Now the rest of the story. The actual adventure motion picture the day after tomorrow, thrilled
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. During 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 farther 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 Harbor, where all of the ships passed through all of the year, it was completely frozen.
You can't walk from Manhattan to Staten Island without even dampening the soles of your shoes.
The Baltic Sea regularly froze solid as well. What caused the last ice age?
Scientists wonder about that. Some conjecture that increased volcanic activity during the
epoch, put enough dirt and ash into the upper atmosphere to filter significant amounts of
warming solar radiation. Others observed that the sun itself goes through cycles of
site warming and cooling. And, or, 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. How long did 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. Is he climatologist
systemates 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. Galatians appeared where they had not in thousands of years wiping out
farms and entire towns in two hemispheres. Now, 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 argue 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 duimpses 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.