WE’LL BE HAVING A LONG HEAT WAVE
(…and there’ll be a long wait before things cool off again)

The global warming evangelicals are no doubt grimly smiling through their flood of sweat, saying…we told you so!…as two large high heat cells park themselves over most of the country.

To a certain…degree…if you’ll pardon the expression, they may be right, but only partly so because they still seem to ignore an underlying fact about global warming, which is: We’re barely halfway through the most recent inter-glacial phase of our planet, which began about 50,000 years ago. If the pattern of duration for these phases over the past million years remains true, it will probably be another 50,000 years before another cooling phase starts to kick in.

To what extent our human contribution impacts on that time frame remains to be seen. Actually, our contributions to this current warming cycle might shorten its duration thus speeding us towards another glacial cycle sooner than we might think. Here’s why: With higher temperatures, our ice caps melt more rapidly, ocean levels and volumes rise, creating higher levels of evaporation, which in turn produce higher volumes of precipitation as snow, forming new ice on the polar caps, and these then begin to expand again, leading to another glacial phase…and so on.

Such has been the pattern of the cooling-heating cycles of our planet for the past million years. Even if our human contribution were brought down to zero…tomorrow…that cyclical pattern would continue, just as it is doing right now.

So, here we are. At best this current warming cycle will be one of the shorter ones on record, otherwise, we’ll be having a long heat wave…and there’ll be a long wait before things cool off again.

CENTURION