Alternative view on climate change

Joe Shimmin (UK) Before you start shouting at your magazine, don’t worry, you’re not going to read that I think climate change isn’t happening or that human beings aren’t contributing to it. However, I am going to try to show that the version of climate change that we are always being shown may not be all that we should be thinking about. If you look at the timescale over which human-influenced climate change has been happening – and compare it with geological time – it is such a tiny period. However, people do not live over geological time periods, so it is natural that we concentrate on the present, with little regard for the past. In fact, with today’s human influenced climate change taking up all of the limelight, anyone would think that climate change was solely a human invention and that before the industrial revolution, the climate had been stable. But this is not the case. Fig. 1. A Map of Europe during the last glacial maximum. Blue areas are covered by ice. Green areas are land. White shows oceans and seas. In the event of a glaciation, could the influx of people migrating from the north be mitigated by the growth of the land masses due to a drop in sea level? Picture credit: Kentynet. A quick glance at Figs. 2 and 3 shows massive changes in average global temperature across the millions of years of geological time. The y axis of the graph shows change in average … Read More