Its implications are getting serious

BY GREGORY J. RUMMO

Climate change has replaced the term global warming to more accurately reflect the fact that there are places on our planet where the climate has indeed changed over the course of the twentieth century; whether becoming warmer or in some cases, colder; wetter or dryer, more stormy or less so. Nonetheless, it is still one of the most important issues of the twenty-first century, affecting almost every part of the world and every human being in one way or another. We are however, not the first generation to experience climate change in such drastic measures as the media often portrays it.

The meteorological history of our planet over the last 1000-plus years tells an interesting story of the climate's ups and downs. There have been epochs of warmer and colder climates. The heating witnessed during the latter half of the twentieth century was not unprecedented.

From about 850 A.D. to 1250, a 400-year warming occurred that we know as the Medieval Warm Period. The website Windows to the Universe explains that during this period, "the Vikings may have been better able to explore and colonize many areas in Northern Europe while the climate was relatively warm...because there was less sea ice. They traveled by boats to Greenland among other places through seas that would later become blocked by sea ice during the Little Ice Age." Two points to note: the Vikings called this place where their cows could graze on grass in green meadows and where they could plant warm-weather crops such as potatoes, Greenland not Iceland, and that this 400-year period of warming occurred on the earth long before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the internal combustion engine, and all of the other human activity involving the burning of fossil fuels that is routinely blamed for the warming recorded during the latter half of the twentieth century.