The ice-filled continent on the southern edge of the planet is indeed warming up, but it isn’t the first time.
The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most quickly warming areas on Earth right now, and as such has become a hotbed for global warming analysis.
But researchers looked back thousands of years and found periods where the peninsula was even warmer than it is today. Its temperature has been cyclical, just like any place on the planet. There have been times of very cold temperatures as well as temperatures warner than today.
This is the biggest point of argument for climate change theories – is the latest string of warming caused by manmade activity or just cyclical changes in the atmosphere?
After all, this planet went from being covered in ice to being completely thawed out thousands of years ago, and we didn’t even have internal combustion engines back then.
So the hunt is now on to find sources of rising greenhouse gases that aren’t necessarily the product of human interaction.
Recently, it was also discovered that large forests of diseased trees may also be releasing huge quantities of methane, more than could normally be produced by the average manmade source.
Nevertheless, researcher Dr. Robert Mulvaney wrote, “If I am pressed to say whether I think it’s human-induced, then I would say what we are seeing is human-induced.”
