That's some pretty skin-deep understanding of the relation between global weather patterns and solar patterns, as well as the definition of what constitutes an Ice Age. I won't break it down for you, I'll just give you the important bits all at once:
Are you referring to me? Because i was not claiming otherwise (hence the "it seems" parts).
I'm not saying you meant this, but the part "won't break it down for you, I'll just give you the important bits all at once" sounds like - "Hey kid, you won't understand this anyway, so i'll give you the story mode version".
Sorry, that SHOULD have read as "I don't wanna go into detail this time around, so lemme sum up". I know many people have a mental image of my tone as frequently coming off as highly derogatory, but it's really not the case. Possibly an unfortunate side effect of abandoning forced humility when a friend made the very compelling argument, "It's not bragging if it's true".
Well i heard this from various sources (not the ice age of doom narrative though, as i mentioned up there somewhere), but are we on the same page here, because i didn't mean an actual ice age, and i'm not even sold on the little ice age yet.
Oh, the Ice Age scare of the 70s was quite the spectacle. Mind you, I wasn't alive at the time, I only learned about it from studying craze and talking to those who remembered it. But it was absolutely identical to all the other scares that come and go. Global Warming, Killer Bees, Mad Cow, so on and so on. Just some news that manages to kick up enough of a storm to get lots of people REALLY scared. 'Cept back then, the hypothesis (which has some level of solidity in its concept) was that if the average temperature of the planet drops low enough, and enough of the planet's poles and surface are covered in ice, this will cause a cascading effect, where light will be reflected off of the white surface, rather than being absorbed into the planet's surface as heat, thus lowering the temperature even further, coating more of the surface in ice, reflecting and not absorbing more light, freezing the planet faster and faster.
One of the names they gave that was the Snowball Effect (IIRC), and people were genuinely terrified of it being right around the corner. But, with enough computer projected models, and a better understanding of how physics (more specifically, thermodynamics, astronomy, and geology, to name a few) functions, it was realized that the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere would capture heat anyway, and volcanic activity would be all it takes to melt massive portions of the supposedly irreversible planetary freezing (not to mention release MORE CO2 into the atmosphere), and as such, no cascading, unstoppable freezing would be possible. Didn't stop people from making fortunes off of the terror, of course...
If it weren't for all the shysters who preyed on the less informed and made a parasitic living off of all this fear, this cyclical paranoia would fascinate me. But as it stands, watching assholes deliberately proliferate these for their own gains, and countless clueless being suckered into defending it, the whole thing just frustrates me. Just another tragically simple yet powerful consequence of people failing to grasp the importance of the lesson of "those who fail to learn the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them" I guess. ~_~
