It's time for some straight talk. No more beating around the bush. I no longer want to evade an issue around whose edges I've been skirting for 12 years. So I'll come right and say it loud and clear: In all probability, we've come to the end of the line.
Unless I'm grievously mistaken, we are about to go extinct. Soon. In 1997 I warned that we are approaching the onset of a new ice age. I wrote that the record shows that ice ages are preceded by a period of about 20 years, and things get very unpleasant as the end of that period approaches.

Contrary to poor Al Gore's alarmist prediction that the planet is approaching the boiling point, it's getting colder - a lot colder. And it's going to get even colder. Spring and fall will disappear, summers will be short and winters longer and increasingly more frigid.

That, however, is only part of the story. Along with the cooling of the planet will come a series of increasingly violent natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of a size and fury unmatched in human history. Or a global repeat of the Tungusta event in 1908, which probably was a natural nuclear explosion in Siberia that had the force of 1,000 Hiroshima atom bombs.

And then we will go the way of the dinosaurs.

That's the way nature always has set the stage for 90,000 years of glaciation. And nobody survives. This planet has seen a series of extinctions. As Robert W. Felix has written in his extraordinary new book, "Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps," (Sugarhouse Publishing) the extinctions are followed by ice ages and then 90,000 years later by the sudden appearance of entirely new species that appear whole and complete and survive until the next extinction heralds a new ice age.

That's the way we evolved, not by slow Darwinian steps, but by a series of total transformations, according to Felix.

He quotes paleontologist Robert Bakker as observing, "The idea of slow, gradual, imperceptual evolution is wrong. The fossil facts do not read that away." Mass extinctions always come suddenly, without warning, he adds, noting that the population is then immediately replaced with entirely different species with no forerunners.

It would seem that God created us step by step, with each extinction, followed by the appearance of a new and vastly improved humanoid species that lasted until a new extinction before the onset of an ice age.

Until it became clear that there were big bucks to be made in climbing aboard the global warming gravy train, most scientific organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences were warning that we were on the verge of a new ice age.

In 1975, for example, the academy published "Understanding Climate Change." Page 181 proclaimed:
The present interglacial interval - which has now lasted for about 10,000 years - represents a climatic regime that is relatively rare during the past million years, most of which has been occupied by colder, glacial regimes. Only during about 8 percent of the past 700,000 years has the earth experienced climates as warm or warmer than the present.

The penultimate interglacial age began about 125,000 years ago, and lasted for approximately 10,000 years. Similar interglacial ages - each lasting 10,000 plus or minus 2000 years and each followed by a glacial maximum - have occurred on the average every 100,000 years during at least the past half-million years.

During this period, fluctuations of the northern hemisphere ice sheets caused sea level variations of the order of 100 meters.
On page 189, the question is asked:
When will the present interglacial end?

Few paleoclimatoligists would dispute that the prominent warm periods (or interglacials) that have followed each of the terminations of the major glaciations have had durations of 10,000 plus or minus 2000 years. In each case, a period of considerably colder climate has followed immediately after the interglacial interval.

Since about 10,000 years have passed since the onset of the present period of prominent warmth, the question naturally arises as to whether we are indeed on the brink of a period of colder climate.

The question remains unsolved. If the end of the interglacial is episodic in character, we are moving toward a rather sudden climatic change of unknown timing . . . If on the other hand, these changes are more sinusoidal in character, then the climate should decline gradually over a period of a thousand years.
A study prepared for the 95th Congress in 1978 agreed with the National Academy of Sciences position as explained in the above-quoted study. The document "Weather Modification: Programs, Problems, Policy and Potential" warned: "In geological prospective, the case for cooling is strong . . . If this interglacial age lasts no longer than a dozen earlier ones in the past million years, as recorded in deep sea sediments, we may reasonably suppose the world is about due to slide into the next ice age."

Not a single thing has emerged that challenged those assertions. They remain as valid now as they were in 1975. We are at the end of an age and all hell is about to break loose.

I hope I'm mistaken, but I would suggest that we have about five years left.

Don't worry, however, we'll be back in 90,000 years, and better than ever.