So this means these areas were once not ice covered? Does this mean the area is returning to what it was a thousand years ago? And, back then, this was the normal or is ice covering the normal?
"Normal" is probably not a very useful framing. We're currently in an interglacial period in an ice age. So, on one scale we'd expect ice there, on one scale we'd not. On another scale we're just waiting for the sun to swallow the Earth and burn it all away. What's "normal" out of that?
If you happen to be asking if the current human-caused warming is an issue, yes it is. The Earth doesn't care, and "normal" doesn't care. We do though, we're fucking up our environment pretty good and it's causing misery and death.
As was stated "normal" is not really a useful framing. It has at various times been both "normal" for the glaciers to extend much further south, and it has also been "normal" for the earth to have no glaciers at all. When thinking about climate change the issue is not that the climate IS changing, but rather how quickly. There is no evidence that global climate has ever changed as quickly as it is today, with the fastest rates we have evidence for being on the order of 1 degree every thousand years, as compared to the current rate of about 1 degree per 50 years.
Of course that's mostly going to be poor people, and it's really hard to get rich people to care about that.
> Dropping fossil fuels today would kill people too
Wean and drop are pretty different. Many US citizens and Republican politicians have shown less than 0 interest in making progress and the Trump administration in particular has actively sabotaged the effort.
The US, a nation in huge debt, is committed to around $1T in tax subsidies and $500B in loans and other funding for clean energy in the next decade. Private capital investment in that same time will account for another several trillion - driven by these subsidies and the regulations which force industry to adapt (and because clean solutions are genuinely cheaper in many applications).
The government tax subsidies and direct spending (depending on tax projections) are on the order of 5-10% of the discretionary budget (around 2-3 times the annual 'extra' cost above baseline of assisting Ukraine or bombing Iran Feb-Oct which are each on the order of $50B). It's hard to get an exact number of course, since 'funding which decreases carbon emissions' extends way beyond clean energy and electrification. For example, Defense Production Act may be used to fund manufacturing or refining capacity in key areas.
That's a long way from 'refusal' and represents only one country.
Public and private combined, the EU is investing at about the same rate as US, China is investing on the order of about double the rate of the US.
These are very hard problems to solve.