Time & Perspective Quote by Kenneth R. Miller

Miller’s line reads like a lab result delivered with a pointed, almost political restraint: the ice sheet isn’t an eternal fixture, it’s a symptom. The intent is to puncture the comforting folk picture of Earth as a stable stage where “normal” climate simply returns after a weird year. By insisting it was “only around during cool snaps,” he reframes ice not as baseline reality but as an intermittent condition triggered by particular climate states.

The subtext is about time and evidence. “We believe” signals science’s calibrated humility, but it also stakes a claim: this is the best-supported reconstruction given cores, sediments, isotopes, and the deep archive of geology. He’s smuggling in an argument against nostalgia-driven climatology, the idea that the presence of large ice sheets represents nature’s default setting. If ice sheets come and go, then today’s warming is not a minor wobble around a fixed point; it’s a shift that can redraw coastlines, ecosystems, and human infrastructure because the planet’s “fixtures” are contingent.

Context matters: modern climate discourse often gets hijacked by the everyday weather brain (“It snowed, so warming is fake”) and by the rhetorical trick of treating recent history as permanent. Miller’s phrasing pushes back with a simple timeline correction. Ice sheets are climate’s punctuation marks, not its prose. That’s why the quote works: it compresses a vast, technical story into a sharp inversion of assumptions, reminding us that “around all the time” is usually just another way of saying “around during our brief moment of attention.”