Ice doom of DOOM!

[james_davis_nicoll]

The previous ice age lasted some 110,000 years and ended about 11,000 years ago. In other words, some 4,000 generations of humans knew of nothing but harsh winds and eternal snows. The apparently "normal'' periods between ice ages, like the present one, have averaged between 8,000 and 12,000 years. In short, the next ice age is overdue. The key question is when it will come. Can space be colonised by a sufficiently large population so that, when the next ice age strikes, it will not threaten the survival of the race?

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/1445233.html

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Several years ago I found an address Isaac Asimov gave to MIT students in the 1970s in which he seems to be endorsing the anthropogenic global cooling hypothesis. One of the points of evidence he gives is that global temperatures had been cooling slightly since the 1940s, and he attributes this to aerosols (smog). As far as I know, this is completely correct! Global warming did have a pause of about 30 years, with a very very slight declining trend, in the middle of the 20th century, and I think modern models attribute that to aerosols. But greenhouse gas emissions eventually powered right through (and some societies managed to reduce aerosol pollution).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...by the way, all subsequent "pauses" you may have heard of seem to be artifacts of some combination of noise, the El Nino cycle, and cherry-picking of data.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Waiting for "global warming stopped in 2015" future memes.

[rwpikul.livejournal.com]

Not only do the modern models attribute the cooling for the 1940s-70s to aerosols, so did the work in the 1970s. One thing I have to repeatedly point out to the "they forecast an ice age in the 70s" crowd is that that minority[1] of forecasts were all based on high-aerosol emission scenarios.


[1] There was a period of a couple months where the cooling forecasts caught up to the number of warming forecasts. It ended when the third paper forecasting warming came out.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I assume somebody is now campaigning for increased aerosol production but I haven't encountered them.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

It's a common idea for geoengineering. Would apparently be pretty cheap and easy, within the reach of a dedicated billionaire.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

We know what Elon Musk, Tony Stark, and Bruce Wayne are doing with their money. What about the rest of them?