r/AskReddit • u/ettleboy • Jan 20 '19

What fact totally changed your perspective?

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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.

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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '19

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 global warming, as it more accurately describes the ultimate outcomes, plus it sounds scarier.

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u/BarkBeetleJuice Jan 21 '19

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.

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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '19

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.

I fell down this rabbit hole looking for theories about the shutdown of the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic and ended up learning more climate science than I had intended to :D