In 1922, the poet Robert Frost wrote,
"Some say the world will end in fire,
some say in ice .
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire,
but if it had to perish twice ,
I think that for destruction ice
is also great
and would suffice ."
The likelihood, the science, points to ice.
The weather has been on everyone's mind of late. First it was Katrina, followed by Rita, and then Wilma wondering about in a fashion that defied the ability of the most sophisticated computers of the US Weather Service to predict. Typically, the perpetrators of scare campaigns were quick to announce that the number and ferocity of these and other hurricanes this passed season was due to "global warming."
This is as false as the theory of global warming. Climatologists agree the hurricanes were due to the atlantic Ocean Conveyer, a system that determines whether the ocean is warmer or cooler, moving large currents around. It is, like most things in Nature, a regular cycle, one that produced many storms in the 1940s and 50s, then eased off until the 70s and 80s, and has now returned.
It is well known that, of the course of billions of years, the earth has gone through warming and cooling cycles. From 1850 to 1950, the Earth gained about one degree Fahrenheit in warmth. It has been warmer in the past such as during the millions of years that dinosaurs existed. The earth, however, is not showing signs of significant warming. The Ice Shelf in Greenland and antarctic is actually getting thicker and, in 2004, the temperature in the artic grew noticeably cooler.
This is not something to be ignored because the earth has been in an interglacial period between ice ages that lasts about 11,200 years and we are due another ice age any day now.
Just as there is nothing mankind can do to prevent a bogus global warming, there is likely nothing we can do to avoid the very real prospect of the next ice age. When it comes it will be extinction time for people, plants and animals north of the Equator. That's the way it was the last time. Indeed, in the course of its five billion years, the earth has experienced such extinctions on a regular basis.
While the environmentalists have flooded the classrooms and media of america with endless nonsense about global warming, the fact is that the schedules, i.e. the movement of the earth around the sun, galactic timetables, and ways in which the earth and our solar system function are well known to scientists who study these things and, frankly, none if it bodes well for the human race and other critters.
at least, that is the conclusion of Robert W. Felix, the author of "Not by Fire, But by Ice: The Next Ice age Now" ($15.95, Sugarhouse Publishing, Bellevue, Wa). Piling scientific fact upon fact, Felix notes that, "We're beginning to realize that earth is a violent and dangerous place to live. We're beginning to realize that mass extinctions have been the rule, rather than the exception for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on earth."
There's environmental propaganda and then there is hard, cold science. No pun intended. Here's what Felix writes:
"Then, about 11,500 years ago, the ice age ended. and it ended fast. as the world grew warmer, tropical animals moved back into Europe, and the barren tundra filled with trees once again…It was a global sweep of death–mass extinction–destroying not only the mammoth, but some 75% of all of america's larger mammals. But why only the big ones? and why so fast?"
It hardly does justice to Felix and his book to try to encapsulate his view that a predictable reversal of the magnetic poles will act as a trigger for the next ice age and
it is not the much ballyhooed global warming that troubles Felix, but evidence that vast, unseen, underwater volcanic warming of the earth's oceans will bring about the next ice age. as the oceans warm, evaporation increases, which leads to more precipitation and when the excess precipitation begins falling as snow, it portends a new ice age.
"There is a cycle," says Felix, "a cycle that includes orogenesis (creation of mountains), seismic activity, sea level changes, black shale deposition, volcanism, extinctions, seafloor spreading and magnetic reversals." (To learn more, visit www.iceagenow.com)
Science is a wonderful thing. It gathers huge quantities of facts, organizes, tests and analyzes them. It is science that has given us an understanding of gravity, our solar system, the human genome, and everything else that has influenced and advanced our lives. Felix has peered into the past and into the future to warn us that all to bundle up.
Is he right? I hope not, but the science he cites, plus the climate worldwide seems to suggest he is.