The rest of the story.
The action-adventure motion picture the day after tomorrow thrills audiences with vivid
visions of the next ice age, Manhattan Island and gulfed by rising seas, the northern hemisphere
instantly fresh frozen like a bag of bird's-eye peas.
In fact, nobody knows what the next ice age would look like.
But what did the last one look like?
Well, this is what?
Seeing the last ice age, if you could have stood on the highest mountain on the North Atlantic
Island of Iceland, you could not have glimpsed the open sea in any direction.
Nothing but vast ice flows for miles around yawning beyond every horizon, even part of the
south.
In what's today Scotland, temperatures plunged through most of the year to the point that
plant life ceased to flourish.
In Switzerland, glaciers roared down out of the Alps into the lower valleys, crushing
gouging and gulping everything in their paths as did glaciers worldwide from Norway to
New Zealand.
And what do you know?
As New York Harbour, where all of the ships passed through all of the year, it was completely
frozen.
You could have walked from Manhattan to Staten Island without even dampening the soles
of your shoes.
The Baltic Sea regularly froze solid as well.
That caused the last ice age.
Scientists wonder about that.
Some conjecture that increased volcanic activity during the epoch, put enough dirt, gnash
into the upper atmosphere to filter significant amounts of warming solar radiation.
Others observed that the sun itself goes through cycles of slight warming and cooling.
And oh, yes, a fluctuation of as little as a few tenths of a percent in the energy
output of the sun that could be enough to alter the earth's climate dramatically and
unquestionably something did, along to the ice age last four, maybe six centuries.
And we have remarkably precise evidence of it for the last 250 of those years, thanks
to the invention by one Galileo of something called the Thermometer.
You see, climatologists estimate the outside parameters of the last ice age from roughly
1250 to 1850 AD.
And yes, it meets all of the qualifications of a genuine global ice age.
The famines resulting from drastically diminished growing seasons, killed millions, one and
a half million in 1315 alone, the year 1315, glaciers appeared where they had not in thousands
of years wiping out farms and entire towns in two hemispheres.
While some winter times even in New York Harbor solidified, and in the year 1816 there
was no summer at all, not anywhere.
So should it occur to you, as it has to art historians, that landscape oil paintings
in the 16th and 17th centuries have more than their share of snow?
You will know that what you are seeing through those windows in time are glimpses of something
you thought was prehistoric.
Yes, I do mean to say that we civilized humankind, lived through the last ice age, and we scarcely
even knew it was there.
But now you know the rest of the story.