Beware the coming ice age

Dear Editor,

Some scientists warn that we could be headed for another "little ice age" because of how strangely calm the sun has been in recent years.

The sun goes through cycles that last about 11 years, marked by the coming and going of sunspots on its surface. At the peak of sunspot activity, (solar maximum) the sun has a lot of sunspots and it slowly unleashes solar flares and coronal mass projections.

Since our current solar cycle (cycle 24) began in 2008, the number of sunspots have been half of what the scientists had expected. If you go back to when the sun was this inactive, it was about 100 years ago.

The greatest threat to the human race is the beginning of another ice age. By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we hasten the advent of the next ice age. Obama announced that they may try to cool the planet through geoengineering. A move like that in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age. In 90 percent of the past million years, the normal state of the earth's climate has been an ice age. Ice ages last almost 100,000 years and are interrupted by short periods of warm climate, or interglacial periods. The last ice age began 144,000 years ago.

For 100,000 years temperatures fell and sheets of ice a mile thick grew to envelop much of North America, Europe and Asia. During the last ice age in Greenland, abrupt climate swings of 30 F were common. In Northern Europe, the little ice age began with the Great Famine of 1315. Crops failed because of cold temperatures and incessant rain.

The Great Famine was followed by the Black Death; the greatest disaster to have ever hit the human race. One-third of the human race died. Terror and anarchy followed. Human civilization is only possible in warm, interglacial climate. Short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the greatest threat to the human race is the onset of another ice age.

Global warming predictions by meteorologists are based on speculative, untested and poorly constrained computer models, not knowledge. The ice age is based on a wide variety of reliable data, including cores of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

August 2000 was the first month since 1913 that no sunspots were observed. We are on a cooling trend. The extent of global ice is above the 20-year average.

The potential danger of global warming is small compared to the risk of entering a new ice age. The real danger facing humanity isn't global warming, but more likely, global cooling.

Faye Ruckhardt

Nesquehoning