The beaver dam and the story of reaching it is so cool especially as I'm loving playing Timberborn right now, but I wish journalists wouldn't insist on throwing deceptive claims about climate change into every possible story. It is exactly this kind of casual but pervasive manipulation that makes people tune out all scientific assertions about environmental damage:

> It’s hard to remember, but in the early ‘70s some scientists thought the Earth might be cooling. Thie’s research had showed evidence of the opposite; the paper about permafrost melting that he published in 1974 is now considered one of the pioneering studies of climate change.

This is all lies. In the paper [1] Thie states clearly that the world was cooling, and that the changes in the permafrost were connected to entirely natural cycles. That's all stuff that has been fully memory-holed today in a world where scientists insist that temperatures are fully stable if not for fossil fuel burning. Here are some quotes from it:

> "Especially with the trend of cooling of the past 20 years, new permafrost might develop again in some area"

> "If the present trend of cooling of the climate does not continue, the slow northerly movement will continue"

The Yale article makes it sound like the paper disagreed with global cooling, but it states it as a pure matter of fact.

> "it was estimated that extensive melting started between 100 and 200 years ago, and has progressed most rapidly over about 120 years ago till the present"

1850 is considered by climatologists to be pre-industrial as there were hardly any CO2 emissions at this time.

There is also an extensive discussion of at the time well known long term temperature cycles:

> "The first alternative seems somewhat unlikely, as during the warm period of about 1000 years which followed it, permafrost would have collapsed and most collapse scars would most probably have become overgrown. The second alternative is therefore a distinct possibility: most of the permafrost in the study area is probably not much older than about 600 years and not younger than about 150 years. The southern limit of collapse scars as mapped by Zoltai (Zoltai and Tarnocai 1969) must have had permafrost dating from between 600 B.P. and 120 B.P. Possibly this limit was reached during the “Little Ice Age” which started around 550 B.P. and ended about 1850 (Lamb 1963) - most likely between about 400 B.P. and 200 B.P"

The Little Ice Age! A term that you hear only from supposed climate change deniers these days. But also:

> "It is inadequate to suggest that a single meteorological parameter, such as temperature, controls permafrost development and collapse."

Fossil fuels, CO2 and man-made climate change isn't discussed in this paper at all. Yet Yale tells us it was a consensus busting pioneer that showed the world that global warming was real.

It is all deeply unfortunate. The frequency with which we are told lies about the history of climatology is one of the strongest arguments for being skeptical about all claims by academics, not only about their present day findings, but also about the past.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274463511_Distribut...