Thank goodness for global warming

I don't regard any "may have" or "what if" stuff as real science but I found this amusing.

Humans may have prevented super ice age:

Our impact on Earth's climate might be even more profound than we realise. Before we started pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet was on the brink of entering a semi-permanent ice age, two researchers have proposed.

Had we not radically altered the atmosphere, say Thomas Crowley of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and William Hyde of the University of Toronto in Canada, the current cycle of ice ages and interglacials would have given way in the not-too-distant future to an ice age lasting millions of years.

[...]

For much of the 500 million years or so since complex life evolved, Earth's climate has been much hotter than it is now, with no ice at the poles. During the last of these "hothouse Earth" phases, from around 100 to 50 million years ago, the Antarctic was covered by lush forests and shallow seas submerged vast areas of America, Europe and Africa.

Since that time, though, CO₂ levels have slowly fallen, possibly due to the rise of the Himalayas. As a result Earth has gradually cooled, with permanent ice sheets starting to form in Antarctica around 30 million years ago and later in the Arctic.

Then, 2.5 million years ago, the climate entered a curious new phase: it started oscillating wildly, see-sawing between interglacial periods with conditions similar to today's and ice ages during which the amount of permanent ice in the northern hemisphere expanded hugely.

At the peaks of these transient ice ages, much of northern Europe, northern Asia and North America were covered in ice sheets up to 4 kilometres thick, and sea levels were 120 metres lower than today.

[...]

When the cycle began, the climate went from ice age to interglacial and back roughly every 41,000 years. More recently, it has been happening every 100,000 years.

The temperature swings have also become greater: the interglacials have been no warmer but the ice ages have become much colder. So the overall cooling trend was continuing - until the arrival of the Anthropocene, the period in which humans have affected Earth's geology.

According to a simple climate model developed by Crowley and Hyde, this increasing variability was a sign that the climate was about to flip into a new stable state - a semi-permanent ice age. This ice age might well have lasted for tens of millions of years or more, Crowley says.

In the model runs best resembling actual climate history, the switch to a long-lasting ice age happened as early as 10,000 to 100,000 years from now.

[...]

The idea that humans have averted an ice age may ring a bell with regular New Scientist readers. Climatologist Bill Ruddiman has suggested that Stone Age farmers prevented an ice age by releasing greenhouse gases.

Let's keep those greenhouse gasses going please and prevent a permanent ice age. Eat more beef - the more cow farts the better. Drive big cars and generate as big a "carbon footprint" as possible otherwise we will be faced with enormous heating bills and probably not enough fuel to warm us.