A Mammoth Climate Change Project

For a number of years now, we have had people like Greta Thunberg et al from around the world ringing the alarm bells on climate change. While I do believe that it is true that our climate around the world is changing and that, to a degree, our activity as human beings has had an effect on this, I do not agree that it has been only us that have been to blame. Throughout history, and prehistory, the climate of the world has been ever-changing. The average temperatures on earth during the middle ages, for example, were way warmer than they are now. I believe that it serves certain political purposes these days to cry foul regarding certain industries' impact and that these are far more dangerous than the effects of changing weather patterns on our society. But I digress. Of course, we should do what we can to minimise the impact of that which we do on the world we call home.

People seem to think that the greenhouse effect, and the warming of our world has everything to do with us adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Whether by industry, agriculture, or indirectly, it is this that has led to the advent of the term "carbon footprint" and its application to everything we do. However, it is shortsighted to believe that carbon is the only culprit. Methane, by comparison, is four times more impactful in terms of the greenhouse effect it creates as it is introduced to our atmosphere. And as the world gets warmer, more methane is being released. And this has nothing to do with anything that we have done. As it turns out, the permafrost in the northern hemisphere is melting, and it contains far more dead organic material then we could have ever imagined. Everything that has ever lived and died in that part of the world has been frozen in, what has been up to now, one big ice cube. And with the melting of the permafrost, methane has slowly been releasing into the atmosphere in staggering amounts. What can we do, you may ask? It turns out that you stop 1600 billion metric tons of carbon from entering our atmosphere by resurrecting a long dead friend.

As recently as 1650 BCE, we shared our world with woolly mammoths. It is clear from paleolithic cave art that humans and mammoths lived amongst each other, and that humans relied on the mammoths as part of their equation for survival. It is also quite clear, however, that humans helped to bring about the eventual extin