How Climate Change is Affecting Our Alpine Environments

Mr. Lanza, you ask a terrific question. It is true that our climate has shifted through periods of warming and cooling on about a 10,000 year cycle, as I remember from my classes at Texas A&M some years ago. In those cycles temperatures would make very small shifts over thousands of years - kind of like simmering food. Volcanic eruptions and other natural effects caused this ongoing and very subtle change. The issue with climate change to day is the RATE at which human-produced gasses are accelerating the temperature change. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have seen what I recall to be just over a 1 degree F increase in the world's average temperature, with projections rising to about 3 degrees F if our emissions run unchecked over the near-term. This rate of warming over the past 100 years would take eons as a part of the 10,000 year ice-age cycle. Hope that sheds some light.

Michael Lanza,
Climate change may dramatically change things as you suggest. Your comments have gotten me thinking. My big question is how much of this is part of a grand cycle? Remember Otzi the backpacker found in the Tyrolean Alps? He died in a hollow depression that protected him from the glacier that eventually covered him up. The receding glacier revealed his body in 1991. Researchers say he died in approximately 3300 B.C. This makes me wonder if the glacier developed later - after he died. If so, what did the Alps look like then? Was it warmer? Maybe Otzi lived at the beginning of a cooling cycle and we are in a warming part of the cycle? Obviously, glaciers start sometime. This is especially evident in volcanic ranges. Mountains like St. Helen's form glaciers on top of the summits, but how long had the summit been there (especially St. Helens)? In Otzi's case, his body was well preserved by falling where he did. Now, if he actually fell into a cravasse at that location, then all bets are off on my glacier theory. But...one wonders what he saw in those mountains 5000 years ago. I bet the sunsets were just as beautiful.