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"Nobody can afford right off the bat to buy 20 years of dehydrated mashed potatoes," he said. He would buy a little extra every time he went to the store. Peace of mind increases as the larder grows, he said. "If you stock food for a year and lose your job, you can at least eat for a year," he said. Besides food and water, his stash includes certain medicines and some cash -- "If it's worth anything in the end" -- and important documents, some of which he's duplicated and stored off site. "You can't be prepared for everything,...

Britain should brace itself for another freezing winter with the return of La Niña, a climate phenomenon known to disrupt global weather, ministers have warned. The warning coincides with research from the Met Office suggesting Europe could be facing a return of the “little ice age” that gripped Britain 300 years ago, causing decades of bitter winters. The prediction, to be published in Nature, is based on observations showing a slight fall in the sun’s emissions of ultraviolet radiation, which over a long period may trigger mini ice ages in Europe. –Jonathan Leake, The Sunday Times, 9 October 2011 BRITAIN...

Science & Technology 9/16/02 Defrosting the past Ancient human and animal remains are melting out of glaciers, a bounty of a warming world BY ALEX MARKELS As he hiked near Colorado's Continental Divide in the summer of 2001, Ed Knapp noticed a strange shape jutting from a melting ice field at 13,000 feet. "It looked like a bison skull," the building contractor and amateur archaeologist recalls. "I thought, 'That's strange. Bison don't live this high up.' " Knapp brought the skull to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where scientists last month announced that it was indeed from a...

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Anthony Watts THE DEMISE OF SUNSPOTS—DEEP COOLING AHEAD?Don J. Easterbrook, Professor of Geology, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WAThe three studies released by NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network this week, predicting the virtual vanishing of sunspots for the next several decades and the possibility of a solar minimum similar to the Maunder Minimum, came as stunning news. According to Frank Hill, “the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.” The last time sunspots vanished from the...

It’s official: a new Ice Age is on its way. In what has been described as “the science story of the century”, heavyweight US solar physicists have announced that the sun is heading for a prolonged period of low activity. This makes global cooling a much more plausible prospect in the next few decades than global warming. Indeed, it might even usher in a lengthy period of climate grimness such as we saw during the Maunder Minimum (when Ice Fairs were held on the Thames) or the Dalton Minimum (which brought us such delights as the 1816 Year Without A...

Old and busted: global warming. New hotness: coldness. Reports from three different studies released yesterday point to the possibility of an extended period of solar inactivity not seen for three hundred years, and one that could bring a new mini-Ice Age: According to three studies released in the United States on Tuesday, experts believe the familiar sunspot cycle may be shutting down and heading toward a pattern of inactivity unseen since the 17th century.The signs include a missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles, said experts from the National Solar Observatory and Air Force Research Laboratory.‘This...

Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years. The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated. ...Currently, the sun is in the midst of the period designated as Cycle 24 and is ramping up toward the cycle's period of maximum activity. However, the...

Physicists say sunspot cycle is 'going into hibernation' What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age. The announcement made on 14 June (18:00 UK time) comes from scientists at the US National Solar Observatory (NSO) and US Air Force Research Laboratory. Three different analyses of the Sun's recent behaviour all indicate that...

Climate: New study slashes estimate of icecap loss PARIS (AFP) - – Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually.Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches)...

<p>Washington — A people who may have been ancestors of the first Americans lived in Arctic Siberia, enduring one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth at the height of the Ice Age, according to researchers who discovered the oldest evidence yet of humans living near the frigid gateway to the New World. Russian scientists uncovered a 30,000-year-old site where ancient hunters lived on the Yana River in Siberia, some 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle and not far from the Bering land bridge that then connected Asia with North America.</p>

Pardon the vanity! But with the weather this winter, we need to talk more about Global Warming just to warm people up! Some news links about the weather forecast for Ground Hog day (and the day before and after...): Weather.gov: Blizzard warning for Chicago, ILFoxnews: Midwest, Plains Brace for Massive Winter StormAccuWeather: Blizzard, Ice Storm, Nasty Cold All Aiming for MidwestWeather.com: Multi-Day Dangerous, Destructive Winter Storm Forget about Al Gore's Global Warming Time to start talking about Al Gore's Ice Age It appears the Al Gore ice age has cometh! Joking aside, Weather.com is claiming 100 million Americans will be...

Video: There are some nasty short- and long-term implications in control of the weather and climate. You and I have nothing to do with it, nor can we control it.

It's official, Tampa Bay: December 2010 was the coldest December in recorded history. Overall, the average daily temperature, the high and the low divided by two, was about 10 degrees below the norm for the month. Tampa set a new record low at 53.2 degrees, besting the previous record of 54.5 degrees in 1935. It was even colder than January 2010's record-breaking cold snap. St. Petersburg's 56.3 degrees beat a record of 56.9, also from 1935. In Hernando County, Brooksville set a record at 52 degrees. The previous low was 54.1 in 1935. St. Leo, in Pasco County, also set...

Climate: Nothing makes fools of more people than trying to predict the weather. Whether in Los Angeles or London, recent predictions have gone crazily awry. Global warming? How about mini ice age? The sight of confused and angry travelers stuck in airports across Europe because of an arctic freeze that has settled across the continent isn't funny. Sadly, they've been told for more than a decade now that such a thing was an impossibility — that global warming was inevitable, and couldn't be reversed. .... A cautionary tale? You bet. Prognosticators who wrote the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,...

Do you know of any science fiction stories about future Ice Ages? I've read one, the novel, Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn Wikipedia articleRead it online ... Do you know of any other SF stories on this topic?

EIN GEDI, Israel — Five miles out, nearly to the center of the Dead Sea, an international team of scientists has been drilling beneath the seabed to extract a record of climate change and earthquake history stretching back half a million years. The preliminary evidence and clues found halfway through the 40-day project are more than the team could have hoped for. The scientists did not expect to pull up a wood fragment that was roughly 400,000 years old. Nor did they expect to come across a layer of gravel from a mere 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. That finding...

As the United Nations opened its latest conference on global warming, Mother Nature sent snowstorms and freezing temperatures that disrupted travel all across Europe and much of the Northern Hemisphere. Even Cancun, Mexico's sunny resort city that hosted the confab, was not spared the chill. The UN summit, known as COP16 (the 16th Conference of Parties on global warming), concluded Saturday morning after an all-night marathon session. Cancun may not have experienced blizzards and ice, but it did, nevertheless, get hammered with record low temps for the month of December. Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who runs the global warming skeptic blog...

AFTER nearly two weeks of snow and sub zero temperatures rivaling those of Siberia, the old joke about global warming being a good thing has had a new lease of life. So what has happened to doom-laden predictions of the world heating up as glaciers melt? Mike Kelly reports. FIRST the good news. These bitter winters aren’t going to last forever. The bad news is that they will go on for the next 30 years as we have entered a mini ice age.So says author Gavin Cooke in his book Frozen Britain. He began writing it in 2008 and it...

Stockholm is forecast to experience its coldest seasonal temperatures for over 100 years this week as winter weather takes hold of the country, according to the Swedish Meteorological Institute... Temperatures across the country are expected to drop to record lows for the first week of December, with the exception of the far north, with averages coming in 7-10 degrees Celsius below normal. Stockholm registered -11 degrees Celsius at the weekend, the coldest November temperature since 1965 and the mercury is set to plunge further on Wednesday and Thursday, dropping as low as -15. "It is far below average temperatures, which...

Snow, floods and gale-force winds have swept across eastern Australia overnight, transforming parts of New South Wales and Victoria into springtime winter wonderlands. More than 200 people have been forced to flee their homes in southern New South Wales, where a creek burst its banks and homes were flooded. In Queensland, strong winds have caused havoc on roads and in Victoria snow has blanketed parts of the state and flood warnings are in place. The Bureau of Meteorology has issued flood warnings for all three states. The bureau's Simon Allen says the overnight extremes are unusual. "The weather this time...