Scientists say human greenhouse gas emissions have canceled the next ice age [View all]

[IDemo]

At a time of intense planetary warming, it’s odd to even contemplate a counterfactual world in which we might instead be in or heading into a glacial period, sometimes more popularly called an “ice age.”

But new research published Wednesday in the influential journal Nature suggests that we may have had a close scrape with such a period earlier in the current geological epoch known as the Holocene — and that pre-industrial human modifications of the climate through agriculture, fires and deforestation might have just barely staved it off.

“Humanity narrowly escaped a glacial inception in the middle of the Holocene, which was almost suppressing the formation of civilization,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, one of the paper’s three authors and founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (tjhe other authors are also affiliated with the institute).

Moreover, the study says, massive human greenhouse gas emissions since that time have likely “postponed” what might otherwise be another ice age “by at least 100,000 years.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/01/13/scientists-say-humans-have-basically-canceled-the-next-ice-age/