THE FREEZE TO COME

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 32, 7 August 1923, Page 6

THE FREEZE TO COME

When ingenious users of telescopes and such magic tell thrilled audiences that the sun will go out in a, thousand million years or so, they are aware of a general air of thankfulness that the event is so far off, and not a mere hundred million years away. Compared with such prophecies, there is something distinctly unpleasant about the forecast that in two hundred years the earth will be "in the grip of another ice-age," attributed by a cable message to an unnamed Paris astronomer and meteorologist. He attributes this coming disaster to the fact that the earth is not producing enough carbonic acid. This is a function that few people realise the earth exercises. With the properties of carbonic acid in mind, one- may wonder how much of the gas is necessary to ward off a glacial

epoch, and whether after all there is much to choose between being frozen or smothered out of exisf> ence. Croll, Bull, Newcomb, and many others have laboured exceedingly to discover the causes of the "Ice Ages" which have already occurred, and which profoundly changed the face of the earth over vast areas. The idea that a lack of carbonic acid might be responsible was advanced by Chamberlin at the end of the nineteenth century, purely as a hypothesis, the suggestion being that the resulting reduction of. the density of the air enabled the earth to lose its heat at a faster rate and to become chilled. The French author of the present warning, should be enlisted as a propagandist for afforestation, which may be depended upon to increase in some small degree the output of the protecting envelope. When, if ever in man's existence, a glacial epoch does come with such horrible suddenness, there will be less worry about causes of the cold than about ways to keep it out of the marrow. Some people may begin to suspect that the French prophet is out in his reckoning by a couple of centuries, and that the present world-wide dislocation of climate that is apparently prevalent may be quoted against him. But there is more reason to suppose that the earth is suffering at present from the periodical attack of go-slow which the sun affects every ten or twelve years, this being a time of "minimum sunspot activity." Hitherto however, attempts to show a definite relation between the weather and the sun's appearance of health or be-spottedness have been more interesting than successful. And while, as individuals,' we need not personally be alarmed by the Parisian prophecy, we may anticipate, in the interest of the unborn millions, that it is wrong. Whatever the cause of an ice age, it will not come down " with a bang," as the sun used to set at Edinburgh Castle; no single generation of men, if there are any men, like ourselves then, will notice it.