ARCTIC ICE AGE

Taranaki Daily News, 21 September 1931, Page 15

ARCTIC ICE AGE

BRITAIN’S GLOOMY PROSPECTS. LIFE LIKE THAT OF ESKIMOS. London a city of snow, with fur-clad inhabitants relying upon giant aircraft to supply its food. England a country of frozen rivers, and the Pennine Chain deep ravined with yawning ice chasms, the home of bears and other Arctic life. A country of two seasons, one wet and intolerably warm, the other bitterly cold. This is tho picture of our country, in the not so very far distant future painted by Professor Knut Holmundsen, the famous Danish meteorologist, in a special interview with a Reynold’s correspondent, “There is no doubt,” the Professor said, “that the climate of Great Britain has undergone a great change curing this century. I have visited England for two or three months of every year for more than thirty years. “I can recall a time when your summer was so hot that people wore linen sun hats and draped their horses’ heads with rnubarb leaves; when it was considered foolish to go out without a hat. for fear of sunstroke. “And I remember winters when my friends had to clear a way from their front to the street —the snow was so deep. “Have you noted your birds? Every year the swallows, swifts, and martins are getting more scarce —I recall when every house had them under the eaves. Then the cuckoo—he is getting quite a rare bird nowadays. ‘‘This .is the second week of June, and I’ve seen very few roses yet. Years ago England was a veritable rose garden at this time. * “I do not know whether the Gulf Stream is cooling or veering out of its ancient course, but something is influencing your climate tremendously. “The seasons are no longer eo clearly defined. You get days in December as warm as some you have in- May, and your April—which used to be so lovely and so essentially English—now has days cold enough for December. “You know, people say that the straw hat is out of fashion. It isn’t. If England had the same summer as she did twenty years ago, you’d soon see straw hats again. “Although your winters are so mild, your summer is also getting lower in temperature every year. This would seem to indicate that the tendency climatically is for a levelling out of the aH-the-year-round temperature. Throughout the ages, from the glacial period onward, areas that have undergone a complete change of climatic conditions have shown the same tendency before dropping to Arctic conditions. “I am not alone among scientists when I predict that a hundred years hence Great Britain will approximate in climatic conditions to Greenland and Iceland and that the population of these isles will revert perforce to furs, the eating of heavy fats sueh as blubber—in fact, the inhabitants will live under much the same conditions as the Eskimos do now. “Of course, things will not be so primitive, for there is always the progress of science adding day by day to human comfort. And there is the possibility that by then man will have marched so far forward along the path of knowledge that he will be able to more or less command the weather. For there is no apparent limit to the powers of electricity and radium, and these two servants will be called upon by scientists to perform more wonders than I, for one, dare to contemplate. “The recent earth tremor felt in this country has ’bewildered scientists and has led people furiously to think. All sorts of phenomenal things are happening under the crust of the earth. “For ages seers, witches, charlatans and others have foretold the end of the world by some cataclysmic upheaval. While I will not join that band of prophets I do say that it is as well that each country has a little group of scientists who are “keeping their eye on things”—for, as my young English nephew Says to me sometimes, “You never know, you know.”