Global climatic changes associated with climate change and human CO2 emissions have already influenced long-term fluctuations in the Earth's climate and "shifted" the time of the next ice age by 100 thousand years into the future, climatologists say in an article published in the journal Nature.
“Even without climate change, the next ice age would not have arrived earlier than 50,000 years from now, making the present geological era, the Holocene, unusually long in terms of the gaps between glaciations. Our research has shown that even current, relatively small anthropogenic CO2 emissions are enough to delay the advance of glaciers for another 50 thousand years,”said Andrey Ganopolsky from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research (Germany).
Ganopolskiy and his colleagues at the institute came to this conclusion by creating a new climate model of the Earth that describes long-term climate changes that coincide in length with the cycles of advancing and retreating glaciers, and takes into account changes in CO2 and other greenhouse gases that occur as a result of movement ice.
As the calculations of German climatologists have shown, the next ice age could come on Earth today, if mankind completely abandoned not only machinery and industry, but also agriculture. In this case, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere would have been slightly below the critical level, upon crossing which the planet's climate changed irreversibly, which postponed the onset of the ice age by 50 thousand years.
These changes, as scientists write, are due to the fact that the masses and volumes of ice in the Arctic in the northern hemisphere begin to grow only if the temperature on the day of the summer solstice is below a certain value, which, in turn, depends on the share of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
We achieved this figure, according to the calculations of Ganopolsky and his associates, back in the 19th century, when the first machines appeared and mankind began to actively burn coal and other minerals.
The industrial revolution and the explosive growth in oil and gas consumption in the second half of the 20th century led, in turn, to the complete "cancellation" of the next ice age - the authors of the article do not expect that it could come earlier than 100 thousand years, contrary to the forecasts of Russian climatologists from Moscow State University and the University of Northumbria.
As the authors of the article note, such forecasts and statements based on indirect data served as one of the reasons why they decided to conduct this study and understand how to predict the onset and retreat of glaciers using reliable data obtained in the course of paleoclimatic research and modern observations., and accurate climate models.
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