Brak wants to know, "Are we in an ice age now"?

Question

Seems with all this frost, snow, & -40 temperatures in MN, is this our ice age?

Will there truely be an endless summer decades from now?

I like summertime and the warmth and I hate the cold so longer summers are a good thing for me.

Answer 1

it's very possible.

Answer 2

We're actually just leaving the "Little Ice Age". Don't worry Brak, Al Gore says the temperatures will rise. But I wouldn't pull our your beach towel and toy shovel just yet. He isn't the most reliable liberal out there.

Answer 3

Global warming is not a blowtorch that eliminates winter. It's a small but steady increase in AVERAGE temperature that will cause great damage if we do nothing.

For a short time, in some places, winter weather can overcome global warming. But, long run, over the whole Earth, the AVERAGE temperature is increasing. NASA data:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/

We need to do something about that.

Answer 4

Yes we are in an ice age.  We are currently in a warm interglacial period.  It is possible that it will get warmer but based on previous cycles, it is probably more likely that we will go through another cold period.  I too wouldn't mind if it warmed a bit before it got cold again and I hope it doesn't get colder anytime soon.

Answer 5

A quote from the source:

Glaciologically, ice age is often used to mean a period of ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres; by this definition we are still in an ice age (because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist). More colloquially, when speaking of the last few million years, ice age is used to refer to colder periods with extensive ice sheets over the North American and Eurasian continents: in this sense, the most recent ice age ended about 10,000 years ago.

Answer 6

no a'hole hilary hates you to, Mr. third person!

Answer 7

Yes. Ice age be here. When I was little boy had bigger ice age called Global Cooling by people who scare kids by saying pollution cause new ace age and all kids will freeze. Then when I was big we had warm age and people scare other kids by saying pollution cause Global Warming and all kids will burn. Kids don't remember Global Cooling lie told to other kids so they believe Global Warming lie. Now God make earth cooler and new ice age is here. When I was kid we called ice age global cooling winter and we called global warming summer.  Now they say pollution causes both. I no believe them...

Answer 8

we have been in a ice age for the last 3 million years.

what we are in is a interglacial period of a ice age.

don't let the treehuggers fool you with there global warming scam.

http://anthropology.si.edu/humanorigins/...

of the cenozoic era that we are in the earth has been ice free 95% of the time. and 5 to 10 degrees warmer

about 3 million years the world went into  global cooling.

maybe its just time for the earth to warm up.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Ima...

there have been 3 other ice ages 110 to 175 million years ago.

270 to 325 mya

and 430 to 475 mya

since man was not around during those ice ages what caused them to end.

maybe it is causing this one to end.

Answer 9

No.  It's Winter now.

Think about it... how much would the one degree of warming so far affect Minnesota's winter temperatures of 40 below?  

A few days or months of weather, in one location, say nothing about long term global climate trends, do they?

You're asking about weather (local, short term variations), not climate, long term trends that determine what survives in your local ecosystem (including the food that you eat).

As noted by NASA, NOAA, etc., Northern Hemisphere temperatures are temporarily being affected by a strong La Nina cooling cycle:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2...

The El Nino / La Nina cycles do temporarily overpower and mask the underlying gradual warming trend, but they do nothing to stop it.

The progression in scientific understanding is explained in detail on this site:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.h...

Impacts of Global Warming

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/impac...

The Discovery of Global Warming

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index...

The author Spencer R. Weart is Director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in College Park, Maryland.  His own informed conclusions regarding global warming are posted here:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/SWnot...