Ice Age: the Quarternary

The Earth has been steadily cooling down over the last 60 million years and the last two million years have been the coldest ever recorded! Since Earth is on a multi-million year downward cooling trend, we may get the mother of all ice ages. The next ice age may be even deadlier than the last ice age when the world population shrunk to only a few million. We will soon be reaching the end of the safe Holocene. Once more we will plunge into an ice age so severe that it may even spell the end of humanity. ................At the beginning of March 2018 Great Britain experienced unexpected snowfalls due to a change in our usual wind directions. The infamous "Beast from the East" winds from Russia brought record snowfalls in March. This change in wind direction from warm westerly to cold easterly is thought to be affected by the sun. Professor Mike Lockwood is convinced that a low sunspot count can induce more cold easterly wind flows. In 2017 Mike Lockwood at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire said that the sunspot activity is declining at its fastest rate for ten thousand years!............Could this be the start of our new ice age? Professor Mike Lockwood of Reading University is concerned about the declining strength of our Sun and its heliosphere. The heliosphere is a protective bubble that deflects nasty space weather away from Earth. Space weather is loaded with deadly cosmic radiation and energetic gamma rays. Lockwood believes that the heliospheric bubble that is protecting both planet Earth and our solar system will have substantially shrunk by mid -century. Then we will be at the mercy of whatever the cosmos decides to throw at us...........A major ice age would be the perfect means for Gaia to wipe the slate clean to give the planet a chance to recover. Fortunately such an ice age is due. This may please a lot of climate protesters who are worried about the damage being inflicted on our planet. It is rather ironic though, that it will be a cataclysmic global cooling event that will wipe us out, rather than the predicted catastrophic global warming!..........We may not appreciate that climate has been stable during the Holocene when we read of the storms and floods that are occurring worldwide! The Holocene climatic optimum (HCO) was a period of increased warming in the exact midpoint of the interglacial. This period of optimal warmth ended about 6000 years ago and the Earth has been cooling down ever since. So we are slowly gearing up for our expected ice age....................An increased accumulation of snow and ice arrived in Antarctica for much of the Cenozoic Era. Prior to this rift of Gondwanaland, the South Pole was almost tropical! Therefore continental drift and tectonic plate movement has affected our planet`s temperature on a long geologic time frame dating 50 million years. This lengthy time frame helps to put the recent warm decades of the twentieth century into a contextual time frame. A few recent warm years cannot let us escape the fact that our Earth is slowly cooling and that ice ages are becoming longer.............Dr. Andrey Ganolpolski from Potsdam is convinced that man can shape the climate and the ice age will be averted. This led to the dramatic announcement by the Potsdam Climate Institute in 2016 that the next ice age has been cancelled! Ganopolski`s team may have got the idea for this study from an article of mine printed in the Oxford Times in 2014 titled "stalling the ice age". Here is a short extract from this article;"The measured solar levels are now getting so low as to be sufficient to precipitate another ice age. Indeed, before the global warming zeitgeist became popular, scientists were voicing concerns about the imminent ice age. However carbon dioxide levels have risen recently and this may be stalling the expected ice age. This is because carbon dioxide levels might need to be below 280 ppm to facilitate the ice age, and they are presently at about 360ppm