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The Next Ice Age: What will it be Like?

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Lisa Wolfe
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« on: September 02, 2010, 02:50:12 pm »

Next Ice age in five years!
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Title:  Next Ice age in five years!
Author:  Richard Underwood
Date:  Friday, 12 February 2010 10:36




Topic:   Ufocomet - Our Planet
Next Ice age in five yearA leading weather scientist has claimed Europe could be just five years away from the start of a new ice age. While climate change campaigners say global warming is the planet’s biggest danger, physicist Vladimir Paar says most of central Europe will soon be covered in ice. And people will be able to literally walk between countries that where separated by sea, an example of this would be England and Ireland or Scotland and main land Europe.




Professor Paar, from Croatia’s Zagreb University, has spent decades analyzing previous ice ages in Europe.

“Most of Europe will be under ice, including Germany, Poland, France, Austria, Slovakia and Slovenia,” the professor said in an interview with Croatian news website index.

“Previous ice ages lasted about 70,000 years. That’s a fact and the new Ice Age can’t be avoided. The big question is what will happen to the people of European countries, which are under ice? They might migrate to the south or might stay, but with a huge increase in energy use, this could happen in five, ten, fifty or hundred years, or even later. We can’t predict it precisely, but it will come.

ice ageThe last ice age was 20,000 years ago, when large sheets of ice covered most of North America and Europe. The Professor added: “The reality is that mankind needs to start preparing for the ice age, we are at the end of the global warming period. The ice age is to follow. The global warming period should have ended thousands of years ago; we should already be in the ice age. Therefore we do not know precisely when it could start – but soon”

Professor Paar said scientists think global warming is simply a natural element of the planet’s make-up. He said: “ Some 130,000 years ago the earth’s temperature was the same as now, the level CO” was almost the same and the level of the sea was four metres higher. They keep warning people about global warming, but half of America no longer believes it as they keep freezing.”

Professor Paar said it will be possible for man to survive the ice age but energy costs will be huge. He added: “Food production also might be a problem. It would be produced in greenhouses with a lot of energy spent to heat it. The nuclear energy we know today will not last longer than 100 years as we simply do not have enough uranium in the world to match the needs in the ice age. But I’m still optimistic. There is the process of nuclear fusion happening on the sun. The fuel for the process is hydrogen and such a power plant is already worked on in France as a consortium involving firms from the EU, the US, Russia, China, Japan and south Korea.”

Professor Paar said he knew about the plans, as the head of the project was a former Japanese ambassador in Croatia. The new power plant will take at least another ten years to build.
Last Updated on Friday, 12 February 2010 16:49

http://www.ufocomet.com/articlespage/41-our-planet/104-next-ice-age-in-five-years
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« Reply #1 on: September 02, 2010, 02:51:43 pm »

Prophet of the Next Ice Age

A hero from the glory days of discovery half a century ago, before the sophistry about man-made global warming invaded climate science, will be speaking at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago, 16-18 May 2010.



Kukla at work in Czechoslovakia, from The Weather Machine (book). Photo by courtesy of G. Kukla.

In the 1960s a respected geologist in his native Czechoslovakia, George Kukla, counted the layers of loess – windblown mineral dust ground by the glaciers and laid down in the region during recent ice ages. They were separated by darker material left over from warm interglacial periods. Kukla found too many layers of loess. Until then, almost everyone thought that there were just four recent glacial ages, with long interglacials between them. An exception was Cesare Emiliani, who in Chicago in 1955 had traced major variations in heavy oxygen in seabed fossils, and counted seven ice ages. Very few experts believed him until Kukla reported at least nine loess layers in the brickyards of Czechoslovakia.

Following the ill-fated bid for democracy in the “Prague Spring” of 1968 Kukla emerged from behind the Iron Curtain and found refuge at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory (now called the Earth Observatory) where he still works.

The observatory perches beside the former glacier valley of the Hudson River. And down at water level Alec Nisbett of BBC-TV filmed Kukla for our multinational TV blockbuster called “The Weather Machine”, broadcast in 1974. By then the count of ice ages had increased still further and the reasons for the comings-and-goings of the ice were better understood. And as you can view here (after a patch of narration read grandly by the actor Eric Porter) Kukla issued a warning.

Added 16 May: The wonders of WordPress feedback tell me that only 10% of visitors to this story follow the YouTube link, so I’ll put in the transcript.

Narrator: Will a new ice age claim our lands and bury our northern cities? It’s buried Manhattan Island before, when great glaciers half a mile thick filled the valley of New York’s Hudson River. That’s what an ice age is all about. George Kukla is from Czechoslovakia, where he discovered signs that ice ages are far more frequent that most experts have supposed. Today he continues his work near New York City. For him, the next ice age is not at all remote.

George Kukla: Well almost all of us have been pretty sure that there were only four ice ages, separated by relatively long warm intervals. But now we know that there were twenty in the last two million years. And the warm periods are much shorter than we believed originally. They are something around 10,000 years long. and I’m sorry to say that the one we are living in now has just passed its 10,000 year birthday. That of course means that the ice age is due now any time.

In this post I’ll summarize what was going on in the mid-1970s, about ice age science and climate policy, before catching up with what Kukla thinks nowadays about the coming ice age.
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« Reply #2 on: September 02, 2010, 02:52:24 pm »

Milankovitch verified

Here’s an ancient viewgraph that I have used to tell the tale.

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« Reply #3 on: September 02, 2010, 02:53:00 pm »

Badly needed was better accuracy in the dating of the previous ice ages. That became available with the detection of a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field in the seabed layers and Kukla’s terrestrial material. It was then glaringly obvious that a dormant theory about the pacing of the coming and goings of the ice was correct – namely the Milankovitch theory. According to the Serbian mathematician, Milutin Milankovitch, what matters is how much solar heat is available in summer to melt the snow that falls in winter on the large northern continents. That varies as the Earth’s axis wobbles and rolls, and as our orbit around the Sun changes its eccentricity.

I explained in a lecture to the Royal Institution in London in 1980: When we were making The Weather Machine, reliable dating for the ice ages had only just become available, and preliminary tests looked very promising for Milankovitch, but the experts had not yet carried out a thoroughgoing check. There were three courses open to us. First, we could be very inhibited, and talk about the dozens of conflicting theories of the ice ages that were then current. Secondly, we could be very uninhibited and plump for the Milankovitch theory simply on the basis of a growing belief among experts that the theory was right.

The third possibility was to carry out our own test, and that was what we did, albeit reluctantly, because I do not think science writers should dabble in research as a rule, any more than lobby correspondents should try to stage a coup d’etat. But if we could thereby avoid confusing or misleading our viewers it was worth while on this occasion. So I obtained the detailed astronomical calculations of the variations of sunshine and made some ludicrously simple assumptions about the freezing and melting of the ice in response to the variations. With a pocket calculator I figured out the comings and goings of the ice by simple arithmetic, and had the results accepted and published in a letter to Nature before the programme was broadcast, to make it scientifically respectable.

My results are reproduced at the bottom of the rather complicated diagram from John Imbrie of Brown University and his son John Z Imbrie (see references).
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« Reply #4 on: September 02, 2010, 02:53:48 pm »

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« Reply #5 on: September 02, 2010, 02:54:21 pm »

The lowermost curve (D) is my own reckoning of the ice from half a million years ago to the present day, and on 100,000 years into the future. It purports to show the short-lived spikes of warmth, the interglacials, and also the glacial troughs. These can be compared with two actual records of the amount of ice in the world, as measured by Shackleton in deep-sea cores: Curves B and C. I had the deepest troughs, the glacial maxima, in the right places; not roughly, but pretty exactly. As this could not be a matter of chance it told us that the Milankovitch story was correct.

But while the peaks of warmth are generally in the right places, the heights I obtained were often too great. The Imbries used a proper computer to generate Curve A (Authors’ model) , and the match to the ocean-core record is gradually getting better. The studies by the Imbries and myself give broadly the same forecast for the next glaciation. Those top and bottom curves, at the left-hand ends, show it proceeding by two steps into a deep ice age. Our planet came over the hump of the switchback about 6000 years ago and it is on its way down.

A more definitive confirmation of Milankovitch came in 1976, in a paper by Hays, Imbrie and Shackleton, using Shackleton’s data in the figure above. But long before either that paper or my own, there was widespread behind-the-scenes acceptance of Milankovitch, and Kukla, for one, was concerned about the implications.

Kukla warned President Nixon

Those who rewrite the history of climate science to suit the man-made global warming hypothesis hate to be reminded that global cooling and the threat of a new ice age rang alarm bells in the 1960s and 1970s. In the Orwellian manner they try to airbrush out the distinguished experts involved, and to say it was just a scare story dreamed up by stupid reporters like me.

No, we didn’t make it up. I was present in Rome in 1961 when global cooling was already the main concern at a conference of the World Meteorological Organization and Unesco (see the Unesco reference). The discussions were led by Hubert Lamb of the UK Met Office, who went on to found the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

A persistent concern of Lamb and others was that the world might return to a Little Ice Age like that of 300 years ago. But the improving knowledge of glacial history, and especially the apparent brevity of warm interglacials, prompted anxiety about a full-blown ice age. George Kukla, together with Robert Matthews of Brown University, convened a conference in 1972 entitled “The Present Interglacial: How and When will it End?”, and reported it in Science magazine.

Kukla and Matthews alerted President Richard Nixon, and as a result the US Administration set up a Panel on the Present Interglacial involving the State Department and other agencies. None of us knew then that the mid-century cooling was about to be punctuated by a warming spell from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s.
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« Reply #6 on: September 02, 2010, 02:54:44 pm »

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« Reply #7 on: September 02, 2010, 02:56:08 pm »

Kukla’s present thinking



George Kukla was awarded the European Geophysical Union's Milankovitch Medal in 2004. Photo EGU

To forewarn myself of any shift in Kukla’s opinions I turned to an interview with Gelf Magazine in 2007, headlined “An Unrepentant Prognosticator”. Leaving aside his comments about the media and the politicization of climate science, I noted Kukla’s main scientific point:

The last glacial was accompanied by the increase of areally averaged global mean surface temperature, alias global warming. … But also increasing was the temperature difference between the oceans and the poles, the basic condition of polar ice growth. Believe it or not, the last glacial started with “global warming”!

I recognized the “condition for polar ice growth”. The main ice sheets grew on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. The warm Gulf Stream fed snow onto the northern lands that were chilled by weaker summer sunshine due to the Earth’s orbital changes. But I didn’t quite understand what Kukla was driving at, until he kindly sent a reference to a paper he published with Joyce Gavin in 2005. The abstract reads in part:

As perihelion moved from winter solstice toward spring equinox, the solar beam in astronomic winter and spring became stronger than in summer and autumn. This orbital configuration under climate conditions like today would lead to warming of tropical oceans but cooling of the polar regions. The areally weighted global mean surface temperature, which is dominated by the low latitudes, would increase. Consequently, during the first millennia, the early glacial ice build-up was most likely accompanied by global warming. It was the associated increase of meridional insolation and temperature gradients, which were instrumental in the transition to a glacial.

Kukla also gave me a preview of slides for his talk in Chicago, from which I select this one.
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« Reply #8 on: September 02, 2010, 02:56:41 pm »

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« Reply #9 on: September 02, 2010, 02:57:38 pm »

Global and tropical temperatures 1950 to August 2009. Both series, but especially the tropical temperatures, are strongly influenced by the Nino/Nina warmings and coolings of the tropical Eastern Pacific. Data from NASA-GISS.

Kukla comments: Note that the 1976 to 1998 tropical warming is considerably stronger than the global one. Clearly, the tropics run the ongoing change, not the high latitudes.

And the next ice age?

In the Gelf Magazine interview, Kukla said:“The shifts of solar orbit today are about two to three times weaker than in the last glacial, or by the way, in the last 400,000 years. … No doubt that we have about 10,000 or even possibly 20,000 years still ahead before the major ice advance can start.”

It’s potentially comforting, that Kukla no longer seems to think that the ice age is “due now any time”. There have been further calculations of the Earth’s orbital changes, and much attention is paid to other natural processes at work in the glacial cycles, including solar variations.

I’m not entirely reassured. When we made “The Weather Machine” Willi Dansgaard of Copenhagen had evidence of a very rapid downturn in temperature before the end of the last interglacial. And both Hubert Lamb of the Met Office and Nick Shackleton of Cambridge were speaking of ice-sheets growing, not by the horizontal creep of glaciers but from the bottom up across huge areas, when the winter’s snow failed to melt in summer. We called it “the snow blitz”, and I suspect that could still happen fairly soon, on a millennial timescale.

Finally, Kukla tells me in an email, “I have earlier believed that man may be contributing to the warming at least a little bit, but today I am not so sure even about that.” On the policy side, Kukla met the Czech President Vaclav Klaus at Prague Castle a few years ago, and supported him in his scepticism about post-Kyoto measures to “control” climate change.

References

Chicago conference: see http://www.heartland.org/events/2010Chicago/index.html

“The Weather Machine”, produced/directed by Alec Nisbett, written by Nigel Calder, BBC-TV and co-producers, 1974.

N. Calder, The Weather Machine, BBC Publications etc., 1974.

N. Calder, “The Arithmetic of Ice Ages”, Nature, Vol. 252, pp. 216-18, 1974

N. Calder, “Shall We Fry or Freeze?”, Proceedings of the Royal Institution Vol. 51, pp. 234-254 1981

J.D. Hays, J. Imbrie, and N.J. Shackelton, “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” Science, Vol. 194, pp. 1121-32, 1976

J. Imbrie and J.Z. Imbrie, “Modeling the Climatic Response to Orbital Variations”, Science, Vol. 207, pp. 943-953, 1981

Changes of Climate, Proceedings of the 1961 Rome Symposium organized by Unesco and the World Meteorological Organization – Arid Zone Research XX, Published in 1963 by Unesco. Maurizio Morabito has traced the report, including a 45MB pdf, accessible here: http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/?s=Calder (Thanks once again, Maurizio!)

G. J. Kukla and R. K. Matthews, “When Will the Present Interglacial End?”, Science, Vol. 178, pp. 190-202, 1972

Mari Krueger interviewing George Kukla, Gelf Magazine, 24 April 2007 http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/an_unrepentant_prognosticator.php

G. Kukla and J. Gavin, “Did glacials start with global warming?”, Quaternary Science Reviews, Vol. 24, pp. 1547-155, 2005

About Kukla and Klaus: Prague Daily Monitor 4 June 2007 http://www.iceagenow.com/Climatologist_Supports_Czech_Presidents_View.htm

Further references, from George Kukla

“The recommended additional reading would be Liu et al., on “Global Ocean Response…..” in Paleoceanography 2003, Volume 18 (2) pp. 1041Ff, . Clement A, Seager R. and Cane M.A., in Paleoceanography 1999, Volume 14, p 441-456, and perhaps also Kukla et al., Quaternary Research 2002, Vol. 58, p 27-31.”

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« Reply #10 on: September 05, 2010, 01:47:58 am »

When Will the Next Ice Age Occur?
If historical patterns repeat themselves, the next ice age will occur within about 2,000 years.
Posted 06.24.2002 at 4:34 pm 0 Comments

When will the next ice age occur?


Jessica Myers

Glen Ridge, N.J.


If historical patterns repeat themselves, within about 2,000 years. But that's an extremely big "if." Over the past several million years, Earth has spent most of its time sheathed in ice. But about every 100,000 years, the planet thaws. These warm spells, called interglacial periods, usually last between 15,000 and 20,000 years. We've been enjoying our current interglacial period for about 18,000 years-giving us roughly 2,000 to go before the next deep freeze.


Many factors may affect this pattern, however, and scientists disagree on the impact of these influences. First, we're still learning about all the natural cycles that affect Earth's climate. These include astronomical forces such as variations in sunspots, the planet's tilt, and tectonic pressures such as shifting landmasses and volcanic activity.


Also, we're still assessing the effect of our own impact on climate. Increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have been proven to increase surface temperatures. Ulrike Lohmann of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which co-sponsored a conference on "Global Warming and the Next Ice Age" in 2001, predicts the icy arrival in about 10,000 years. Predictions from other scientists vary from 5,000 to 50,000 years.


Edited by Bob Sillery
Research by Brad Dunn and Michael Moyer

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2002-06/when-will-next-ice-age-occur
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« Reply #11 on: September 05, 2010, 01:49:22 am »

When Will the Next Ice Age Occur?

 by Sam Montana, Staff Writer   (Ranked #1 expert in Weather & Meteorology)

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No one can say when the next ice age will occur, but we can look to previous ice ages and see what caused them. With that knowledge we can understand what events might cause another ice age.
What is an Ice Age

There are major ice age or glacial periods in Earths history. As the overall temperature of the planet cools the winter snows don’t melt over the summer. The snow continues to build up with each winter and again each summer not all of it melts, leaving it over for another winter. More snow on the ground will reflect the warmth of the sun, causing further cooling, this is called the albedo effect. Each winter the snows build up and each summer more snow fails to melt. The snow then compacts and becomes heavy and moves in the form of glaciers. As more snow and ice cover larger parts of the planet thus causing even further cooling.
Previous Ice Ages

Scientist now believe there have been four major ice age periods in Earths past. The earliest well-documented ice age occurred about 700 million years ago when the entire earth could have been covered with ice, called snowball earth. And ironically what ended this major ice age was global warming in a sense, the greenhouse effect from volcanoes. Scientist don’t know exactly what caused these ice ages either, there is speculation that maybe the oceans were warmer causing more evaporation, causing more cloud cover and precipitation which built up the snow pack. There was also an ice age 450 million years ago with the last one starting 2.5 million years ago, some scientist say we are still in that ice age because there are still ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland.

There are the glacial (glaciers advancing) periods and interglacial (glaciers retreating) periods. The planet has seen this cycle of glacial and interglacial periods on a time scale of 40,000 to 100,000 years. The Earth is currently in an interglacial period and has been in this period for about 11,000 years now.
What Causes Ice Ages to Start

There are several theories as to what causes an ice age to start.

    * The composition of the atmosphere, concentrations of carbon dioxide, CO2.
    * The Earths orbit around the sun. The Earths orbit changes with what’s known as the Milankovitch cycle.
    * The suns orbit in our galaxy and the suns energy output.
    * Changes in ocean currents, which affect our weather.
    * The moons orbit around the Earth.
    * The impact of a large meteor.
    * Large volcanic eruptions.
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« Reply #12 on: September 05, 2010, 01:49:55 am »

Recent history – The Little Ice Age

In the recent past there have been times when the earth cooled significantly. What is known as the little ice age lasted from 1350 to 1850; peaking in the 17th century, though the time duration is argued. During this time the average temperature fell by 2-3˚ F (1-1.5˚ C). Winters lasted longer, crops didn’t grow, there was famine and the dark ages and the plague occurred during this time, there were terrible winters during the American Revolution. There is much discussion as to what caused this little ice age, and no one seems to be able to pin point any one cause. Increased volcanic activity could have been the cause, but there have been increases in volcanoes before and after, that didn’t cause a little ice age. There is an odd fact that during this time period the sun was in an unusually quiet stage. Usually there is an 11-year cycle for sunspots, going from no sunspots to many. During this time, there was a 50 to 70 year period where there weren’t any sunspots. This is called the Maunder Minimum.



Maunder Minimum approx 1645 to 1715.
The Year Without a Summer

Near the end of the little ice age, the summer of 1816 has gone down in history as the year without a summer. It snowed during the summer in New England and the weather was gloomy across the planet and colder then normal. This part of the little ice age does have a known reason and that was the major eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia on April 5, 1815. It erupted for four months and was the largest volcanic eruption in history.

In 1991, Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted; it was the largest eruption in the 20th century, throwing out 30 trillion pounds of rock, liquid dust and gas into the atmosphere. The years of 1992 and 1993 were cooler in the interiors of the continents and weather patterns did change.

Now in January 2009 there have been swarms of earthquakes in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. In prehistoric times Yellowstone has erupted with 1,000 times more power then the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Scientists say it is now 40,000 years overdue for an eruption. Will that cause the next ice age?
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« Reply #13 on: September 05, 2010, 01:50:41 am »



Mt. Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991.
When Will the Next Ice Age Occur?

That might be impossible to know, especially since scientist still don’t know what caused other ice ages. Ice ages start slowly, gradually over a long time. The last major ice age might have been caused by changes in the earths CO2 levels or it could have been caused by a minor shift in the earth’s axis. Although a cataclysmic event such as a large meteor hitting the earth could cool the planted drastically and suddenly. A major volcanic eruption or series of them could also cause another ice age. Sudden shifts in the ocean currents would shift our weather patterns dramatically, which could cause an ice age. Some scientists believe we are overdue for an ice age, but human activities could have stalled it or possibly even eliminated that cycle.

Scientist can predict the earth’s orbit in the past and in the future, according to that school of thought the next ice age will begin in about 50,000 years. As more studies of ice cores are done, scientist will find more information concerning previous ice ages and may be able to predict the next one.

Sam Montana © 10 January 2009

NASA article about the current solar cycle minimum

http://factoidz.com/when-will-the-next-ice-age-occur/
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« Reply #14 on: September 05, 2010, 01:52:11 am »

How to Survive the Next Ice Age

Throughout the history of the planet, the world periodically experienced ice ages when most of the world was covered in ice sheets and glaciers. If you saw the movie called The Day After Tomorrow, then you would already be familiar with how global warming, whether caused by man, nature, or both, will cause another ice age. Unlike the movie, the next ice age will not happen in a matter of days, but most likely in a few decades. And the next ice age will most likely not start during our lifetimes, yet it is an inevitable cycle of the planet. So, how will mankind survive the next ice age?

During these ice ages, almost all forms of life find surviving much more difficult than the abundant period of time that humanity is experiencing now. No matter how well prepared any person or group can be for the next ice age, they will eventually run out of supplies and need to start living off the land again. And since we are no longer cavemen or Neanderthals who survived by hunting and gathering, we need a well thought out plan for survival. The four minimum requirements needed for survival during the next ice age are food, shelter, water, and fire. Let’s tackle each of these requirements one at a time.

FOOD:
At the start of the next ice age, most farms on the planet will be devastated and will not be able to produce enough food. Additionally, most of the world’s population will move closer to or into the tropics, and these tropical areas will not be able to produce enough food for everyone either, especially when they are severely overpopulated. Therefore, the world would need different kinds of food sources that can better survive the cold.

During the last ice age, it is believed that the main source of food for Neanderthals was fish and rabbits. These types of animals are more naturally resilient to cold climates. On the other hand, I don’t see how most livestock, such as chickens, can survive perpetual winters for hundreds of years; so farms will need to switch to raising animals that can more easily withstand cold, especially if these animals can more easily forage and consume the limited plant growth during the ice age such as rabbits. Also, the production rate of these types of animals will be much higher than regular livestock such as cattle, thus more quickly feeding more people with fewer resources.

Remember that large proportions of the planet will be covered in ice sheets and glaciers where edible plants will not grow. Therefore, farms in warmer areas will have to switch to faster growing plants to be able to feed more people, especially with shorter warm seasons to grow plants and limited farmlands. Growing food quickly with limited areas of farmland will be the key to feeding the world’s population in the next ice age. As a result, I predict that farms will convert to using mostly greenhouses; where even in harsh climates, foods of any type can be grown. Unfortunately, growing food either way will be much more difficult and more expensive. I also predict that most individuals will be growing food in their homes and in small personal greenhouses to offset the costs of food.

SHELTER:
I suspect that our homes during the next ice age will look much more different than today’s McMansions (i.e. excessively large houses), because larger homes will cost more to keep warm. First, most of the existing homes and building will not be able to withstand the harsh weather or crushing ice sheets, so new homes and buildings will need the be redesigned and built specifically for the ice age climate. Homes will have many more sources of heat, such as fireplaces and skylights, for keeping their occupants warm and dry than they do now. These homes will be better insulated and have fewer windows to keep out harsher winter weather. In the overly populated areas near the equator, smaller homes will be a necessity to squeeze more people together over small areas of land.

Furthermore, communities and even cities will almost become self contained biospheres that are virtually closed ecological systems. These biospheres will provide safe and necessary communal areas for commerce, recreation, education, farming, etc. away from the harsh weather outside.

WATER:
Water will most like the easiest survival requirement to satisfy. Anyone can easily boil snow and ice to make safe drinking water. And in the over populated tropics, current technology allows us to safely desalinate salty sea water.

FIRE:
Since wood will become more scarce during the next ice age, burning almost anything, including trash, will be the norm to stay warm and dry. However, in modern society, we mostly use electricity and fossil fuels to heat our homes. I predict that the world’s energy requirements will skyrocket to unfathomable heights to keep people alive. I can only hope that our scientists and researchers can eventually invent cheaper, safer, and renewable sources of energy, such as solar, wind, hydro, and fusion power.

CONCLUSION:
Unfortunately, these plans may not be sufficient to save mankind during the next ice age. Only through the prevention of ice ages can we guarantee a safer planet for ourselves and our descendants. Therefore, we need to discover new ways to understand and control the world’s climate, thus preventing both global warming and global cooling that can both lead to future ice ages.

by Phil B.

http://www.philforhumanity.com/How_to_Survive_the_Next_Ice_Age.html
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