Panicking people fleeing dying cities…Pandemics and epidemics breaking out…Europe facing regional famines…Countries going to war…Millions dying…
The plot for a new Hollywood disaster movie? No. Scenes from the near future.
For those that live in the upper half of the northern hemisphere no theater tickets are needed. Everyone will have front row seats.
The ice is coming
A growing number of scientists have checked their data, the solar cycles, the climate cycles and the Arctic ice core samples. What they see is approaching disaster: a new Ice Age that could displace whole nations, destroy the word’s fragile economy and bring freezing death to as much as one-fifth of the world’s population.
According to some, a new mini-Ice Age could occur in as little as five to ten years.
And those are the optimists.
The pessimists believe the Earth is spinning towards a full-fledged Ice Age—the kind that lasts thousands of years. The kind that changed the shape of continents and carved out gigantic fresh water lakes like the Great Lakes in the northern Midwest of the United States. The kind of planetary climate disaster that almost wiped out the entire human race some 12,000 years ago.
Cycles
Everything in the universe is cyclical. Climate is no exception. Ice Ages have come and gone in cycles. Two primary cycles exist: the cycle of the mini-Ice Ages and the major Ice Ages. Both types of cooling are destructive. Some regions become virtually uninhabitable with terribly shortened growing seasons, while southern areas can suffer devastating droughts.
If the planet’s truly on the cusp of a major Ice Age, some experts predict that the Antarctic ice sheet will calve at the edges and thicken towards the middle.
That’s exactly what’s been happening during the last decade or so.
According to the evidence gleaned from core ice samples, the Ice Age cycles are normally preceded by a brief warm-up in the atmosphere followed by years of greater precipitation and centuries or millennia of cooling.
Despite the short-sightedness of the man-made global warming crowd—who were over-reacting to the brief warm-up before the massive global cooling kicked in—some of the clearer thinking climatologists have been tracking the trends towards a new Ice Age since the 1970s.
Unfortunately, their voices of concern were shouted down by media and political hysteria over the trumped up warming. Now, humans may be about to face something far, far worse.
“It is quite possible that we are at the beginning of a Little Ice Age,” ~ Thomas Globig, meteorological scientist.
As the frenzy over man-made global warming dies the slow death of a thousand cuts, desperate scientists are attempting to interpret what has happened to the sun, what will happen to the Earth as the solar system swings into alignment with the galactic core possibly exposing everything to titanic energies the planet is normally shielded from, and why the Earth may slip into a full-fledged Ice Age in less than ten years.
The clock is running out.
Then add to their discoveries raw data that suggests the Earth’s molten core may have shifted and the readings pouring in that the magnetic field protecting the planet from Unimaginable deadly solar radiation is weakening.
Passing the zenith of a nearly two centuries of robust warming, the sun’s next phase will see a decline. Climatologists and heliologists agree that within 30 years the sun will go quiet resulting in a dramatic drop of solar heating. The early stages of this activity are already being felt.
All of these factors—in one way or another—have or will have a significant impact on the future climate. The impact is not a favorable one.
And again, each of these events is cyclical.
Arctic ice could spread farther to the south
“I think it is even conceivable that the Arctic ice spreads significantly in the years to come,” Globig told reporters for the German weather site weter.t-online.de. “The impact of solar activity on climate has been criminally underestimated for a long time.”
During the last few weeks of November and the first several weeks of December 2010, amazing climate anomalies have been occurring: Cuba’s temperature plunged towards the freezing mark, historic mega-storms battered the West Coast; across Europe’s temperatures plummeted as far south as the Mediterranean; Sweden braced for the coldest weather in 1,000 years and Australia had a record snowfall with one week before the beginning of summer.
England is fighting against the coldest weather seen in many hundreds of years. “What actually will happen depends on the next five to ten years,” believes Globig.
Harder, longer winters and shorter, colder summers
Globig sees two main causes for the significant cooling: First, the cyclical changes in the big air currents over the Atlantic, and second, the variations in solar activity.
Unfortunately, the high-tech Western world might not fare too well as the Ice Age advances. As Globig points out, people across northern Europe have been barely coping with just a little more snow and cold. “Our modern, high-tech world was completely overwhelmed with the winter situation.”
As the climate shifts towards an Ice Age footing, the world’s weather patterns will reverse dramatically. Again, that is exactly what Globig sees happening. “The weather over the Atlantic is upside down,” explained Globig. “Now cold air from the polar region has lots of space to flow to Europe—and that’s what’s happening.”
The odds seem to favor an approaching Ice Age and Globig tends to agree. “We will have to abandon some climate forecasts.“
Perhaps weather prediction will actually become much easier. Day after day the forecast will be: “Colder, with the likelihood of more snow.”
