Global warming

[pbrower2a]

Yes, global cooling would be more harmful than global warming. Global cooling is connected to low levels of carbon dioxide and the most variable of greenhouse gases, water vapor. A warmer world is a moister world.

Here is what Europe looked like when carbon dioxide levels were lower -- and much of the world's water was imprisoned in ice, as shown in Europe:




There was more dry land to the extent that the seas shrank, but it was much drier and chillier even where the glaciers did not reach. "Ice" shows where the glaciers were. Gray indicates a polar desert about as barren as the modern Sahara, except brutally cold as well as parched. Steppe-tundra is a strange world too cold and dry for trees, but in which grasses competed with tundra-like plants for coverage.  Dry steppe is short-grass prairie similar to what stopped the plow in the American High Plains due to low productivity. The limited areas of green are prairies with a few trees, mostly in places which had some seasonal melt water from glaciers or snow packs. Semi-desert is cold grassland or shrub land about as promising as the lower elevations of northern Nevada and Utah.

The map has an error, as the author writes: what is now central France was steppe-tundra and not cold dry prairie.


For a map that relates to modern boundaries but lacking the color see this:

Ice sheets reached sites of modern Dublin, Cardiff, Birmingham, Berlin, Poznan, Minsk, and Moscow. Iceland, the whole of Scandinavia (except western Denmark) and the Baltic basin, and northwestern European Russia were ice-bound. What is now the English Channel and the North Sea was dry land -- cold and parched, differing little from Mars today except for having breathable air. Sites of modern Paris, Munich, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and Kiev were brutal environments for any humans living there.  The sites of classical civilization of the Greeks, Romans, and Carthaginians were more like modern-day high plains in Montana and Wyoming than the world that Hannibal, Achilles, Solomon, and Caesar knew, which is much the same terrain as one sees in paintings of Canaletto, Cezanne, or Picasso.



This is the warmest phase (so far) of the current interglacial. Trees reached farther north. Red  indicates Mediterranean vegetation in which subtropical plants adapted to summer drought prevail.  

...and below is the Europe of Cicero, Charlemagne, and Churchill:



...Global warming doesn't improve much in Europe that flooding of the Low Countries, Denmark. and the Baltic region doesn't take away when ice sheets melt from Greenland and much of West Antarctica (the part due south from the Americas) .