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The coming ice age

By John Silveira

Issue #86 • March/April, 2004

As little as 30 years ago the talk wasn't about global warming, it was about an imminent ice age. Is an ice age likely? Even possible? Consider this: There have been more than 20 glacial advances, or ice ages, in just the last two million years. And we know from geological evidence that each glaciation lasted anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 years—no one knows why the disparity—separated by warm periods that last some 10,000 to 15,000 years. What we can be reasonably sure of is that we're now in one of the warm periods, and this one is already 13,000 years old. Some scientists think it's at an end and a new ice age is about to begin.

No one really knows what causes ice ages. Theories abound. They include perturbations in the earth's orbit, changes in ocean currents, the earth periodically passing through galactic dust that obscures the sun, variations in the sun's energy output, changes in continental positions, uplift of continental blocks, reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere, etc. Evidence or experiment may eventually resolve which of the theories wins out, or it may turn out that a combination of theories are true. It may even be that none of the current theories proves satisfactory and some entirely new theory ultimately explains their cause.



Do scientists think it'll happen that way again? Yes. And if the next ice age starts here's how it may occur: At first we wouldn't even realize it, so the first few years we'd feel we were just having one or two bad winters. But after a few years rivers will freeze all-year-round, snow from the previous years won't completely melt, glaciers will begin to form, and some of what is currently now the world's most fertile ground will become unfarmable.


At the same time, if the climate changes enough to disturb the monsoon season that fuels agriculture from Africa to China, where over half the world's six billion people now live, hundreds of millions will starve when the climate abruptly changes. There's no way to prepare them for that.



But when is this really all likely to happen? Because no one knows what causes ice ages, there's no way to forecast when the next one will start, how bad it will be, or what effect the (allegedly man-made) global warming taking place today will have on it. We can't tell whether it will be less severe than the last one, when the ice sheets only extended as far south as Wisconsin, or as bad as some of the glaciations of half a billion years ago when ice sheets formed all the way to the equator. Although this latter scenario is unlikely, no one can be sure. But if it does, kiss the human race good-bye.


Can we stop it? We can't even stop a single snow storm. Imagine trying to stop an ice age that's going to go on for tens of thousands of years.

Read More by John Silveira

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