Snowshoe,
If "global warming" is not a Wayo scam there has never been one, not even in Nigeria.
Here I sit on the Floridan plateau, one of the most stable and unchanging geologic formations on earth and 40 miles from the open gulf. My particular location, geologically speaking, is near the edge of the Talbot Terrace, near the old Pamlico shoreline, which 125,000 years ago when the sea level was 25 feet higher than it is now, during the LAST INTERGLACIAL, was the beach. In other words, though I am at an elevation of forty feet, 125,000 years ago less than a mile from here was the open gulf. You can see the old beach line at the edge of the terrace running north and south through the county plain as day. Further east there are older shorelines, also easy to see. And to the west and south there are broken sections of more recent beachline, the Princess Anne at an elevation of about 15 feet and the Silver Bluff of an elevation of 5 feet.
When I dig up the garden here I get shell, new and shiny looking as if I just brought it from the gulf, not even completely fossilized yet. North of here, in places that have been recently scoured by recent repeated glaciations, you don't have this very clear and unmistakable geologic record preserved like it is here. Other places are unstable, and still other places present a steep face to the sea, and erosion can quickly obscure old coastline. But places like here or maybe even better, coastal Georgia, the record is very well preserved.
So 125,000 years ago, a mere instant in geologic time, my house was at the beach, and even before that, just before the current ice age began I would have been way under water here. Then later, say 20,000 years ago at the end of the Wisconsin glaciation, Florida would have been triple the present size, the gulf 250 feet lower and the beach 300 miles to the west. Go out in the gulf in a boat with a good sonar and you can find beachline after beachline.
More: There was no permanent ice in the Arctic until about a million years ago. And till 40 million years ago the Antarctic was ice free. Then or in the most recent interglacial there were no cars or even Algore's dreaded "internal combustion engine".
SO how come it was warm then?
Slagle |
