I am a rather simple chap, and I like to ask simple questions. So here are two little conundrums for readers of ‘Global Warming Politics’ to contemplate over their G & Ts this fine evening.

The map (below) [‘Reconstructed vegetation cover at the Last Glacial Maximum period ~18,000 years ago, describing the type of vegetation cover present, based on fossil pollen samples recovered from lake and bog sediments’ (original materials from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA]): large version for reading ‘The Key’ more easily available here] reconstructs world vegetation at the Last Glacial Maximum (c. 20,000 - 18,000 BP):

Now, if you visit the larger version of this map, you will readily observe the greatly reduced area of forest cover [the dominant vegetation was savanna, grassland, scrub, and desert], a condition that persisted until the end of the last Ice Age (between 15,000 and 10,000 BP). Even in the tropics, through increased dryness and seasonality, along with cooler conditions up mountains, forest was reduced to core areas, as in parts of Amazonia, or to certain refugia, or along rivers. The world only became significantly forested with the global warming that followed the end of the glaciation, the trees advancing in response to the warmer and wetter conditions, from the boreal region and the temperate lands to the sub-tropics and the tropics.

Now here, therefore, are my two conundrums:

“If the spread of forests is a characteristic of global warming, why then are forests and trees seen as a counter to ‘global warming’?”

“Which follows which, the trees the climate or the climate the trees?”

I only ask. And don’t think any answer lies in human deforestation - there are still more trees today than at the end of the last Ice Age.

“I need a bit more of that gin, dear! Easy on the tonic, there!”

“Chin, chin!”