Scheduled shifts in Earth's orbit should plunge the planet into an enduring Ice Age thousands of years from now but the event will probably be averted because of man-made greenhouse gases, scientists said Wednesday. . . . Two researchers built a high-powered computer model to take a closer look at these intriguing phases of cooling and warmth. In addition to the planetary shifts, they also factored in levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), found in tiny bubbles in ice cores, that provide an indicator of temperature spanning hundreds of thousands of years.They found dramatic swings in climate, including changes when Earth flipped from one state to the other in a relatively short time, said one of the authors, geoscientist Thomas Crowley of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. These shifts, called "bifurcations," appear to happen in abrupt series, which is counter-intuitive to the idea that the planet cools or warms gradually.
"You had a big change about a million years ago, then a second change around 650,000 years ago, when you had bigger glaciations, then 450,000 years ago, when you started to get more repeated glaciations," Thomas told AFP. "What's also interesting is that the inter-glaciations also became warmer."
According to the model, published in the British journal Nature by Crowley and physicist William Hyde of Toronto University, Canada, the next "bifurcation" would normally be due between 10,000 and 100,000 years from now.
Do your part to prevent the next Ice Age: trade that Prius in on a carbon-spewing V-8 Detroit musclecar and go tear up the roads.