Any of you guys ever wonder why Greenland is called Greenland? Glaciers come and go, grow and recede. Of course, in the realm of "Chicken Little science", any change means the impending doom of the earth...
My regards,
Widewing
Wide, with respect, not the "doom of the earth"....more like just our species. People that use your flawed argument as case in point proof always seem to leave out the pesky little extinction question. The planet took a shot to the jaw via asteroid 65 million years ago... it's still here. Now, not many of the species that existed in that peak time of biodiversity are, though.
In any case, the true short term threat to our species' current demise
is CO2. Not via global warming though. Ocean acidification is well underway from the simple over abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere (carbonic acid, H2CO3). I just attended a conference on reef biology. The predominant feeling was that there was nothing that was going to halt the acidification process in time to save corals. A higher acidity restricts the ability of corals to lay calcareous skeleton. Once the pH gets below 7.9, corals become free floating cnidarians again. At this point, the ideology is to describe and catalog, then attempt to place as many species into a gene bank as possible, for re-introduction in the future. Reefs nurse all stocks of gamefish.... if they go, so go the fish.
As I've said before, glacier size is not intrinsically tied to warming/and or cooling cycles. Primary consideration is the predominant precipitation in the upper reaches of the glacier field. You can have a glacier form and grow in a warm climate (see tropical glaciers Peru), as long as the upper field is getting snow.
