|
|
|
|
It’s Getting Colder, Not Warmer
by Alan Caruba
10 November 2005
In his new book Not by Fire but by Ice, Robert Felix argues that another ice age is inevitable.
|
|
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 past 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, over 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 Arctic 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.”
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 all to bundle up.
Is he right? I hope not, but the science he cites, plus the climate worldwide seems to suggest he is.
Alan Caruba is the author of Warning Signs, published by Merril Press. His weekly commentaries are posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center.
Email Alan Caruba
Send
this Article to a Friend
|
|