Will the Next Ice Age Be Permanent?

November 13, 2008 | Source: New York Times

The world may be witnessing the final stages of a 50-million-year transition from a planet with a persistent warm climate and scant polar ice to one with greatly expanded ice sheets at both poles, two climatologists suggest in Nature.

The Nature paper goes on to propose that humans, as long as they have a technologically powerful society, would be likely to avert such a slide into a long big chill by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.