"All men by nature desire knowledge." Aristotle


Here's today's nugget of pyrite for you folks.

And it comes to you with just the slightest hint of irony.

With thanks to Al "ManBearPig" Gore...


Chilly?

Well, it may or may not come as a surprise to you that we are currently experiencing an Ice Age.

OK. Not the full fat, woolly mammoth, Everybody Loves that charming movie franchise kind of Ice Age. But a totally bona fide Ice Age none the less.

An Ice Age is any period in the Earth's history where we have caps of ice at the Poles. The term for the period we're living in right now is 'Interglacial'. Yes, this does make it sound like we're between ice ages. However, it actually refers to the time of warming where our ice is retreating to the Poles. The duration of an interglacial period is not fixed. Experts, of which, I must stress, I'm not one, estimate their duration to be somewhere between 12,000 and 50,000 years. Not taking man's impact into account. However, how it's possible not to I don't know, considering the variables are things like atmospheric conditions. Others factors are things like; the layout of the continents and our planet's orbit. Not that we have any influence over that. But give us time.

We've apparently seen an average increase in surface temperature of 0.2°C per decade in the past 30 years. In fact, we're supposedly within about 1°C of the maximum temperature the planet's achieved in the past million years. And allegedly, global warming of more than 1°C, from the year 2000, will constitute a potentially dangerous climate change. That is, based on models of the likely effects it'll have on sea level and it's impact on species.

Well. A degree doesn't seem a lot to me. But...

In about the year 1500, the average temperature in Northern Europe dropped by a degree and we ended up with polar bears in Orkney. Well, a polar bear. Still, one's enough.

The "Little Ice Age" lasted about 300 years. During that time the Arctic ice sheet stretched far enough south that, not only did Orkney get a visit from a disgruntled and obviously disorientated polar bear, Eskimos even kayaked to Scotland on at least six occasions. As a small side note, Eskimo isn't a derogatory term. Originally coined by Algonquin Indians to describe those people that lived in high Arctic regions, it can mean "someone from another country" or "someone who speaks another language". It's not very P.C. in Canada, where they correct term is Inuit, but Alaskan Eskimos actually prefer it. Chiefly because they are most definitely NOT Inuit.

But anyway, back in the Little Ice Age...

A possible cause for it has been put forward by Utrecht University, the Black Death.

The cataclysmic drop in the population of Europe resulted in massive swathes of fertile farmland abandoned and eventually engulfed in millions of trees. Trees love carbon dioxide, so this would have led to a huge leap in the absorption of CO2 from our atmosphere. This would have led to a drop in the average temperature, the inverse of the greenhouse effect.

This was shortly followed by the eruption of Mount Tambora, Indonesia in 1815. The ash released into the atmosphere gave us a little taste of Nuclear Winter too. 1816 was referred to as "the year without Summer". However, it did provide the inspiration for Lord Byron's Darkness and set the scene for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. So, not all bad.