The Kind of Global Warming I Can Get Behind

Instapundit links to a positive global warming story, one that says we have saved ourselves from an Ice Age inadvertently:

Over the last 8,000 years carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have gradually risen, when previous trends indicated that it should have dropped.

Methane, another greenhouse gas, had also increased instead of fallen.

The unexpected trends could be explained by massive early deforestation in Eurasia, rice farming in Asia, the introduction of livestock, and the burning of wood and plant material, all of which led to an outpouring of greenhouse emissions.

The United States researchers, led by William Ruddiman from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, used a climate model to test what would happen if these greenhouse gases were reduced to their "natural" level.

They wrote in the journal, Quaternary Science Reviews: "In the absence of anthropogenic contributions, global climate is almost 2C cooler than today and roughly one-third of the way toward full glacial temperatures."

At the peak of the last ice age, which began 70,000 years ago, 97% of Canada was covered by ice.

The research showed that without the human contribution to global warming, Baffin Island would today be in a condition of "incipient glaciation".

See? We're so smart we heated the planet in anticipation of the coming ice age. Good for us; I was really starting to get sick of people whose sole purpose on this earth is to kill any and all buzzes around them, making sure we're all as unhappy as we can be about our lots in life. This kind of thing is invariably more about the unhappiness and lack of fulfillment of the speaker than scientific fact - they think guilt is what Americans, and people in general, deserve. How sad for them.