Must have been a short growing season.
The global warming people want us to go back to that?
You can apparently watch an entire program on this subject here (in five 10-min parts):
2001 BBC Horizon Snowball Earth part 1 of 5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG5_ufWfbuk
Sounds like Algore’s ancestors were asleep at the wheel. Probably swinging through the trees and eating frozen bananas.
Canada (where I live), was buried under a two-mile thick icecap, until about 8,000 years ago. I have yet to hear any AGW alarmist explain why having that icecap melt was a bad thing. If I lived in (say) Arizona, I would probably appreciate ice more — preferably in a tall glass.
In this photo from Canada's Yukon Territory, an iron-rich layer of 716.5-million-year-old glacial deposits (maroon in color) is seen atop an older carbonate reef (gray in color) that formed in the tropics. (Credit: Francis A. Macdonald/Harvard University)
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This work was supported by the Polar Continental Shelf Project and the National Science Foundation's Geobiology and Environmental Geochemistry Program.
Planet earth prosper during warming trends and dies off during ice ages. The more we can put off the next ice age the better. Al Gore be damned!!!!
Why all these references to geniuses? “Boffinry”, “Brainbox”; I know it’s British, but it reads like something from the Weekly World News.
Sounds more like a “settled science” pipe dream.
I got to tell ya, that the more crap I see coming out from the ‘scientific community’ the more I want to ignore the whole group. they make stuff up and try to sell their theory as scientific fact.
The big picture: 65 million years of temperature swings
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Greenland Temperatures - last 10,000 years. Are we headed for an ice age? (See below for more detail.)
Generally, we can explain the Snowball Earth episodes (there were at least 5) by Continental Drift.
The Earth goes through non-regular cycles of Super-continents coming together and then breaking apart (the stress on the crust eventually breaks them up into plates again).
When these Super-continents congregate at one or both of the poles, glaciers build up the pole, spread out across the available land (and glaciers do not build up on the ocean), Albedo increases (more sunlight is reflected and not allowed to heat up the Earth), it gets colder, more glacier builds up, even more sunlight is reflected and eventually, everything is frozen except the tropics.
The continental drift reconstructions show that there really was Super-continents in the right place at least 715 million years ago and 635 million years ago (the last Snowball period).
The Albedo of all that ice on a Continent over the south pole 20 times bigger than Antarctica is calculated to increase the amount of sunlight reflected from 30% today to 50% in the Snowball periods which is just the right amount to freeze over the whole Earth other than the tropics.
Snowball period ends when Super-continent breaks up and the plates move away from the poles and the ice melts.
So continental drift, rather than greenhouse gases.
Here is how the continents looked at the last Snowball period and how far the 5 km high glaciers could have grown.
I'd like to see the climate "scientists" that have this kind of prediction in their models. Personally, I think climate is too complex a system to be modelled given our technology at the moment. It may very well never be possible due to sensitive dependance upon initial conditions (the butterfly effect). We need more data, and more samples. I hereby volunteer to man a spacecraft to the nearest solar system with probable planets such as ours so we can have more data to work with.