New Little Ice Age

Most scientists now agree with the counter-intuitive explanation for the northern hemisphere’s current Little Ice Age first proposed by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute shortly after the turn of the century. These scientists suggested that global warming would actually cause a significant drop in average temperatures in our hemisphere. They hypothesized that by the early twenty-first century, global warming (whether part of a natural cycle or the result of our hydrocarbon-based civilization) would cause much of the polar ice cap to melt, resulting in cold fresh water submerging the denser warmer waters of the Gulf Stream and turning them back in a southerly direction, thereby depriving the northern hemisphere of their critical warming effect.

This view has, of course, been challenged by certain evangelical religious groups, like the Brotherhood of Natural Causes, who believe that all climate change is part of a divine plan, which they call “intelligent design.” These fundamentalists cite generally accepted evidence that ice ages and great floods have occurred at regular intervals throughout history, but they layer onto this legitimate data dubious numerological arguments that these precise time intervals are predicted in The Books of the Apocrypha.