What Caused a 1300-Year Deep Freeze?

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Things were looking up for Earth about 12,800 years ago. The last Ice Age was coming to an end, mammoths and other large mammals romped around North America, and humans were beginning to settle down and cultivate wild plants. Then, suddenly, the planet plunged into a deep freeze, returning to near-glacial temperatures for more than a millennium before getting warm again. The mammoths disappeared at about the same time, as did a major Native American culture that thrived on hunting them. A persistent band of researchers has blamed this apparent disaster on the impact of a comet or asteroid, but a new study concludes that the real explanation for the chill, at least, may lie strictly with Earth-bound events."

Comments

Re:Climate change is for pussies.

[bunratty]

Cope, yes. Cope inexpensively, no. Coping with a significantly warmer climate will be expensive. There's evidence that we could spend some money now to reduce the warming, thereby reducing the total cost. Wouldn't reducing the total cost mean that it makes economic sense to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?

Re:Put this in perspective

[Livius]

No-one is suggesting the human species won't survive.

Large numbers of individual humans might not.

Re: Climate change is for pussies.

[bunratty]

There's so much misinformation in your post it hurts. It's warmed 0.7 degrees Celsius in the past 134 years. It is currently warmer now than any time in the past 2000 years. In the past 17 years Earth has warmed by about 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade. And there's no sign of cooling or even temperatures leveling off.

Re:Put this in perspective

[Capsaicin]

Apparently they're not aware that this is trivial compared to what nature dishes out. During the Last Glacial Maximum (only ~23,000 years ago), sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.

So the billions of inhabitants of the world's major cities would have been much further away from the coast back then? I wonder how they got their fish?