With our solar mirrors we controlled the polar caps. The glaciations and mass extinctions that had marked the Pleistocene were over; the next ice age, long overdue, would never come. With our space-based lasers and nukes, we could shield the earth from asteroid impacts. We could bring back lost species from the DNA in museum exhibits. Soon, any century now, we would control the Milankovitch cycle. We were secure.
Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division
On Paar (not The Tonight Show host, but the optimist prophet of icy doom),
The Zagreb based scientist says it will still be possible for man to survive in the ice age, but the spending on energy will be enormous.
“Food production also might be a problem. It would need to be produced in greenhouses with a lot of energy spent to heat it”, commented the professor, who remains optimistic despite his predictions.
He said: “The nuclear energy we know today will not last longer than 100 years as we simply do not have enough uranium in the world to match the needs in an ice age. But I’m still optimistic. There is the process of nuclear fusion happening on the Sun. The fuel for that process is hydrogen and such a power plant is already worked on in France as a consortium involving firms from Marseille and the European Union, the US, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea. The head of the project is a Japanese expert, and former Japanese ambassador in Croatia”, Vladimir Paar revealed.
He said the building of the new technology power plant will take at least another 10 years.
“In 40 years we’ll know how it functions. That would be a solution that could last for thousands of years. We have a lot of hydrogen and the method is an ecological one”, the professor concluded.
“Croat scientist warns ice age could start in five years” Croatian Times 2-10-10
Never really got into Frost, but I can’t knock his toss-up approach to elemental eschatology (as it’s still pretty mysterious, I’ll file this cruciform doohickey under “ice”, for now). Also, Greenpeace UK director John Sauven says Rajendra Pachauri is lowering the IPCC’s street cred and should resign, Pachauri says he’s no quitter and wishes death by asbestos on his critics, Nature editor Philip Campbell resigns from the Climategate investigation (“over interview defeding researchers“, according the editorially doubleplusrigorous Telegraph), and Evo Morales throws his own dang climate summit.
See yinz in flames, flooded, frozen, or just chillin’, as the case may be.
Have fun and cuídate.