Source: Watts Up With That?

[…] 12,800 years ago, the world abruptly froze. Temperatures plunged back to ice age conditions, and stayed cold for over 1000 years.

In 2009, a group of scientists researching high resolution sediment samples from Lough Monreach, an ancient lake in Ireland, claimed the return to ice age conditions might have occurred over a period of less than a year. In the lead researcher’s words, “It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to Svalbard, creating icy conditions in a very short period of time”.

There is nothing unusual about ice ages in our current geological epoch. It is the reprieve from cold temperatures which is unusual, not the glaciation. Most of the last 115,000 years the world was locked in a harsh ice age, with vast ice sheets covering Europe and Canada. The Holocene, our current brief respite from extreme glaciation, only stretches back for the last 12,000 years.

While climate alarmists parade their worthless computer models and shriek that the world is overheating, paleo-climatologists are aware that far from being unusually warm, the world is currently in the grip of the Quaternary Glaciation, a period of unusual cold which has so far lasted 2.6 million years. What we are experiencing right now is the Holocene, a brief respite from the vast ice sheets which define much of the Quaternary.

A return to extreme cold is unlikely to happen in our lifetimes. Noteworthy geological scale events rarely happen on a human timeframe. But a return to glaciation at some point in the future is inevitable. Let us hope our descendants maintain the technological and engineering prowess they will need to hold back the ice, when the ice finally returns to challenge our beautiful home.