The Guardian (U.K.) reports a study done by scholars in Denmark and the U.K. which found the following very interesting science.
Two-million-year-old DNA from northern Greenland has revealed that the region was once home to mastodons, lemmings and geese, offering unprecedented insights into how climate change can shape ecosystems.
The breakthrough in ancient DNA analysis pushes back the DNA record by 1m years to a time when the Arctic region was 11-19C warmer than the present day. The analysis reveals that the northern peninsula of Greenland, now a polar desert, once featured boreal forests of poplar and birch trees teeming with wildlife.
Climates change, and they've been doing it without human assistance for a million years or more. No SUVs, no coal-fired generation plants, probably no humans at all, just the solar system and good, old Gaia doing what they do because that's the way nature functions.
Much more recently the glacier ice was probably a mile thick near our place in Wyoming, now long gone of course. Climates change, involving natural forces immeasurably greater than anything humans can muster or influence.
What distinguishes our species is our adaptability to wildly divergent conditions; compare the relatively low tech environmental adaptations of the Inuit and the bedouin Arab. What we humans need to do is use our prodigious ingenuity to figure out ways to cope with what comes, be it heat or cold, flood or drought.
It is what we do.
