Ice Age // Current

Apocalypse how? Revealing the next catastrophic threat to our world

A devastating collision with another planet, a supervolcano that killed 60 per cent of the world's population and a... more

sunnyspeaks
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Darwin Got it Wrong and It’s Not What You’re Thinking

Charles Darwin got it wrong. This is not to disparage the man. Science is an ever evolving process and scientific theories are... more

HansGruen
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Funny “Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” Teaser Trailer

We have a new teaser trailer for animated flicks “Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.” The teaser is all about that... more

allanford
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New Ice Age Coming

Well, its hard to know who to believe in todays world.

barbara3d
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Frozen earth could return in 10,000 years

The planet could face a freeze worse than an ice age starting in as little as 10,000 years, giving future societies a headache the... more

urlspotter
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Are we on the brink of a 'New Little Ice Age?'

Evidence has mounted that global warming began in the last century and that humans may be in part responsible. Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the US National Academy of Sciences concur. Computer models are being used to predict climate change under different scenarios of greenhouse forcing and the Kyoto Protocol advocates active measures to reduce CO² emissions which contribute to warming.
Thinking is centered around slow changes to our climate and how they will affect humans and the habitability of our planet. Yet this thinking is flawed: It ignores the well-established fact that Earth’s climate has changed rapidly in the past and could change rapidly in the future. The issue centers around the paradox that global warming could instigate a new Little Ice Age in the northern hemisphere.
Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily apparent in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One sees clear indications of long-term changes discussed above, with CO² and proxy temperature changes associated with the last ice age and its transition into our present interglacial period of warmth. But, in addition, there is a strong chaotic variation of properties with a quasi-period of around 1500 years. We say chaotic because these millennial shifts look like anything but regular oscillations. Rather, they look like rapid, decade-long transitions between cold and warm climates followed by long interludes in one of the two states.

"...Researchers always tell you that more research funding is needed, and we are not any different. Our main message is not just that, however. It is that global climate is moving in a direction that makes abrupt climate change more probable, that these dynamics lie beyond the capability of many of the models used in IPCC reports, and the consequences of ignoring this may be large. For those of us living around the edge of the N. Atlantic Ocean, we may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur."

(Excerpt) Click the link above for full story

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is the largest non-profit oceanographic institution in the world.
Evidence has mounted that global warming began in the last century and that humans may be in part responsible. Both the... more

frimer
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18 responses

3 months ago

Death of sunspot activity to herald new ice age?

A top observatory that has been measuring sun cycles for over 200 years predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees over the next two decades as solar activity grinds to a halt and the planet drastically cools down, potentially heralding the onset of a new ice age.

While the mass media, Al Gore and politicized bodies like the IPCC scaremonger about the perils of global warming and demand the poor and middle class pay CO2 taxes, both hard scientific data and circumstantial evidence points to a clear cooling trend.

Following the end of the Sun’s most active period in over 11,000 years, the last 10 years have displayed a clear cooling trend as temperatures post-1998 leveled out and are now plummeting.

China recently experienced its coldest winter in 100 years while northeast America was hit by record snow levels and Britain suffered its coldest April in decades as late-blooming daffodils were pounded with hail and snow on an almost daily basis. The British summer has also left many yearning for global warming, with temperatures in June and July rarely struggling to get over 16 degrees and on one occasion even dropping as low as 9 degrees in the middle of the afternoon.

“Summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century’s opening decade,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That’s by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.”

The reason? Sunspot activity has dwindled. There have only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar cycle.

“The sun’s surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun’s 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century,” reports one science blog.

Long-time man-made global warming advocates NASA assure us that significant sunspot activity will return in 2012, but a recent a paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, predicts that sunspots will all but vanish after 2015.

Since the sun, and not carbon dioxide, is the principle driver of climate change, a dearth of sunspot activity would herald a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare and contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age during which Europe and North America were hit by bitterly cold winters and the Thames river in London completely froze.

Forecasts of a sharp cooling trend are backed by the UK’s Armagh Observatory, which has been observing solar activity for over 200 years.

The observatory notes that solar cycles 21 and 22, which were characterized by being short and intense in their activity, led to the natural global warming observed in the 80’s and 90’s.

“Cycle 23, which hasn’t finished yet, looks like it will be long (at least 12 to 13 years) and cycle 24, which has still to start, looks like it will be exceptionally weak,” writes one observatory scientist.
A top observatory that has been measuring sun cycles for over 200 years predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees... more