Global warming

[pbrower2a]

(02-12-2017, 07:07 PM)Drakus79 Wrote: Has this been disproven?

We are not yet in the warmest phase of the current interglacial period. Paradoxically, one oif the signs of a warmer world is that the hot deserts are much rainier. This is Africa and most of Arabia today, and as they have been since the desiccation that forced people to take refuge in the Nile Valley, clear the nearly-impenetrable thickets around the river, and irrigate surrounding land if they were to survive.  (See Toynbee's A Study of history).





Below is how Africa was at the peak of glaciation around 18 000 years ago (dated by carbon-14):



Because so much of the earth's water was imprisoned in ice, there just wasn't enough moisture in the air to allow the richer vegetation of our time The Sahara and Namib deserts were larger and more severe.  Human populations were small, and consigned entirely to hunter-gatherer existence.

Finally I have Africa at the peak of moisture. in the map below:




The Sahara was rather mild desert, more like the Mojave of our time instead of the nearly-barren desert of the modern Sahara. Temperatures were on the average slightly warmer than they are now. Lake Chad was huge, reflecting far greater rainfall in surrounding areas.

This was practically a paradise for hunter-gatherers. It may be telling that evidence of the corded-ware people extends far to the north of the current Sahel, people advancing northward with the savanna and grassland. Summer rains went father poleward in both Northern and Southern hemispheres.

I show Africa because it had a huge part of the human population in both the peak time of glaciation and the pre-classical optimum.

...Yes, it is true -- global cooling would be more of a menace than global warming. But abrupt changes in climatic patterns do not allow people to adjust agricultural economies well.

General source:

http://web.archive.org/web/2016041914473....html#maps