Glaciers DO move south. That’s how they can carve up the land so much. That’s why the USA has all of Canada’s topsoil. Snow falls in the extreme north, and the sheer weight of it as it builds pushes the ice down and then out of the way in all directions.
You’re right that glaciers don’t “move” when they retreat though–they just melt.
The trouble is that it isn’t possible to say that anthropogenic warming would automatically and directly counteract a natural trend toward cooling. The Earth’s climate system is enormously complex, with many positive and negative feedbacks all interacting with each other, and there is a great deal that we frankly do not understand well, if at all. In fact, there is some thought that increased warming in the near future could conceivably trigger ice sheet growth, since higher latitudes would receive more precipitation (in the form of snow) than they do right now.
What to do, what to do…
Phlosphr - Thanks for the compliment. And although I wish I could say that I owned a boat of any kind, my name is just a nickname my friends came up with a long time ago.
The crowding problem would be somewhat offset by the lowering sea levels expanding the coastlines and ice from the glaciers could be used to water crops growing in the deserts of New Mexico, and Arizona. Don’t forget that a lot of tasty animals like the musk ox can get by just fine on the tundra.
The thing that’s always bothered me about the new Ice age scenario’s that you read about is what would happen to any nuclear power stations/dumps that got caught up in an ice sheet advance.
I guess you would have a few hundred years to remove all the high level waste, but the thought of an advancing radioactive ice sheet is not appealing.
We get seasons now. We get “summer” and “not summer”. There may be only two, but we get them, darn it!
On a more serious note, this is the real problem with the dire warnings that we are going to destroy the earth through global warming. Climactic changes are far too complex to think that we have all of the answers, or even most of them (I remember being in grade school 25 years ago and reading serious scientific articles about global cooling) and we certainly can’t say that any actions of the human race will definately have any specific effect on global climate, short of blowing up all of our nuclear weapons at once - and even then, we don’t know for certain specifically what would happen (other than that it would be pretty bad).
Does that mean that we should dismiss pollution as unimportant? Absolutely not. But let’s be concerned for the right reasons: because it’s distinctly unpleasant, causes real and measurable health problems, and may be causing or contributing to other problems, which may or may not include global warming.
Snow falls in the extreme north, and the sheer weight of it as it builds pushes the ice down and then out of the way in all directions.