Doggerlanders All
When we talk about a changing climate we are talking about the earth’s climate slowly shifting towards patterns that we don’t recognize as normal. Those that oppose the science of climate predictions based on our continued pouring of carbon into the atmosphere will often argue that the earth’s climate is always in flux. And it might surprise you to hear me say that they are right. And like so many things they (“they”) say, it’s obvious and beside the point. Yes the earth’s climate has always been in flux, and big changes have occurred thanks to major climatic shifts.
For example. There was once an icy lake, or an inland sea where the North Sea is now. Beside it was a peninsula that would someday become the British Isles. The body of land that attached future Britain to current mainland Europe is called “Doggerland.” Doggerland isn’t a theoretical place, it existed. People lived there. The Thames river used to run through it, once joining with the Rhine River before flowing into the Atlantic Sea. One day, during a long period of warming that followed an ice age, something gave way in what is now Norway; it was a landslide called the Storegga Slide. The inland sea was probably lapping at the banks of Doggerland already, as melting glaciers filled the basin full. The landslide created a tidal wave that inundated Doggerland. The deluge washed across the peninsula and severed the islands from the continent.
The reason we know all of this about Doggerland is because multiple different fields of study have presented each other with overlapping evidence. Climate scientists know about the retreating glaciers. Geologists know about the Storrega Slide. Archeologists have dredged up signs of human habitation in what is now the English Channel and the North Sea. Together they’ve painted a picture of the past, which as most of us realize, is a potential roadmap for the future.
Today multiple, differing fields of science have once again come together to raise the warning about coming catastrophic shifts in the earth’s climate. I personally think it’s important to remember that none of this matters to the “Earth” much at all. But a Norwegian landslide ended up mattering very much to whatever group of early humans had decided to live in Doggerland. Had they had some way of foreseeing those events, they almost sure would have left the area. And it seems obvious to say if they had a way of stopping it they would have. It seems obvious.
After Doggerland’s disappearance, the Earth kept turning, but that catastrophic event changed human history by creating the British Isles. This time, thanks to multiple scientific fields of study with overlapping data, we’re able to chart the events that are leading up to our own landslide, billions of gallons of water trapped in massive glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland that are melting at an increasingly rapid rate. We’re able to understand what’s causing this current period of warming, and, what is wildest is, we know what to do to stop it.
But we probably won’t.
And when we don’t our descendants will wonder at our current culture. They’d dredge the saltwater bay that was once New York Harbor for signs of the previous civilization there. They’ll find the foundations of skyscrapers and crumbling roads where our carbon emitting cars once drove by the millions. They might even learn that we had the key to stopping or reversing the effects our primitive fossil fuel fired energy technologies were having on the atmosphere.
They’ll understand that we were slowly overcome by fiercer and fiercer storms. Storms we simply had built no defenses against. Tornadoes that ripped through Middle America in the winter. Wildfires that raged for months and were so hot as to cause their own weather systems. Hurricanes that broke our system of classifications and became so frequent and powerful that we ran out of names for them.
And they’ll wonder at both our prescience and our inaction. They’ll find that a large group of us, large enough to blunt any momentum we might have gained to save ourselves, first denied anything was amiss, and then when faced with predicted tragedies like the one that happened in Kentucky a couple of days ago, will cling to their old canard; the climate has always been changing!
The difference between us and the Mesolithic Doggerlanders though, was that we could have stopped the deluge. And we didn’t.