by Allan Taylor

Created on: May 13, 2009   Last Updated: May 14, 2009

Fact or Fiction is a useful term commonly applied to books or other writings.

Some writings may be wholly fact, such as tourist brochures and travel books whilst others, like science fiction novels, may be entirely fiction.

I like to read detective novels and these books may be a blend of fact and fiction. The characters are always fictional by name but the author may base them on known personalities.

The plot is usually fictional but may be based on something that really happened. The locality (Yorkshire, Mallorca, Australia etc.) is often factual, more or less, as far is geography is concerned.

So for any entity, nothing is truly black and white. Fact and fiction can be blended in a bewildering array. So too when the term is applied to global warming.

The most amazing factual thing about global warming is the conveniently forgotten rapid major climate change from the past ice age to the present warm interglacial period.

This rapid global warming can only be considered as beneficial to mankind. It was the cause of the rapid development of the human race and the eventual distribution of humans to all corners of the earth, due to retreat of the ice.

Americans should be thankful for this short period of global warming because at the height of the last Ice Age, a mere 50,000 years ago, the localities of Chicago and New York were buried under a kilometer thickness of ice. Now it is gone, all melted, thank goodness. This is a fact.

So much water was tied up in ice sheets globally that that the sea level was about 130 meters lower than today. The continental shelf of the land was exposed to the elements of erosion, by the rivers and the atmosphere. Human beings at this time were very primitive and few in number. Their origin is thought to be in East Africa, from whence they migrated north to Europe and east to Asia. In Australia we know that with the indigenous Aborigines their arrival dates back to at least 40,000 years ago. At this time it was possible to traverse on land what is now the Bering Strait and so the Asian human beings populated North America (ca 20,000 years ago) and eventually South America, as far south as Tierra del Fuego. What a long walk!

Global warming has been a good thing! We should not be frightened of it!

The rapid warming period from about 17,000 to 10,000 years ago amounted to a global rise in temperature of about 7 degrees C, or an average temperature of 15 up to 22 degrees C, or thereabouts. All the excess ice melted and sea

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