How cave men caused the Late Glacial Maximum [most recent ice age]

A lot of people don’t know that cave men were responsible for all this climate change thing that has everyone upset.    You want climate change?    By golly those old cave men did some climate change the likes of which nobody has ever seen since.

That’s right.    About 13,000 years ago everything was going along just fine until the cave men didn’t have a big enough carbon footprint to start global warming and keep the ice age from coming.     And so began what is called, the Late Glacial Maximum.  [Don’t be mistaking this for the Last Glacial Maximum, which was 22,000 years ago.   We don’t know what cave men did to cause that one.]

But by 11,700 years ago the cave men finally woke up and started having a bigger carbon footprint.    And that started the beginning of the Holocene Glacial Retreat.  Which is sort of where we are now.

For a long time we were lucky as hell to have such a big carbon footprint, driving those glaciers back up north and down south where they were a few times in the distant past.     But everyone had gotten so used to having glaciers scattered hither-thither-and-yon that it seemed kind of scary to a lot of people

Over a few decades people found it necessary to run around in increasingly smaller circles telling one another about those glaciers going away.   As they’d done a few times during the last 110,000 thousand years or so.    And nobody could recall whether those times without much in the way of glaciers were good times, or maybe bad times.  Nor what man had done to cause it to happen.

So the safe position to take is to assume it’s going to be bad.   Really really really bad.  And sign some petitions to try to make the glaciers come back.  Or at least tell one another about how bad it’s going to be.

But look on the bright side.   At least we won’t be in an ice age.

As I overheard someone say in a restaurant a while back, “Having human beings on this planet is not an unmixed blessing.”

Old Jules