Hansen, Schneider: catastrophic new ice age by 2021

U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming

Washington Post and Science magazine

The world could be as little as 15 or 25 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. Dr. S. I. Rasool of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Columbia University used a computer program by his colleague, Prof. James Hansen, that studied clouds above Venus.

By 2021, fossil-fuel dust injected by man into the atmosphere could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees, resulting in a buildup of new glaciers that could eventually cover huge areas.



Video 1: This is what would happen in Florida. Around Shanghai, home to 40 million people. The area around Calcutta in India, 60 million.

If sustained over several years, five to ten, or so, Mr. Rasool estimated, such a temperature decrease (about 3.5 Kelvin degrees) could be sufficient to trigger an ice age, as calculated in their article in the Science magazine written together with Stephen Schneider.




"Mr. Rasool is a first-rate atmospheric physicist whose findings are consistent with estimates I and others have made," Gordon MacDonald, a top government scientist told us.

Hat tip: The Washington Times, News Busters
Source: The Washington Post (also appeared in Science)
See also: new ice age in Time magazine

Sorry if you think that the news from 1971 are no longer hot but I found them rather cool. ;-)

If you feel too cold, yorick and ABC News have a warm update for you. The same James Hansen now argues that the year 2045 will be warmer than any moment in the last one million years. This remarkable prediction is based on Hansen's latest scientific paper that is formatted as a small footnote for one page of Michael Crichton's famous book, "State of Fear". Hansen chose to be a Michael Crichton's assistant, although not too important one. ;-)



Hansen spends eight paragraphs arguing with "State of Fear" and claiming that he was not wrong in his 1988 Congress testimony. Click the picture above by Willie E to see more details. The upper curve is the scenario A warming that assumes a continued growth of CO2 concentrations, just like what happened. The blue line are the HADCRUT3 observations that are even colder than Hansen's scenario C that assumed that CO2 concentrations would stop rising after 2000 and numerous volcano eruptions would contribute to the cooling.