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Global Warming May Trigger Mini-Ice Age
Further information on the consequences of global warming have arisen from a surprising source. Fortune is running an article on how global warming could trigger a massive climate shift in the Northern Hemisphere. According to the article: 'Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point.' and that 'abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future'. One of the consequences of this climate shift might be an ice age, ranging from the severe "Younger Dryas" to the lesser "Little Ice Age", depending on how the North Atlantic "great conveyor" is affected. Such an ice-age would produce huge political upheavals, which are also discussed in the article.
I thought it was important to stress the difference because yesterday I've seen posts on other boards where people were assuming the pentagon is predicting that we are causing global warming, and therefore, our demise.
They probably don't consider "stressing the difference" important because there is no difference. Human carbon dioxide emissions clearly contribute to climate change and they are growing. The only question is when and how human contributions become catastrophic.
And if humans cause an unavoidable ice age to happen just 50 years earlier through excessive carbon dioxide emissions, that in itself would be huge: at the rate at which technology is changing, 50 extra years might allow us to cope with an ice age much better.