Source: The Deseret News
Date: 08/09/1972
Event: "A new Ice Age is creeping over the Northern Hemisphere"
Credit: The Deseret News
THE DESERET NEWS - SEP 08, 1972
Ice Age Coming
NORWICH, England (AP) - A new Ice Age is creeping over the Northern Hemisphere, and the rest of this century will grow colder and colder, a British expert on climate has claimed.
Prof. Hubert Lamb, director of climate research at the University of East Anglia, had a few comforting thoughts in an interview Sunday:
"The full impact of the new Ice Age will not be upon us for another 10,000 years and even then it will not be as severe as the last great glacial period.
"We are past the best of the interglacial period which happened between 7,000 and 3,000 years ago," he continued. "Ever since then we have been on a downhill float regarding temperature. There may be a few upward fluctuations from time to time but these are more than offset by the general downward trend."
Lamb said temperatures had been slowly dipping for the past 20 years.
"We are on a definite downhill course for the next two centuries," he declared. "The last 20 years of this century will be progressively colder. After that the climate may warm up again but only for a short period of decades."
Lamb said climate changes come in cycles determined by astronomical and physical factors. He said one main cause is the amount of radiation received from the sun.
"We know that the behavior of the sun changes at intervals and these changes have their effect," he said. "The distance between the earth and the sun also varies through the ages as the earth's orbit increases or decreases its elliptical path. The tilting of the earth as it rotates round its own axis also makes the polar ice cap grow, and thus affects the air masses round it."
The last great ice age took place about 60,000 years ago and was the sixth over a period of about a million years. The great ice sheets covered most of the British Isles and in America covered what are now New York City, Cincinnati, St Louis and Kansas City. The ice was at least 5,000 feet thick.
"I don't think it will be quite as serious this time," Lamb said. "But there will be a lot of glaciers on high ground which do not exist at present."