July 1, 2010 | David F. Coppedge

Breaking Up an Ice Age Is Hard to Do

“Ice Age 3” the movie is out, and the subject of ice ages deserves some attention.  Atmospheric scientists and geologists seem very confident sometimes about things they know about only indirectly, like ice ages.  At other times, though, the rhetoric turns diffident (opposite of confident).  Take this opening paragraph from PhysOrg:

Scientists still puzzle over how Earth emerged from its last ice age, an event that ushered in a warmer climate and the birth of human civilization.  In the geological blink of an eye, ice sheets in the northern hemisphere began to collapse and warming spread quickly to the south.  Most scientists say that the trigger, at least initially, was an orbital shift that caused more sunlight to fall across Earth’s northern half.  But how did the south catch up so fast?

(For more on the orbital shift theory, see the 06/02/2009, 02/05/2008 and 08/08/2006 entries.)  A new theory for how the south caught up is “blowing in the wind,” the article said.  A team put together a model that invokes carbon dioxide release, wind, and Milankovitch cycles to explain how it all happened.
    But all is not so tidy.  Here was global warming on a colossal scale, without man being at fault.  “We’re trying to answer the puzzle: why does the Earth, when it appears so firmly in the grip of an ice age, start to warm?”  It’s counterintuitive.  You need heat to start an ice age, and cold to stop it.  According to the new model, a chain of events led to ice age 20,000 years ago, and by 4,000 years later, the system rebounded.  Glaciers made a “spectacular retreat” while carbon dioxide from the deep ocean provided enough warming to prevent another ice age.
    The article left off on a confident note that the new theory improves on old models that stalled: “Now, with the evidence for shifting southern hemisphere westerlies, the rapid warming is readily explained.”  Of course, this new model needs some more work: a Penn State scientist said, “Testing this hypothesis will be very interesting, to see whether it successfully ‘predicts’ the observed timing of CO2 and temperature changes in the south.”  One might also wonder why this irreversible chain of events occurred in the “geological blink of an eye” and not repeatedly over billions of years, if it was indeed triggered by a regular orbital cycle.  Climate skeptics might also use this theory to point out that not all global warming is man’s fault – especially one called “the great global warming of all time.”

Scientists like this aren’t interested in the truth.  They are interested in preserving the deep time paradigm.  Part of that is always revising deep time models, but never questioning them.  Their whole system is built on a house of cards, and inside the house, life emerges (a miracle).  Once evolution was done with the deep freeze, it came time to clear out the Ice Age room for the Birth of Human Civilization (another miracle).  Ask yourself: “Self, is a little bit of warmth an explanation for human civilization, and not intelligent design?”
    Secular scientists would never even pause to deign to ponder to think to consider the possibility that a global flood could produce the ice age (singular) and its warming aftereffects in far less time.  That explanation, at least, has an eyewitness account attached to it.  But no; deep time is in their DNA (Darwin Naturalistic Authority), and so the tale goes on.  It doesn’t need to be true.  It just needs to keep the story going and the storytellers employed.  If they can attach a political spin to it (man-made global warming), all the better.  The more ad hoc, the better; this one-time phenomenon occurs 16,000 years ago, but not throughout their beloved 4.5 billion years of Milankovitch cycles.  They will tolerate a cartoon “Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” (advertised along with the PhysOrg article) with its timeline that is completely out of whack with the Darwinian geological column, but that’s OK – it’s not creationist.  Anything but that.  Anything but the Eyewitness.  Considering that would mean (gasp) the loss of human autonomy for endless storytelling.
    Readers not enslaved to the secular guild’s world might like to do a little research on what creation scientists have to say about the ice age.  Search for “ice age” on True Origin, Creation.com, ICR, Answers in Genesis, In the Beginning or the Creation Research Society and you’ll get a lot of hits.  Deep-time geologists and biologists are not the only people who think about these things.  They’re just the only ones who get a free ride in the deep-time media.  They believe in miracles, too, you realize; they just have a handy place to hide them – in the deep freezer of deep time.

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Categories: Physics

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