study the 50,000-year evolution of this creature with its large, curved horns weighing up to 300 kilograms, illustrated that the animals' numbers "expanded and declined several times over the last 100,000 years or so", alerting the scientists to the reality of ongoing climate change being responsible, not human hunters.
A warmer, wetter climate that concluded the last ice age is now recognized as the likeliest cause of the beast's disappearance along the Planet's northern frontier. In this instance, too, humankind formerly thought responsible for an event of some dramatic proportions, turned out not to have been so.
The migration of humans to the new world meant that in some areas hunting in more recent centuries cleared off southerly-located muskoxen. But the real culprit in the clutch was climate, and nature's propensity for whatever cause to swing between one extreme and another.
Sounds kind of familiar.
Labels: Environment, Nature, Science
posted by Pieface | 7:42 PM
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