The New Ice Age

Saw this headline in Pravda this morning: "How Ice Age Begins." Short, Slavic...can almost hear Svetlana rolling it off her tongue...but it is an intriguing little piece without much credit to scientific findings and the like. BUT, a quick search on Google yielded a plethora ("do you know what a plethora ees, chefe?") of links including this short piece by Gerald Marsh, a physicist at the University of Chicago: "The Coming of the New Ice Age." Hmmm...here's some of the good news:

The last “little” Ice Age started as early as the 14th century when the Baltic Sea froze over followed by unseasonable cold, storms, and a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea. That was followed by the extinction of the Norse settlements in Greenland and the loss of grain cultivation in Iceland. Harvests were even severely reduced in Scandinavia And this was a mere foreshadowing of the miseries to come.

By the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, wiping out farms and entire villages. In England, the River Thames froze during the winter, and in 1780, New York Harbor froze. Had this continued, history would have been very different. Luckily, the decrease in solar activity that caused the Little Ice Age ended and the result was the continued flowering of modern civilization.

There were very few Ice Ages until about 2.75 million years ago when Earth’s climate entered an unusual period of instability. Starting about a million years ago cycles of ice ages lasting about 100,000 years, separated by relatively short interglacial perioods, like the one we are now living in became the rule. Before the onset of the Ice Ages, and for most of the Earth’s history, it was far warmer than it is today.

Indeed, the Sun has been getting brighter over the whole history of the Earth and large land plants have flourished. Both of these had the effect of dropping carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to the lowest level in Earth’s long history.

Five hundred million years ago, carbon dioxide concentrations were over 13 times current levels; and not until about 20 million years ago did carbon dioxide levels dropped to a little less than twice what they are today.

It is possible that moderately increased carbon dioxide concentrations could extend the current interglacial period. But we have not reached the level required yet, nor do we know the optimum level to reach.

So, rather than call for arbitrary limits on carbon dioxide emissions, perhaps the best thing the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the climatology community in general could do is spend their efforts on determining the optimal range of carbon dioxide needed to extend the current interglacial period indefinitely.

So just exactly what are the busy-bodies in Congress doing? Oh, don't get me started. Bottom line is this: it is complete hubris on our part to think we can control nature - we can't. This is the type of thinking that develops when we depart from faith in a divinity to faith in ourselves. The evidence for global warming is increasingly suspect, so perhaps, before we add more brakes to our staggering economy, we ought to consider the unintended consequences?

But, hey, look at the bright side - more places to do this: