Ice Age?

I wasn't going to post anything on this at all, because I no more believe in the coming ice age than I do in Global Warming (GW) ... which means I don't DISbelieve in either one either, I'm an agnostic. I don't think we have nearly enough data to reach a conclusion given glaciation cycles that take order 10's of thousands of years. What is more, our understanding of star behavior is really jaded by our close proximity to a sample of precisely ONE.

In terms of "sensational" though, the idea of rapid expansion of the polar caps and most of the northern hemisphere under continental ice sheets ought to make it. No doubt food production would drop off precipitously as growing seasons became shorter and shorter and eventually were gone over much of our current major food growing areas. Do I believe that is likely? No, it is just what one might want to consider if they were to be close to as alarmist about another set of data than what the GW folks have had their undies in a bundle over for a long while.

Ice Age Data Article

Something a little closer to my own heart as we close to less than two weeks from the MN fishing opener. Note that the latest Mille Lacs had ice out was May 6th, which would be a week from tomorrow. It is still 100% ice covered. (lake cam here). Worse, we are making ice tonight, and the 10 day forcast for Garrison (NW corner of Mille Lacs) is all 50's by day and 30's by night until May 7th when they are supposed to hit a blistering 62. The all-time record is in danger

Here is some data from a couple of MN lakes, just to show the potential for getting the wrong impression from shorter term data. One MIGHT think that there was a BIG warm-up from '96 to 2000 ... and even do some other extrapolation and decide "it is obvious we are warming up". If one looked at over 100 years of data however, they would see that 1878 was WAY earlier (meaning warmer) and 1856 was not much cooler than '96, which would give the impression that at least on that data we had COOLED since the late 1800s. Of course 100 years of data in a data set of 10's of thousands for just ONE glacial cycle, with 10's and 100s of MILLIONS of years of data for multiple cycles is about as close to completely useless as one can get. It is "just data". Any sort of trend projected from it is just like reading the farmers almanac.

Data from MN DNR:
Mille Lacs - Avg April 24, Earliest April 2, 2000, Latest May 6,1996 (42 years of data)
Minnetonka - Avg April 11, Earliest March 11, 1878, latest May 8, 1856 (129 years of data)

There are NOT enough facts to make a decision here, but we know that the best data we have says that the planet has a N hemisphere ice age bias in this land mass configuration. "On average", most of the US is under a sheet of ice, as is Europe for the last 40 million years or so. We are actually IN an "ice age" because there are polar caps. Supposedly the previous case with ice caps was 430-460 years ago, so there was something like 400 million years of "global warming" prior to our current "ice age". This may indicate that it is possible for the planet to warm and cool on it's own, but you can draw your own conclusions about human intervention 400 or even 40 million years ago. Suffice to say we have no tracking data on Mille Lacs from those times, and I have no idea what the fishing regulations were even a mere 40 million years ago.