We are due an Ice Age withing the next 1500 years, but scientists claim high levels of CO2 will delay it. That is a bad thing? The 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba's eruption in the Late Pleistocene reduce human population to as little as 10,000 individuals.
Human emissions of carbon dioxide will defer the next Ice Age, say scientists.The last Ice Age ended about 11,500 years ago, and when the next one should begin has not been entirely clear.
Researchers used data on the Earth's orbit and other things to find the historical warm interglacial period that looks most like the current one.
In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years - but emissions have been so high that it will not.
"At current levels of CO2, even if emissions stopped now we'd probably have a long interglacial duration determined by whatever long-term processes could kick in and bring [atmospheric] CO2 down," said Luke Skinner from Cambridge University.Dr Skinner's group - which also included scientists from University College London, the University of Florida and Norway's Bergen University - calculates that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would have to fall below about 240 parts per million (ppm) before the glaciation could begin.
The current level is around 390ppm.
1 comment:
Gotta love it. Some British scientists argue that the melting freshwater will shut off the flow of he Gulf Stream and that will trigger a sudden Ice Age and that, that is an imminent threat and could happen anytime and has happened on a small scale already just a few years ago. They need to worry about reducing energy usage of fossil fuels of which there is a finite amount and using renewables which are almost infinite.
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