For our scientists here.?

Question

Yes, I realize this is the wrong catagory but you guys brought it up.

I received answers about global warming. A couple of you said that we are actually in an ice age right now. Please educate me. How is that possible? I hear constantly about Antartica breaking off in larger chunks and glaciers getting smaller.

Please take pity on this simple girl from Texas and use plain english for me.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

theres two things at work in my understanding of it ... one, pollution from industry and autos is in fact altering the environment ...and there is a conflict with big oil companies so they put out propaganda that says its a hoax ... and on the other end of the spectrum there are the globalists that want to use the environmental card to pass more globalist related legislation ... so ... imo i dont know which is better .. but we need to stop destroying our environment by going to at least biofuels for our vehicals .. and the infrastructure for that is already in place if we can get out of the influence of big oil ... and we also need to be very careful of the legislation and restrictions we allow our leaders to place on us in the name of environmentalism ... its a touchy situation we need to approach with great care and understanding ...

Answer 2

(the guy above me is living in fantasy-land. Guess he's oblivious to the fact that almost 1/2 the world doesn't even believe in the ten commandments.)

You can be in the midst of an "ice-age", without necessarily being covered in ice. The term "ice-age" simply denotes a cooler period of weather patterns where permanent glacial ice exists at the poles and covers parts of the northern seas and continents.

We may be causing this ice-age to end via global warming. The permanent ice caps at the poles are melting to such a degree, that for the first time in recorded history we are finding drowned polar bears. Why? Because they are unable to swim the distances between the increasingly smaller ice flows without becoming exhausted. At one time, submarines, which have been surfacing at the poles since the fifties, had to search for thin ice (less than 15 feet thick) through which to surface. Today, they can surface anywhere. There is no place left where the ice is more than four feet thick.

These are not irrational alarmist claims. They are facts. You can't deny carcases and sonar measurements. The weather is changing, and we are causing it.

Answer 3

What we are now experiencing is a runaway greenhouse effect|

I plan to get an air-conditioner for my apartment this summer (where all previous summers didn't need one - including the last one)|


The left doesn't get everything wrong, but the solution is not Kyoto or some other pet interventionist or social engineering scheme that they have, but by living by the commandments of God.

Actually that is a valid solution, because living according to principles of *justice* and *charity* (which is the summation of the commandments), rather than according to *exploitation* and *selfishness* (which seems to be the modus operandi of society today), a vast number of factors in science, technology, and human relations, will balance automatically - thus solving any environmental problem that we might have - thus allowing it so that *ecofascism* would no longer have credibility|




---

Answer 4

The best-measured glacier in North America, the Nisqually on Mount Rainier, has been growing since 1931.

The significance of the fact, immediately grasped by any competent climatologist, is that glacial advance is an early warning sign of Northern Hemisphere chilling of the sort that can bring on an Ice Age. The last Little Ice Age continued from about 1400 to 1850. It was followed by a period of slight warming. There are a growing number of signs that we may be descending into another Little Ice Age—all the mountains of “global warming” propaganda aside.

Our current understanding of the long-term climate cycles shows that for the past 800,000 years, periods of approximately 100,000 years’ duration, called Ice Ages, have been interrupted by periods of approximately 10,000 years, known as Interglacials. (We are now about 10,500 years into the present Interglacial.)

These cycles are not mere statistical correlations, as some Wall Street prognosticator working at the modern PC version of a ouija board might spin out. They are determined, with great scientific precision, to correlate with long-term, cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbital relationship to the Sun. Three fundamental orbital relationships are involved, each of which contributes to the amount of sunlight received in high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. When these cycles combine to reduce the incoming solar radiation (insolation) during summer months, over a number of years, the ice sheets which permanently cover Greenland, parts of Alaska, northern Canada, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, begin to advance.

At a certain point, the growth process becomes self-feeding, partly because the high reflectivity of ice and snow reduces the local temperature, partly for reasons that are not fully understood. The glaciers thicken and expand until they become continental ice sheets, one to two miles thick, creeping ever southward. Geological evidence shows that in the last Ice Age, the southern boundary of the continental ice sheet, known as a terminal moraine, stretched down the center of Long Island, through New York City, across New Jersey and Pennsylvania to Southern Illinois and Missouri, then up the Plains States through Montana and Washington State. All of this real estate was buried under one to two miles of ice.

Geologically and climatologically speaking, we are due for another such glacial advance. It might not happen in our lifetimes, but radical shifts in the climate of northern regions can take place suddenly, and in some places may already be taking place.

Answer 5

IF there is such a thing as global warming, then we humans have done nothing to increase it. It was the hottest recorded temperature in like the 1400's..... Besides Mars is getting increasingly hot, do we blame the humans on that planet for Global Warming?

And since they say it is mostly caused by Co2 then when the people who are actually concerned about this stop taking everyother breath then I'll pay attention....

It's amazing, they rely on the human power so much when we can do so little.....

What they really want is for us to stop producing weapons and all then they can come in, have you ever noticed that most of the Global Warming people hate America? Why is that?

That is just my opinion

Answer 6

Supposedly the icecaps melting interferes with the current ocean water takes to heat up and that is suppose to cause winters to become colder.
There's was a show about this on the discovery channel and supposedly an ice age can begin in twenty years, but sparked by global warming.

Answer 7

Ice Age is a technical term. The thing most people don't realise is that even though global warming is a natural event, human interference has increased it. Our planet has a balance. Hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes are all catastrophic events that happen when the pressure builds until the balance is broken. This is a basic scientific law. I.e. air always goes from high to low pressure, so if I decreased air pressure (upset balance) other air would flow in to restore balance. So we have messed up the balance, and now global warming is a bigger and more catastrophic issue than normal. This is bad news for the human race, this type of problem could seriously threaten our societies and lifestyles.

I tried to explain in laymans terms, additionally GLOBAL ICE CAPS ARE MELTING AND SEA LEVELS RISING!!!!!!!!! JS got her data wrong...

Answer 8

We may or may not be in an ice age. Even if we are, the warming and global change is occuring at a rate unseen in the geological record, we are warming at nearly 100 times the rate seen in the fastest warming cycle in history. Our environment is changing very quickly, too quickly for many of the species we rely on to adapt fast enough. As humans, we are trying to slow it down in order to help our fellow resident's cope and there is plenty of evidence that this is our fault.
That's the gist of the global warming issue in a nutshell. Hope that helps.

Answer 9

Yes we are in an ice age. But not in the sense of the colloquial meaning of the term. Quoting wikipedia: "Glaciologically, ice age is often used to mean a period of ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres; by this definition we are still in an ice age."

Clearly this ice age is not going to last much longer...

Answer 10

From a uk prospective the arctic ice caps will melt thus stopping the gulf stream reaching northen europe sending us into an ice age