Greenhouse Gases Could Have Caused A Prior Ice Age

This is an adjacent post to the one below -- more about global warming ... er, nowadays they've started saying "climate change" to cover their butts for whether or not the earth will be warming up or cooling down.

Anyway, some researchers at the University of Birmingham, England that some 630 million years ago, the earth's atmosphere had a warm atmosphere full of carbon dioxide and, yet, the earth was covered in ice. They believe that such "glaciation" could happen again if global warming is not curbed.

Here's the story from the UK's Telegraph:

Greenhouse gases could have caused an ice age, claim scientists

Filling the earth with greenhouse gases could associated with global warming could push the planet into a new ice age, scientists have warned.

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 6:51PM GMT 01 Jan 2009

Researchers at the University of Birmingham found that 630 million years ago the earth had a warm atmosphere full of carbon dioxide but was completely covered with ice.

The scientists studied limestone rocks and found evidence that large amounts of greenhouse gas coincided with a prolonged period of freezing temperatures.

Such glaciation could happen again if global warming is not curbed, the university's school of geography, earth and environmental sciences warned.

While pollution in the air is thought to trap the sun's heat in the atmosphere, causing the planet to heat up, this new research suggests it could also have the opposite effect reflecting rays back into space.

This effect would be magnified by other forms of pollution in the earth's atmosphere such as particles of sulphate pumped into the air through industrial pollution or volcanic activity and could create ice age conditions once more, the scientists said.

Dr Ian Fairchild, lead investigator, said: "We came up with an independent test of a theory that the earth, like a baked Alaska pudding, was once hot on the outside, surrounding a cold, icy surface.

"It happened naturally in the past, but the wrong use of technology could make it happen again."

The limestones studied were collected in Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, which is covered in ice and snow.

I found the comments below the article interesting. One fellow mentioned in particular a website: http://petitionproject.org/ I highly recommend checking it out. It is the Global Warming Petition Project in which over 31,000 American scientists (over 9,000 of them with Ph.Ds) call for the United States government to reject the global warming agreement (Kyoto 1997), stating that there is no convincing scientific evidence that manmade release of greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic heating of the earth's atmosphere and disrupt the earth's climate. The scientists state that the proposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions will result in hindering advances in science and technology, harm the environment, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.