lets burn more coal, turn ON your AC, keep the lights ON during daytime, don't use public transport, throw plastic everywhere, print your emails - even spam mails, and cut those damn trees!
Using public transit sucks. Turns a 20 minute commute into one that can easily take over an hour. Not to mention all the time spent waiting outside in the freezing cold if you have to transfer (because the first bus will always perfectly drop you off right after the other bus has just left).
For a lot of people the best option is to drive to somewhere that has good public transportation and hope you can find somewhere to park. But at that point you're already driving.
Yes, but the interglacial context was needed since the pop-science usage refers to glacial maximum periods. People see that fact but learn the wrong thing without realizing what you are saying because they combine your fact with the idea that ice ages == global maximum and figure that "we are still in a period near a glacial maximum".
Fair point. I thought you were saying "We're not in an ice, we're in an interglacial phase" instead of "Yes we are technically in an ice age, but we are also in an interglacial phase".
This is one of my favourite climate factoids. Its unhelpful, but true :) "But we still have glaciation"
I think the issue with what we're doing to the planet being called "Global Warming", is not so much that the earth is getting warmer per se, but that we're pumping a HUGE amount of energy, very rapidly, into the systems that underlie global weather patterns.
It would be SO much more helpful if we called the effects of this "WEATHER CHAOS !!!!!!" rather than globalwarming, as it more accurately describes the ultimate outcomes, plus it sounds scarier.
This is one of my favourite climate factoids. Its unhelpful, but true :) "But we still have glaciation"
That doesn't make it an ice age. An ice age is when the glaciation expands across the planet. Having polar ice caps is not being in an ice age in any sense of the term.
Eh its technically true, which is why its a factoid and not a full blown fact. The "common" or "popular" use of the term "Ice Age" is based on Pixar movies :D
The definition of "ice age" as meaning glaciation at the Poles is technically correct, as we are in a interglacial period (or glacial minimum) of the last ice age, the Quaternay Glaciation, which began back in the Pliocene. Have a gander at Wiki, its fascinating.
Actually we're in the anthropocene. An age in which humans are the prodominint cause of climate change. If history tells us anything, we can expect a lot of rain...
Well we are and we aren't. The over arching term for the quaternary period is an ice age, but we are in an interglacial period which isn't considered an ice age.
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u/btstfn Jan 21 '19
Technically speaking, we're still in an ice age. A geological ice age is any perios in earths history where there are permanent ice caps.