Bad News for Lovers of the Pleistocene:
It appears that we have cancelled the next ice age.
I have been fascinated for some time about this mind-bending prospect, having heard it mentioned casually by a scientist a few years ago. So, I have been watching for substantiating research ever since.
New research from the Potsdam Institute is helping explain more clearly what causes ice ages to start—a combination of lower-than-average summer solar radiation (due to variations in earth’s orbit) and low CO2 levels. We haven’t yet changed the earth’s orbit to speak of, but CO2—decidedly yes. The upshot is that the CO2 that humans are adding to the atmosphere will remain there for so long, and set processes in motion, that the next scheduled ice age is being postponed many thousands of years and essentially cancelled.
The justifiable caveats and conditional statements of scientists are always frustrating, but as the lead author of the study puts it, “The bottom line is that we are basically skipping a whole glacial cycle, which is unprecedented.”
What to do?
- Stop thinking that we can just fix global warming and get back to normal in any reasonable human timeframe.
- Stop thinking that there is nothing left to do—how much and how quickly we reduce CO2 emissions will still make a huge difference in our children’s and grandchildren’s future.
- Travel lightly, use energy wisely, recycle, grow food, eat healthy local climate-friendly food, pay fair wages, fight corporate control of our lives and politics, and get really serious about electing wise leaders.
- Get out and enjoy the gifts of the Pleistocene—cirques, tarns, eskers, drumlins, remnant glaciers, moraines, glacial lake beds, and more—and dream of ice ages past and future.
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