David Steinman
See book keywords and concepts |
 It's possible that as glaciers melt and more fresh water pours into the Atlantic, the great ocean conveyor, which strongly influences global climate, might temporarily slow down, potentially causing an ice age era like the "Little ice age," a time of hard winters, violent storms, and droughts between 1300 and 1850, say Randall and Schwartz. That period's weather extremes caused horrific famines, but it was relatively mild. However, a total shutdown of the ocean conveyor might lead to a big chill like the Younger Dryas, when icebergs appeared as far south as the coast of Portugal. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 The big deal is that present day theories about how the ice age took place describe it as a slow process requiring thousands of years, meaning that when ice slowly formed over the land mass, it would have been impossible to conceal pine needles and blades of grass still thriving. What this core sample reveals is that the ice sheet must have formed very quickly. In other words, the grass and pine needles were abruptly covered with a massive sheet of ice that left the plants in a relatively preserved state that could be dug up and identified thousands of years later. |
David Steinman
See book keywords and concepts |
| It's possible that as glaciers melt and more fresh water pours into the Atlantic, the great ocean conveyor, which strongly influences global climate, might temporarily slow down, potentially causing an ice age era like the "Little ice age," a time of hard winters, violent storms, and droughts between 1300 and 1850, say Randall and Schwartz. That period's weather extremes caused horrific famines, but it was relatively mild. However, a total shutdown of the ocean conveyor might lead to a big chill like the Younger Dryas, when icebergs appeared as far south as the coast of Portugal. |
Dr. Sharon Moalem
See book keywords and concepts |
 Its widespread prevalence in Sweden around 12,000 years ago seemed to indicate that the warm weather that had followed the last ice age had been interrupted by a rapid shift back to much colder weather. In honor of the telltale wildflower, they named this arctic reprise the Younger Dryas. Of course, given prevailing thinking, even these scientists believed that the "rapid" onset of the Younger Dryas took 1,000 years or so.
It's hard to underestimate the chilling effect conventional wisdom can have on the scientific community. |
Mehmet C. Oz., M.D. and Michael F. Roizen, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
 In the ice age, it's theorized, blood sugar actually helped us. High levels of glucose were thought to prevent cells and tissues from forming ice crystals in them (sugar is a natural antifreeze)—meaning that diabetes actually would have prevented those who had it from freezing to death. Since life expectancy was low anyway, these people never had to worry about the long-term complications from diabetes that we have to deal with; it was simply a biological advantage because it protected them long enough to survive the ice, reproduce, and ensure the longevity of the species. |
Andreas Moritz
See book keywords and concepts |
 When the last ice age began, many vegetarians living in formerly tropical lands were suddenly forced to eat animals in order to survive. Some ate a mixed diet, because of more moderate climates. Others in the all-year-round tropical places of the Earth continued with vegetarian foods until quite recently. The proposed theory is highly inconclusive about all of these facts.
When I went on the high protein diet (very similar to the type O diet plan) at age five, I felt great for about 18 months, as do so many others who go on the popular Atkins diet. |
| Before the last sudden pole shift and ice age, no humans inhabited the cold regions of the world. They all lived in the warm, tropical places where plant foods were plentiful and accessible. But suddenly, without warning, the formerly tropical areas of Siberia and the Arctic region experienced a massive drop in temperature. Animals froze to death within a moment while still chewing on tropical fruit. Such animals were recently found fully intact with the fruit still in their mouth, thousands of years later. |
Dr. Sharon Moalem
See book keywords and concepts |
| The most likely suspect for the onset of the Younger Dryas and the sudden return to ice age temperatures across Europe is the breakdown of the ocean "conveyor belt," or thermohaline circulation, in the Atlantic Ocean. When it's working normally—or at least the way we're used to it—the conveyor carries warm tropical water on the ocean surface to the north, where it cools, becomes denser, sinks, and is carried south through the ocean depths back to the Tropics. Under those circumstances, Britain is temperate even though it's on the same latitude as much of Siberia. |
David R. Montgomery
See book keywords and concepts |
 Such dramatic acceleration of erosion rates makes soil erosion a global ecological crisis that, although less dramatic than an ice age or a comet impact, can prove equally catastrophic—in time.
With soil production rates of inches per millennia and soil erosion rates under conventional, plow-based agriculture of inches per decade to inches per century, it would take several hundred to a couple thousand years to erode through the one- to three-foot-thick soil profile typical of undisturbed areas of temperate and tropical latitudes. |
Dr. Sharon Moalem
See book keywords and concepts |
| What can we do with the possibility that diabetes was an adaptation to the last ice age?
What does it mean for me to understand that malaria wants me laid up and the cold wants me on the move to help them each spread?
And what does it mean that we have all this genetic code that probably came from viruses and sometimes jumps around our genome?
Oh, not much.
Just develop new ways to combat infection by limiting bacterial access to iron and provide better treatment to people whose iron deficiencies are actually natural defenses against highly infectious environments. |
David R. Montgomery
See book keywords and concepts |
| During the relatively warm period in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, before the Little ice age, severe soil erosion caused the abandonment of mostly inland and some coastal farm sites. Later erosion in the lowlands primarily involved farms in marginal locations.
Many theories have been advanced to explain Iceland's abandoned farms. Inland areas have been vacated for centuries, some valleys literally deserted. Until recently, the abandonment was primarily attributed to climate deterioration and associated epidemics. |
| As Europe's climate slid from the medieval warm period into the Little ice age (which lasted from about ad 1430 to 1850), extended cold periods meant shorter growing seasons, reduced crop yields, and less arable land. Perennially living on the edge, the lower classes were vulnerable to severe food shortages after bad harvests. Governments monitored the price of bread to gauge the potential for social instability.
Desire for land reform among the peasantry, fueled by instability and shortages, would help trigger the Reformation. |
| Yet life for the region's ice age inhabitants was less harsh than along the great northern ice sheets. As the ice retreated after the peak of the last glaciation, game was plentiful and wild stands of wheat and barley could be harvested to supplement the hunt. Are vague cultural memories of a prior climate and environment recorded in the story of the garden from which humanity was ejected before the rise of civilization?
Regardless of how we view such things, the changing climate of the last two million years rearranged the world's ecosystems time and again. |
| The combination of overgrazing and climatic detet ioration dut ing the Little ice age triggered the most extensive episode of soil erosion in Iceland's postglacial history.
During the light-filled Icelandic summer, sheep graze twenty-four houts a day, roaming over both heath and wetlands. Trampling generates bare spots up to sevetal feet in diameter. Shorn of a dense root mat, Iceland's volcanic soils offer little resistance to wind, rain, or snowmelt. |
Lynne McTaggart
See book keywords and concepts |
 A change upward of ten degrees may not seem like much until one realizes that lowering it by the same amount would bring on another ice age.
The key to warding off all the fires and floods appeared to be algae. Algae and other plants are the firefighters of our overheated oceans. Scientists are presently engaged in studying sediments from the ocean's floor to see how the oceans cope with rising levels of gases. They are especially interested in the reaction of marine plants to global warming, as these plants are the primary shock absorbers of excess carbon dioxide. |
Andreas Moritz
See book keywords and concepts |
| Those humans and animals that happened to live in other tropical areas of the world experienced more moderate climate shifts and thus survived the sudden start of the ice age. However, they had to learn to live with the seasons as we know them today. During the cold seasons, they had no other option but to kill animals for food. This is when hunting and meat-eating became a necessity. Yet this has nothing to do with the original constitutional design of the human body. |
Mark Lynas
See book keywords and concepts |
 Even during the chilly depths of the last ice age, the forest persisted relatively undisturbed, despite cooler temperatures and lower rainfall. The real problem for the Amazon, it turns out, is heat.
In order to estimate the resilience of the Amazon to changes in climate, a joint UK Met Office/University College London team led by Sharon Cowling constructed a computer model which successfully managed to simulate rainforest changes during previous climatically cooler periods. But the model also pointed to an ominous conclusion about the future. |
Dr. Sharon Moalem
See book keywords and concepts |
| Is it a coincidence that the people most likely to have a genetic propensity for a disease characterized by exactly that (excessive elimination of water and high levels of blood sugar) are people descended from exactly those places most ravaged by the sudden onset of an ice age about 13,000 years ago?
As a theory, it's hotly controversial, but diabetes may have helped our European ancestors survive the sudden cold of the Younger Dryas. |
| If massive climate change was going to lead us into a new ice age, we'd have a few hundred thousand years to do something about it.
Of course, there were some contrary voices singing a different tune, but the larger scientific community paid them very little regard. Andrew ELUcott Douglass was an astronomer working in Arizona in 1895 when he first started cutting down trees to examine them for evidence of any effect from a specific solar activity, called sunspots, that occurs in cycles. |
David Winston, RH(AHG), and Steven Maimes
See book keywords and concepts |
 Several of these unique plants lived through the ice age by adapting to and thriving in the most severe living conditions on Earth. Because of this, Brekhman believed that they might possess qualities that could help our bodies adapt to the stresses of modern life.
The Russian scientists investigated four thousand plants and identified twelve herbs as adaptogens. The majority of the research was done on eleuthero, rhodiola, rhaponticum, and schisandra.
Research into adaptogenic herbs by the Russians was taken so seriously that, in the 1960s, their study became a field of biomedical research. |
Mark Lynas
See book keywords and concepts |
| So perhaps James Hansen's warnings should be taken more seriously, particularly his concern that melt rates and sea level rises as fast as those at the end of the last ice age could begin to happen again this century. At such rapid speeds of melting the whole Greenland ice sheet would disappear within 140 years. The geography of the world's coastlines would then look radically different. Miami would disappear entirely, as would most of Manhattan. Central London would be flooded. Bangkok, Bombay and Shanghai would also lose most of their area. |
| Consider this: 18,000 years ago, during the deepest freeze of the last ice age, global temperatures were about six degrees colder than today. That made the difference, here in Oxfordshire, between arid sub-glacial tundra then and lush English countryside now. Where I sit writing in Wolvercote, north Oxford, would have been just a dozen miles from the southern edge of the ice sheet, a freezing polar desert blasted by dust-laden winds and suffering winter temperatures as low as -40° Celsius. |
| This clue comes from around 6,000 years ago, when the post-ice-age summer sun was slightly stronger than today in the northern hemisphere, due to a tiny cyclical shift in the Earth's regular orbit - over longer periods these shifts modulate the ice age cycles. This warm period, a time known as the 'Holocene maximum', made for a warmer North America and gives a tantalising glimpse of what might lie in store during the first decades of the twenty-first century. |
| This is the scenario fictionalised in an exaggerated form by the Hollywood disaster epic The Day After Tomorrow, where a collapse in the Atlantic current triggers a new ice age, flash-freezing New York and London (although the good guy still gets the girl). |
| And with this the 'average' winter, truly extreme winters would resemble the coldest days of the so-called 'Little Ice Age', when frost fairs were held on the frozen Thames and a succession of failed harvests meant that hunger stalked the British Isles.
Africa's shining mountain
The amateur adventurer Dr Vince Keipper had waited years for this day. Nearing the summit of Kilimanjaro, the highest point on the African continent, Keipper and his group were looking forward to panoramic views of the surrounding Kenyan and Tanzanian plains. |
Dr. Sharon Moalem
See book keywords and concepts |
| And then the warming trend that had persisted since the end of the last ice age kicked rapidly into reverse. In just a decade or so, average yearly temperatures plunged nearly thirty degrees. Sea levels dropped by hundreds of feet as water froze and stayed in the ice caps. Forests and grasslands went into a steep decline. Coastlines were surrounded by hundreds of miles of ice. Icebergs were common as far south as Spain and Portugal. The great, mountainous glaciers marched south again. The Younger Dryas had arrived, and the world was changed. |
Dan Buettner
See book keywords and concepts |
 At that time, the world was warming after an ice age. As the snows retreated, a small band of genetically related people in Iberia began a journey out of the Pyrenees Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea. They followed the coast eastward, through what is today the French Riviera and Tuscany, and across the sea to Corsica, where they stayed briefly. Finally they settled in Sardinia's coastal foothills.
"Eighteen thousand years ago, during the period called the Glacial Maximum, humans could survive in Europe only in two refuges, one in Iberia and one in the Balkans," he said. |
David R. Montgomery
See book keywords and concepts |
| Cooling during the Little ice age from about ad 1500 to 1900 certainly influenced the fortunes of the Iceland colony. So did soil erosion.
Iceland had an extensive forest cover when first colonized. In compiling the Islendingabok in the late twelfth century, Ari the Wise described the island as "forested from mountain to sea shore."2 Since human settlement, more than half of Iceland's vegetation cover has been removed. The native birch forest that covered thousands of square miles now occupies less than 3 percent of its original area. |
James Howard Kunstler
See book keywords and concepts |
 Also, because of the probable human contribution to global warming, this climate change might well be much more severe and longer-lasting than the blip of the early 1300s, or even the Little ice age of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
As hunger and hardship increase, the world may see more than one wave of more than one disease. If and when an influenza pandemic emerges, for instance, many AIDS sufferers will succumb, but people infected with the AIDS precursor, HIV, will still survive influenza and AIDS will march on. |
| A more pronounced dip in temperature produced the Little ice age in Europe from the 1500s into the mid-1800s—as chronicled, for instance, by the Dutch landscape painters who show people skating on the frozen canals of Holland, which in the modern era no longer freeze. The average temperature differential between these two periods was only a few degrees, yet the effects were marked. |
Email this page to a friend
