I was enjoying an excellent IOT podcast of the history of Hell (Melvyn Bragg is Anglican, so he forgot purgatory) on my morning commute when I was startled by the claim that the 'very rapid end' of the last “ice age” is a part of European folk memory. A hot Hell is a mostly medeival innovation claimed the don — older cultures write about cold Hells and warm Heavens.
Hmm. I didn’t know much about that. My ice age knowledge was more dated than I'd realized. Wikipedia brought me up to speed, (one must make allowances for some obviously polemical edits) and a bit of quick research found this 1999 article …
Sudden climate transitions during the Quaternary -- Adams et al. 23 (1): 1 -- Progress in Physical Geography... The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11 500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades. ...
Wow. Decades is more on the scale of "weather" than our traditional view of "climate". I have generally tracked the mainstream scientific view of global climate change (big, possibly scary, worth trying to slow), but I think I just moved a few degrees towards the anxious end of things.
A human lifetime transition from near-ice-age (the Younger Dryas was a stutter along the path from the last major ice age to our current interglacial) to wet-and-warm would make a lasting impression. Maybe a 10,000 year impression through the stories of 200 elders. Noah’s ark takes on a new meaning now …
No comments:
Post a Comment