When Does The Next Ice Age Start?

I'm currently reading "Climatism!" by Steve Goreham which I picked up at the ICCC6 this past weekend. It was a great conference and fun to talk to the many people there who had studied the climate issues and concluded that the IPCC's spin was sheer bunk.

One of the key elements of Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" was a misrepresentation of the Vostok ice-core data seen above. Gore in front of a huge graph of the data makes out like it's the smoking gun of global warming. Now that is really funny if you're a scientist that understands what the data says. First of all the data shows that CO2 and temperature are highly correlated. In my best statistician voice, hear me through now, "Correlation is not causation." So in fact it doesn't even prove that CO2 and temperature are causally related. They could both be caused by something entirely different. That being said there are two other points I'd like to make: 1) careful study of the data shows that in fact the growth in CO2 follows the growth in temperature and not the other way around. So if there is any causation involved it is that temperature causes rises in CO2. This turns out to be a fairly obvious effect of heating the oceans. So Gore's use of this data is sheer bunkum.

Moving on to point 2) you'll notice that there is a periodic structure to the data. There are four complete cycles of sharp warming trends followed by extended cooling trends usually with a briefer sharp cooling interval following the highest peak. That's a dead giveaway that something, maybe something complex, but something, is causing that particular pattern. The pattern is called Ice Ages and each temperature maximum has been followed by a sharp cooling relaxation followed by a exponential decline of temperature corresponding to a very extended cold period.

Finally: Where are we located? We're located at the end of a sharp temperature upswing. So what should we expect? The beginning of the next Ice Age. I'm not trying to be a climate alarmist. Read the time scales and you'll see that they are in many thousands of years. Goreham points out that 20,000 years ago Chicago was under a mile of glacial ice. Walk back on the graph and see where that would put you. If you've got to worry about the weather, worry about the beginning of the next Ice Age. But don't worry too much. You've got a few thousand years before it gets too bad.