Global Warming: A Short History of Nearly Everything

Anyway, a few months ago I finished reading Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything,' a book the New York Times Book Review describes as "destined to become a modern classic of science writing."

The 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' is packed with cool facts about our planet and I highly recommend it. I found Bryson's observations about climate change on pages 426 and 427, particularly interesting:

"It is mildly unnerving to reflect that the whole of meaningful human history - the development of farming, the creation of towns, the rise of mathematics and writing and science and all the rest - has taken place within an atypical patch of fair-weather. Previous inter-glacials have lasted as little as eight thousand years. Our own has already passed its ten thousandth anniversary.

The fact is, we are still very much in an ice age: it's just a somewhat shrunken one - though less shrunken than many people realize. At the height of the last period of glaciation, around twenty thousand years ago, about 30 percent of the Earth's land surface was under ice. Ten Percent still is - and a further 14 percent is in a state of permafrost. Three-quarters of all the fresh water on Earth is locked up in ice even now, and we have ice caps at both poles - a situation that may be unique in Earth's history. That there are snowy winters through much of the world and permanent glaciers even in temperate places such as New Zealand may seem quite natural, but in fact it is a most unusual situation for the planet.

For most of it's history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere. The current ice age - ice epoch really - started about forty million years ago, and has ranged from murderously bad to not bad at all. Ice ages tend to wipe out evidence of earlier ice ages, so the further back you go the more sketchy the picture grows, but it appears that we have had at least seventeen severe glacial episodes in the last 2.5 million years or so - the period that coincides with the rise of Homo erectus in Africa followed by modern humans."

With "17 glacial episodes" in the last 2.5 million years, you can also bet that there were at least 17 "global warming" episodes between the "glacial episodes". But it is particularly interesting that Bryson points out that the current situation of polar ice caps is relatively unique for our planet, and that the more "normal" situation (historically speaking from an Earth science point of view) is that there is "no permanent ice anywhere." Ouch! Another inconvenient fact for Al Gore... Thats gotta hurt.
Meanwhile, another bout of "global warming" in Southern California as a very rare snowfall hit the area, from the beaches of Malibu to downtown LA, covering palm trees in snow. The cold front has virtually destroyed this years California citrus crop causing over one billion dollars in damage.