Global warming could stave off next ice age for 100000 years

“The many tens of thousands of years after which the next ice age may commence is very long compared to the appearance of modern human societies and is not worth worrying about compared to immediate concerns about damaging human-caused climate change expected over the coming decades if no action is takes to mitigate this likelihood”, he said.

Other recent research listed evidence from plastic pollution to the mass extinction of wildlife to show that the Earth has entered the Anthropocene.

This may sound like good news – nobody wants another ice age anytime soon – but it isn’t a reason to thank fossil fuels, says lead author Dr Andrey Ganopolski from thePotsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “It is mind boggling that humankind is able to interfere with a mechanism that shaped the world as we know it”.

For instance, we owe our fertile soil to the last ice age that also carved out today’s landscapes, leaving glaciers and rivers behind, forming fjords, moraines and lakes.

OSLO, Jan 13 (Reuters) – Global warming is likely to disrupt a natural cycle of ice ages and contribute to delaying the onset of the next big freeze until about 100,000 years from now, scientists said on Wednesday.

The result was surprisingly simple.

Humanity’s pollution of the planet may have stopped the onset of a potentially disastrous Ice Age, scientists have suggested. It may have saved our far distant descendants from an ice age, but our closer descendants may suffer from a great flood instead, with ice sheets melting at a much higher rate.

“Like no other force on the planet, ice ages have shaped the global environment and thereby determined the development of human civilization”, co-author and PIK-Director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber says in a statement.

Earth is thought to have been through a cycle of ice ages and warm periods over the past 2.5 million years, with the last being 12,000 years ago, which covered much of North America, northern Europe, Russia and Asia. “In fact, the mean half-life of Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is of the order of 35,000 years”.

Man-made greenhouse gas emissions have postponed the next ice age for an unusually long time, scientists say.

Ultimately, the study published by Bigg and his team speculate that the relationship between the melted icebergs and the photoplanktons account for up to 20 percent of the carbon stored in the Antarctic. “This elaborates the classical Milankovitch theory by adding the Carbon dioxide component”.

The phrase “ice age” may bring to mind woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and perhaps Sid the sloth from the animated films.

“Anthropogenic CO2 will still be in the atmosphere in 50,000 years’ time, and even 100,000 years, which is enough to prevent any glaciation”.

The researchers now say because that amount has since doubled we may have extended the waiting period even further to between 50,000-100,000 years.

We are apparently becoming a geological agent, like researchers mentioned, we are changing layers of sediments, composed by aluminium and carbon and we are extending the time of the interglaciation era. We are able to turn this knob by how many forests we cut down and how many fossil fuels we burn, both processes that transfer carbon from the land (or beneath it) into the atmosphere. “Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve reached that level of wisdom yet”.