Those whacky science folks got us all worried about a sudden new ice age, but the latest crew is saying not to worry. It's just going to get hotter than hell, like we thought before.
"Frostbite and snow-blindness are less likely to be in our future than heat stroke and malaria," one of them says. We might be repeating conditions that led to a greenhouse event 55 million years ago, which scientists can study through evidence left in soils. They see big changes in patterns of wet and dry, but mostly movement towards hot:
During the greenhouse spike of 55 million years ago, tropical mangroves and rain forests spread as far north as England and Belgium and as far south as Tasmania and New Zealand," Retallack says. "Turtles, alligators and palm trees graced Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, which is now the treeless abode of musk oxen and polar bears."
They offer additional comfort by pointing out that this last "greenhouse event" was temporary. It only lasted, oh, half a million years.
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