Maybe you believe that the use of fossil fuels is catastrophically heating the atmosphere. Maybe you don’t.
But a study in the journal Science suggests that supposedly disastrous “global warming” could “fend off what had been presumed to be an inevitable descent into a new ice age …,” The New York Times reported.
The newspaper noted that the last ice age put much of the Northern Hemisphere under mile-thick ice. A return to such conditions, even in the distant future, would be devastating.
The study’s authors did not say that holding off a new ice age makes global warming good. But even they seemed to acknowledge, grudgingly, that global warming is complicated, with potential benefits as well as potential risks.
“In the very long term, the ability to artificially warm the climate, particularly the Arctic, could be seen as a boon as the planet’s shifting orientation to the sun enters a phase that could initiate the next ice age,” the Times noted. One scientist said man’s influence on climate might mean “we could easily skip” the next ice age altogether.
That cannot be all bad.