Forget global warming - ice age looming

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Never mind global warming -- ice age may be looming By Paul Mylrea LEEDS, England (Reuter) - Never mind fears of global warming. The world may be heading back into an ice age, a leading British scientist said Wednesday.

``The earth could still flip back into its ice age so tomorrow the politicians might be telling us we're going back into a glaciation and to chop down all the trees, burn all the coal and start driving cars,'' said Jane Francis, an expert in ancient climate systems from Leeds University.

Francis said it was ``farcical'' to try to prevent a phenomenon such as the warming of the earth by greenhouse gases, which most scientists say is already changing the climate and will become dramatic next century, when it was probably no more than a blip in geological terms.

She told Britain's main science festival that the earth was currently living through a ``brief'' warm spell in an ice age which started 30 million years ago.

She said her studies of fossilized trees found in Antarctica had shown wide variations in climate patterns within this ice age.

About two million years ago, the warm spell was briefly warm enough to allow trees to flourish at the south pole before the ice covered the area again.

``The lesson to be learned from these fossils is that it may only be a short-lived warming and we could soon go back into our ice age,'' she said.

Francis said the length of the current ice age meant all the climate records being looked at by scientists came only from within this 30-million-year period.

``So all we are looking at are fluctuations within that ice-age earth, and it's going to take phenomenal change to get out of an ice-age earth into a greenhouse earth ....

``What we are seeing really is just another interglacial phase within our big icehouse climate,'' Francis told Reuters.

Dismissing political calls for a global effort to reverse climate change, she said, ``It's really farcical because the climate has been changing constantly.

``What we should do is be more aware of the fact that it is changing and that we should be ready to adapt to the change,''

she said. ``Rather than just going with one focus that we're going into a greenhouse, we should be aware that we could, quite quickly, flick back into another state ... and we should be able to cope with that as well.'' ^REUTER@

http://www.relaypoint.net/~patriot/news/iceage.htm

-- Cave Man (caves@are.us), March 29, 2001

Answers

Aswan dam may trigger ice age, say scientists ----------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1997 Nando.net Copyright 1997 Agence France-Presse

LONDON (July 24, 1997 02:21 a.m. EDT) - Egypt's Aswan Dam could cause such oceanic and climatic changes that they trigger a new ice age, according to reports Thursday. Bob Johnson, of the University of Minnesota in the United States, said in the "New Scientist" magazine that his theory, which he described as "pretty far out ... but quite serious", has been backed by researchers at Colorado and Quebec universities. Johnson said that as the dam, built in 1968, stops fresh water entering the Mediterranean, the sea becomes saltier. The more saltier the water, the heavier it gets, and the bigger the flows from the sea through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic. These extra flows, claimed Johnson, move north, and meet the warm Gulf Stream, pushing more of the Gulf Stream into the Labrador Stream, and causing more snowfalls in the Arctic, and so a huge expansion of ice sheets. Johnson proposed a barrier built across the Straits of Gibraltar to counteract the extra flows.

Copyright 1997 Nando.net -

http://www.ee/lists/infoterra/1997/07/0042.html

-- Cave Man (caves@are.us), March 29, 2001.


The cooling could be closer than you think.

Janardhan Negi, a theoretical geophysicist and emeritus scientist at the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) here has made a controversial forecast that global warning phase will change to global cooling and the temperature anomaly will decline substantially by the year 2030.

here is the Full story.

-- Malcolm Taylor (taylorm@es.co.nz), March 30, 2001.


That's not the REAL danger to life as we know it!

The Bat Boy Has Escaped!

And he's still running free!

-- Stephen M. Poole (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), March 30, 2001.


Quoting from Weekly World News' expert on Bat Peeples:

"He moves so quickly that I wouldn't be surprised if he was in Virginia or Kentucky by now."

Run! Hide!

-- Stephen M. Poole (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), March 30, 2001.


Anyone read the story of 'the angry woman, a knife and 13 men who's live's will never be the same'??????

JESUS CHRIST!!!!!

Deano

-- Deano (deano@luvthebeach.com), March 30, 2001.



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