No Northern Ice Age

I want to introduce a shocking concept to my readers that flies hard in the face of the accepted knowledge of the past two centuries.  It is that the Northern Ice Age did not exist at all.  What did exist was an Antarctic sized ice cap situated on top of Hudson Bay and spread out over an arc of thirty degrees.  The crust itself was rotated thirty degrees to position this ice cap and also the Antarctic Ice Cap to sit within fifteen degrees of either pole.

An immediate corollary is that the temperate zone from 15 degrees south through forty five degrees south was subject to difficult weather conditions that made Holocene type agriculture impossible but the Pleistocene menagerie quite happy.  This also meant that a ninety degree band centered on the Equator was prospective for agricultural activity with more consistent weather options but still erratic in many locales.

The globe still received the same amount of heat, but the two super cold poles tempered both hemispheres pretty much in balance.  Africa remained habitable as did much of Asia and South America.  Much of the continental shelves were also available for use.  The northern coast of Asia would have confronted an ice covered sea impacting heavily on the weather there.  A far weaker gulf stream dumped moisture into Scandinavia filling the mountains there with ample ice.

Our scant cultural reports fail to see a world that had achieved large human populations yet or having established our scale of agricultural development.  This was likely held back by climate.  The deliberate shifting of the crust ended the Pleistocene and ushered in the Holocene in which our temperature variation has dropped to plus or minus one degree making agriculture possible everywhere.  It is now possible to increase the surface population, engaged in optimizing the land to around 100 billion people.

Our human mission begun 10,000 years ago is to continue the process of terraforming the lands and optimizing every square kilometer to the best of our imaginations.