TimesToCome

Despite the united front attempted by climate scientists in Paris this week, there is far from agreement on the subject.

The earth has gone through several cooling and warming cycles, first at about 40,000 years apart, lately at 100,000 years apart. There have been glaciers in Massachusetts and there have been tropical plants growing there.

A new theory put forth this month in New Scientist claims solar cycles are causing our ice ages. There’s a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years - exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. So says a physicist who has created a computer model of our star’s core.

Discover in Dec. of 2002 published an article, The Next Ice Age. William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting “George Washington Crossing the Delaware,” which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. “Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,” says Curry, tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. “I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.”
But it may again. Soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalized by the 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece “Hunters in the Snow,” make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. ….

CO2 varies in the atmosphere directly with ice ages and warming spells getting to about 280 ppm at peak temperatures and dropping to less than 200 ppm during cold spells.

Warm periods are typically 12000 years, this current one has lasted 28,000 years. So we are over due for our next ice age. The last warming spell brought us from ice age to fully warm in less than 100 years. This caused sea rises from 30 - 60 meters in less than 100 years. Glaciers typically move forward at about 2 meters a day during a cooling spell but can speed up and move as fast as 200 meters a day for short surges.

“Fallen Angels”, Niven, Pournelle and Flynn is a science fiction novel about about such a thing. Not the best written book, but it is a fun look at how the world would be if environmentalists take over and stop CO2 production which then triggers an ice age.

More Information:

Read the sunspots
Ancient rocks show how young Earth avoided becoming giant snowball
100,000 Year Climate Change Pattern Linked to Sun’s Magnetic Cycles