Gentlemen, start your engines

Turns out idling your car outside 'Seven 11' while you dash in for a carton of milk isn't what's causing catastrophic climate change.  No.  It's all determined by a chain of feedbacks involving the ice, the air and -- most importantly -- the oceans and it's been happening for millions of years.

This is the conclusion of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Summit Station, located in Greenland on the ice sheet -- the epicentre of climate change.  While the two trillion tons of CO2 that people have pumped into the atmosphere have changed the planet to some degree, they are no match for the natural cycles that occur.

I read this in an article in 'The New Yorker', which went into great detail about what is actually happening.  The history of Greenland is a case in point.  During what's known as the Last Glacial Maximum, some twenty thousand years ago, an ice sheet stretched continuously from Greenland across Ellesmere and Baffin Islands, down over Canada and much of the northern United States.  So much water was tied up in the ice that sea levels were found hundred feet lower that they are today.  It was possible to walk not just from Siberia to Alaska, but also from Australia to Tasmania and England to France.

When the ice melted large swaths of the world experienced catastrophic flooding and sea levels rose by more that a foot a decade.  So, rising sea levels are nothing new.  All of it is initiated and terminated by periodic shifts in the Earth's orbit, caused by the tug of Jupiter and Saturn over millions of years.  Any slight orbit shift affects the amount of sunlight that reaches different parts of the globe at different times of the year.

So, it's not cars causing the problems.  It's much bigger than that and there comes a tipping point from which there is no going back -- try as the hysterical and raving Stephen Guilbault might to eliminate oil and gas from the planet.

In the nineties, a team of researchers working at Summit in Greenland succeeded in drilling all the way from the top of the the ice sheet to the bedrock-- about two miles.  Samples taken show how temperatures had varied during the last ice age.  Some swings would shoot up by as much as 20 degrees in a couple of decades, only to drop again.  Apparently, a crazily jumping climate had been the rule, not the exception.

At many points, the Earth has been much hotter than it is today.  During one period 90 million years ago, breadfruit trees grew on Greenland and a rain forest thrived on Antarctica.  There were vineyards in Scotland as temperatures yo-yoed wildly up and down.

It's all very complicated, but basically, humans and our activities will not prevail.  The Earth and its planets will do their thing.  The conclusion is dire:  Once the world's remaining mountain glaciers disappear, they won't be coming back.  Nor will the coral reefs or the Amazon rain forest.  Once we cross the tipping point we may not even notice, but the world as we know it will be gone.

When they all melt, we're done.

In the interim, I'm going to keep driving my gas car.