World might be heading towards Ice Age

[audtatious]

CANBERRA: Scientists have warned that the world might once again be heading towards an Ice Age, with global warming approaching a possible end.

Evidence in support of this theory has come from pictures obtained from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which showed no spots on the sun, thus determining that sunspot activity has not resumed after hitting an 11-year low in March last year.

A sunspot is a region on the sun that is cooler than the rest and appears dark.

Some scientists believe a strong solar magnetic field, when there is plenty of sunspot activity, protects the earth from cosmic rays, cutting cloud formation, but that when the field is weak - during low sunspot activity - the rays can penetrate into the lower atmosphere and cloud cover increases, cooling the surface.

According to Australian astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman, this might have caused the world to cool quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," said Dr Chapman.

"If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over," he added.

Dr Chapman has proposed preventive, or delaying, moves to slow the cooling, such as bulldozing Siberian and Canadian snow to make it dirty and less reflective.

"My guess is that the odds are now at least 50:50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades," he said

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Oooof

[rn79870]

It really can't come soon enough. It's suppose to be 100 here today, and I don't want to run the air conditioner, but the wife will complain until I do. Is there any chance this will happen in the next few hours?

The underside to all this is not all that different than the kid who kept crying wolf. If scientist don't stop with all the predictions of doom and earthly destruction, we may never believe a real threat when it comes like;

On Friday, 4/13/2029 asteroid 99942 Apophis, will pass close to earth. A near miss. 10 years later (unbelievably on 4/13/2039) it will return, and the gravity from the first pass may cause it to have shifted enough to hit the earth. Or so they're saying. Should the rock actually hit earth, it'd have the equivalent punch of 65,000 Hiroshima bombs or approximately 880 million tons of dynamite. It won't be pretty.

And finally, in something like 5 to 7 billion years, the sun is going to become a red giant and engulf Mercury, Venus and the Earth, burning them to cinders and giving new meaning to global warming.

Has Al Gore commented on any of this yet?

[audtatious]

The only reason the sun is going to engulf us is because of all the CO2 we are dumping into the atmosphere......Or is it aerosols?

I forget