By Keith Cooper
“Such a transition to a glacial state in 10,000 years’ time is very unlikely to happen, because human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere have already diverted the climate from its natural course, with longer-term impacts into the future.”
A pattern of encroaching and retreating ice sheets during and between ice ages has been shown to match certain orbital parameters of Earth around the sun, leading to researchers being able to predict that the next ice age will take place 10,000 years from now.
“The pattern we found is so reproducible that we were able to make an accurate prediction of when each interglacial period of the past million years or so would occur and how long each would last,” said Stephen Barker of Cardiff University in Wales, who led the study, in a statement. “This is important because it confirms the natural climate change cycles we observe on Earth over tens of thousands of years are largely predictable and not random or chaotic.”
However, don’t rush for your woolly hat and scarf just yet, because the long-term effects of human-made climate change could prevent the next ice age from ever happening.
Our planet has always undergone cycles of warm and cold, ice ages and interglacials. These cycles are quite separate from human-induced climate change, which is well documented, incontrovertible and is largely overriding Earth’s natural climate cycles.
