The intimidating arrogance of some on Wall Street is exceeded only by the loud-mouthed climate alarmists who are misinforming them. That’s about the best explanation I can come up with for a claim by JP Morgan economists David Mackie and Jessica Murray in January that Climate change threatens “human life as we know it.”

The massive ice sheets that define Antarctica and Greenland are going nowhere fast in the near term. That eventuality must await the end of the last great Ice Age. There may well be more to come since the continents remain in essentially the same configuration around the globe today as they did several million years ago when the Ice Ages began.

We have likely not seen the last of the sprawling continental glaciations across North America and Eurasia, and until the ice melts from the current icecaps there will not be any drastic rise in sea level.

The geomorphology of both Greenland and Antarctica are described as being situated over bowl-like depressions created by isostacy. The upper layers of the Earth’s crust are bent downward beneath the weight of two miles of ice. Both Greenland and Antarctic ice cores (Russian polar station at Vostok, Antarctica) show that the ice survived several warm interludes between successive prolonged periods of continental glaciation. The deeper ice on Antarctica has now been in place for several million years and did not melt even during past inter-glacial periods that were warmer than the present Holocene.

Possibly the fiscal geniuses at JP Morgan might be interested in purchasing a couple of bridges as a hedge against climate catastrophe. I can get at least one cheap if the sea begins to rise in earnest.

Oh, and for JP’s information, the current epidemic spreading from central China or an as yet uncharted bolide (space rock) arriving unannounced from the Oort cloud pose real, yet unquantified risks to human civilization. Climate change doesn’t. There is no need to invent other threats when the supervolcano below Yellowstone Park—“thousands of times more powerful than a regular volcano”—is likely to blow within a few millennia. When it does, “it could spew ash for thousands of miles across the United States, damaging buildings, smothering crops, and shutting down power plants. It’d be a huge disaster.”

Photo by Nicolasintravel on Unsplash.