how do ice ages effect mankind?
82564
It is thought that the last ice age made it possible for humans to migrate to the Americas when the water level dropped, because a lot of water was piled up on the continents in ice sheets. \n\nPeople had to migrate to find enough food, probably mainly to the lower latitudes. \n\nIt might have forced humans to make all kinds of adaptations, and develop new skills. \n\nHumans had to wear different clothing. \n\nHumans probably had to change their diets. \n\nPrevious living areas would have been covered by ice and uninhabitable. \n\nThere might have been more diseases, and less food, and more people probably died.
706387
The earth is protected by the Ozone Layer, which helps us from the sun's damaging uv rays.  As people pollute the air, the ozone layer becomes damaged and evenutally will diminish causing the sun's damaging rays to enter the earth's atmosphere increasing temperatures.  The increase in temperature would cause areas of extremely cold temperature where icebergs are found to become warmer; thus causing icebergs to begin melting.  The increase in temperature will also cause many of the plants that survive and grow in the tropics to die.\n\nAir pollution contribuites to GW by causing the ozone layer to dissapear, leaving sections of "holes" where the powerful ray's of the sun will cause increase in temperatures damaging life forms to include plants, animals that survive on such plants, polar caps melting which could affect the animals (polar bears, penguins, etc).
1128536
Our current understanding of the long-term climate cycles shows that for the past 800,000 years, periods of approximately 100,000 years’ duration, called Ice Ages, have been interrupted by periods of approximately 10,000 years, known as Interglacials. (We are now about 10,500 years into the present Interglacial.)
276114
In effect the ice age hasn't ended yet. We are still in an icehouse climate, albeit a mild one. Glacial retreat ~10,000 BP was most likely brought about by a decrease in in a relatively warm phase of Milankovich cycles as the Earth has precessed so that the northern hemisphere is closest to the sun in the winter, giving us mild winters in comparison to what it was like 10,000 years ago. But precession will put us back at that same situation (northern hemisphere far from the sun -- colder winters) in another few thousand years.\n\nThe recent anthropogenic CO[2] increases are likely to be only a mild forcer in comparison to solar flux (brought about by Earth-Sun cycles) and weathering rates. So it is possible that we will go back into an ice age within a few thousand years.
250515
dude educate your self before you make a broad statement like that. please dont be ignorant. in my opinion is it doesn't exist. because think about it we are coming out of an ice age. it makes sense doesn't it? fact: there have been ice ages. fact: there is a lot of ice in ice ages. so if you know about water then you know the same amount of it is here that was here when the earth began so literally it is dinosaurs piss. well during an ice age lots of stuff is covered in water/ice ( i know i live in Minnesota and it is known that it was fully covered with ice.). so where is all the water? in ice bergs, glaciers, etc. so it would make sense that to leave an ice age most things would melt right? so they are still melting they will finish melting and cover parts of the world, then it will slowly freeze causing an ice age. why would humans make that big of a difference? we are insignificant to the world.(everyone in the world could fit in Texas and it would only be as densely populated as NY city). so our vehicles and combustible engines couldn't have that big of an effect. but you say "what about the ozone thinning?" well i am not saying it hasn't but it was because of the CFC's(chloral floral carbons) which broke up the ozone by attaching to ozone molecules. but the CFC's are no longer around. the ozone is healing itself as it is meant too. their was no real hole only a thinning which is also bad. but now it is closing up and returning to normal. if you think that the co2 we produced cant be good well think about it it isn't that much and while the earth was cooling after being created it released tons of co2. so what people will notice in the next 1-9000 years is it will warm up but in that time it will also cool down and eventually there will be an ice age. just because the great human race is here doesn't mean that the earth will stop having ice ages as it has done by its self for billions of years. think about it. am i a genius or what i mean i just looked at what has happened in history wow who would have thought history would repeat its self
769386
Read the real science - there are 3 metastable states of earths climate, all others are unstable. \n(1) lukewarm: like it is now\n(2) Ice-age: usually kicked off by over-heating the lukewarm\n(3) Ice-cube: Requires most land mass to be located along the equator\n\nWhat happens is it gets hot, really stormy, the clouds reflect off the light, underneath it snows, builds up ice pack, by the time the clouds dissipate the snow & ice can reflect just as well, and the energy balance equation for the earth adjusts so much less energy is retained.\n\nAbout 70,000 BC there was a super-volcano eruption.  It made sulfuric acid clouds, put dust from madagascar to greenland, made it rain very acid rain worldwide, increased the temperature of the entire oceans by 10 degrees Celsius, and kick-started the last ice-age.  In comparison the entire effect of man is less than 2 degrees celsius in the oceans.  My point: its going to take a lot more than the last 200 years of man to give a disturbance larger than what has happened in recent geologic history according to scientists.  NOVA had a great special on it.\n\nSo what if the Arctic melts?  The carbon that made the oil had to come from a very high density of living things, something that is made by dense jungles, not tundra.  According to geologists the Arctic being melted isnt a bad thing.  Nature is fine with it, isnt it?\n\nSo what if the Ocean temperatures rise by a few degrees?  They have been 5 times higher due to a single event according to geologists, and life got through it fine.  \n\nSome people say the end of fish is near, but they radically abused the math.  The power law is the worst fit possible for the data, and a exponential-polynomial fit is much much better, supporting a metastable transition.  \n\nGlobal warming or global freezing sells papers, but the people selling the idea are usually more interested in your money than in anything resembling long-term sustainability.  Their idea of sustainability is to treat humanity as something between cattle and a plague of locusts.  My personal opinion is that dehumanizing humanity and managing reproduction is a bigger sin that bad math and bad science.  Its evil.  Find a value system that treats humans like humans, and not animals.
359037
Natural warming/cooling of the earth as it progresses through it's life cycle.  Effects of civilization on global warming may be measurable, but it is hardly signifigant when compared to the forces of nature and the tendency of our planet's temperature to fluctuate through ice ages and periods of warmer climes.
23626
Yes, but it will have a worst effect after. Who ever survives the next ice-age will endour horrid lung problems from all the hydrogen elements emersed in the air by the melted ice. Also, it hasn't been proven that the ozone will be stable after the "big storm". If the ozone isn't stable it will cause horrid burns on your skin and can give you a 1st degree burn in less than 5 min. Also all the diseses that will break out from people that drink unclean water.
993790
For a long time, people around the Earth have been spending lots and lots of money to send robotic equipment to study other planets in our Solar System.  Several have sent back such surprising results - oh, the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and the colors of Neptune and Pluto!\n\nSome of the results also describe to us what the 'greenhouse effect" causes on other planets.  Unfortunately, when we see the results here on Earth, we presume that such a thing cannot happen here.\n\nWell, it can, and it does, and it has.\n\nFor rasons dealing largely with control of existing industrial resources, cost of investment, and just plain political power, people have made quite a campaign out of denying that global warming is taking place.  Their talk largely just adds to the hot air in the atmosphere.\n\nThe last Great Ice Age was more than 20 millenia ago.  Scientists studying that epoch say that carbon dioxide, particulates in the atmosphere, and a periodic change in the angle of the Earth's relationship to the sun all had a role to play - as perhaps did a major cycle of sunspot activity.  (That's just a guess by solar specialists but they like the idea a lot.)\n\nHowever, the physical evidence from the Great Ice Age is pretty conclusive.  Atmospheric components in ice left over from those days tell the tale.  And one of the great triggers of the last major Ice Age was particulate matter in the atmosphere - what some scientists decades ago warned would occur in a "nuclear winter" after The Bomb went off.  Everywhere.\n\nCarbon dioxide was relatively low in the atmospheric content - both during and at the end of the Great Ice Age.\n\nOne of the best arguments in favor of the effects of carbon dioxide on "global warming" is what we can tell happened to the planet when it got COLDER.  Besides various physical and naural events such as tiny alterations in the incidence of the sun's rays on the planet (that is, the angle at which they struck the atmosphere), we can track the history of stuff in the air that changed things.\n\nIn the pre-Industrial era, the only times that would happen were when NATURAL EVENTS took place - such as immense volcanic eruptions.  Those events combined with a periodic "wobble" in the Earth to create the last Little Ice Age, which affected Europe from around the time of Elizabeth I through the American Revolution.  \n\nSo it is appropriate to ask questions about the NATURAL events that might contribute now to global warming and the shrinking of ice caps.  But it is inappropriate to state that the byproducts of industrialized activities of humans, on a scale never before seen on the planet, cannot influence global weather and atmospheric conditions.\n\nYES, this is a big planet.  Yes, the forces at work are so massive they dwarf the puny efforts of humans - just ask any ship's captain, whether of a supertanker or a dinghy.  But NO, there has never before in all of history been anything equal to the cumulative effects of what humans do across the planet daily to spew heat, gases, and pollutants into the air through UNNATURAL means.  And for the cynics, let's remember that if in olden days all the dinosaurs on Earth had all farted at the same time, the methane they produced would not equal one day's worth of carbon dioxide emissions from industry today.  So leave that alone, once and for all.\n\nPart of the problem is that people think the byproducts of their actions are UNNATURAL.  In the sense that they result from human industrial functions, yes, they are not direct products of nature.  But in the sense that thse are an element of our natural world and we must see the emissions affecting that world, they ARE a part of "Nature."\n\nThe ONLY DIFFERENCE is that as a result we humans actually do own some sort of control over nature.  We can change the way that we influence natural processes.  And by the way - the various global attempts to do so wou
509781
No, for gobal warming will start a ice age.
590367
Humans have very little impact on the world as a whole. For example, the Al Gore's of the world would have you believe that we're heating the world up at an alarming rate... Well, global warming does exist, but we have little or no impact on it. If one looks at the geologic record of the Earth, they see that there are countless cycles of heating and cooling. Think of the last ice age? Does Al Gore think that early man caused the great North American ice sheets to melt by burning too much mammoth dung in their caves? In fact, a 1975 Newsweek article decries how mankind had caused the earth's mean temperature to actually DECREASE since records had started being kept in the late 1800's. From 1975 to 1998 the average temperatures rose again, but have FALLEN every year since then! (I'm sure you wont see those inconvenient truths in his new movie/fund raising infomercial)
1065169
Humans actually account for only a fraction of the chemical content of the atmpspher. Vulcanism, electrical storms, ionization of the atmosphere by solar radiation, interstellar (and this interplanetary) dust, cometary and meteor impacts, wildfire, drought-fueled dust storms, and other natural processes are a greater impact. \nOur study of meteorology has been on-going for a very short time. Our records are spotty, localized, and fraught with inaccuracy as recently as sixty years ago. It is scientifically suspect to make predictions on climate based on short-term observations.\nBut to answer your question, yes, that was global warming, just as the advent of the ice age was global cooling. \nThe cause of either is still an unknown.
251910
An increase in solar radiation due to slight variations in the Earth's orbit and orbital tilt.  These are regular variations and also coincide with greater and lesser ice ages depending on slight variations in solar output.  \n\nWhile "global warming" is an issue for sudden climate change, it probably had little influence on the most recent ice age.\n\nIn fact there have been many "mini" ice ages in recorded history, most notably around 1300 AD where really extreme cold conditions led to some very interesting technological developments such as the chimney.\n\nSee the link below.
688196
Although the current human-induced high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere are thought to be unprecedented in the recent geological record, some scientists argue that it's possible the changes we are making by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere could ultimately help usher in the next ice age.
35095
Probably not. In my humble opinion, humans ultimately play a very insignificant role in the processes that shape this planet, when viewed from a geologic time-scale. After all, more than 90% of all species on this planet were extinct long before hominids evolved. The planet has experienced global warming much more extreme than the present warming trend, and forces such as plate tectonics and isostatic rebound are contributing to problems like the subsidence of the Louisiana coastline probably more so than man's changes in the drainage of the Mississippi River. There is evidence that the modern coastal subsidence of the US Gulf Coast is related to isostatic rebound from the glaciers melting in North America over 10,000 years ago. That is how slow many of these processes work. The climate of this planet has never been static, nor has the shape of the continents. Natural events like climate-changing volcanic eruptions, earthquakes (which build mountains that ultimately change weather patterns), catastrophic tsunamis, meteorite impacts, erosion, catastrophic floods, landslides, glaciation, all have much more impact on a geologic scale than man has done. Even catastrophic oil-spills occurred as a result of natural processes long before man built a supertanker. This planet might not even be habitable by humans if not for the warming effect of radioactive decay within the earth, and over geologic time, that will gradually decline. Light and heat from the sun is something we have no control over that will certainly change over time. Of course, none of this excuses man for damaging the planet with deforestation, greenhouse gases, habitat destruction, etc., but we all need to recognize that even our best efforts may not affect the long-term changes that are taking place around us almost unseen due to the slow progress of these changes. We are going to have to work at not becoming just another part of the fossil record and our ability to adapt to climate change is probably the only thing that will allow the human race to survive long-term. This is just the opinion of this geologist.
368747
yeah I heard all the crap about the new ice age what a crock same thing about human activity causing global warming bunch of nonsense read the astronomy reports the sun is burning a little hotter it does this ever so often like during the middle ages and think about it haven't we been coming out of an ice age for the past ten thousand or so years does this not mean it has been getting warmer
1107328
In the near future, scientists preidct of another Ice Age, followed by another supercontinent wear every continent comes together. Global warming would be temporary. Then, plants would die off, followed by the animals. This is because of teh growing sun and the heat created by it. Daily average temperatues would reach 100-35 degrees farenheit. Mitochondria stops working at 125-130 degrees farenheit. Thus, eukaryotic cells would die off and the earth would be left with bacteria-prokaryotic cells. Soon the heat of the sun would evaporate all of the oceans and only the hardiest bacteria would live, close to the Pre-Cambrian days. The surface of the earth would be so hot that it would melt, and earth would be swallowed by the expanding red giant sun. Before any of this happen, every 100 million years, a meteor larger than the one of the K/T impact that wiped out the dinos could hit us and kill everything except fot bacteria and another Ice Age would occur. Basically, the future represents the beginning of life on earth. bacteria-eukaryotic cells-higher animals-eukaryotic cells-and back to bacteria-no life.