Only yesterday I posted a blog about my take on global warming. (It would be one way to end the insanity of the consumer society and endless growth.) Today, there’s a story on MSNBC about global cooling. But hey, I’m adaptable: I can handle that.

For the past two years, William Patterson, described as an “isotope biogeochemist” (what does your daddy do?) at the University of Saskatchewan, has been looking at tubes of mud taken from ancient lakes in Ireland. It’s basically like the core you get when you take a soil sample, but much deeper of course. And it’s examined in slices about half a millimeter thick. Since this mud was laid down as sediment, each layer offers a snapshot of geologic history. Patterson and his colleagues have been studying this history, and they say the climate cooled — very, very  rapidly — about 12,800 years ago.

That ice age (scientifically the Younger Dryas) is well-documented, of course, and non-controversial, mostly. The “news” is that it might have occurred within a matter of months, or a few years at most.

And it was caused by global warming.

It was news to me that this was “news,” because a sudden Ice Age was one of the main themes of my book, The Place Called Attar, published in 1990. The theory was (and still is) that a vast influx of fresh water into the Gulf Stream turns off what climatologists call the “conveyer belt”, that “river within an ocean” that carries warm water from the Caribbean to the North Atlantic, and makes Maine and Nova Scotia, as well as most of Northern Europe, a more hospitable climate that what we have here in Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, even though we’re farther south.

Twelve or 13 centuries ago, that fresh water came from North America’s Lake Agassiz, which held more water than all of the Great Lakes combined. Today, it could come from the melting polar icecaps.

When warm tropical water is no longer flowing north on that “conveyor belt,” those balmy climates of Maine, Nova Scotia and Northern Europe revert to where they should be, being even further from the equator than Wisconsin. Result: An Ice Age. And it could happen in months, not eons.

My point here is that I’m not taking sides. Global warming — or cooling — might or might not be happening. But either one would devastate what I call The Establishment, that stifles sane living, which I call homesteading. Therefore, even the prospects of either one interest me as a devious means to an end.

Here’s an amusing and personal little aside: In Diane’s last year of college, she needed one more science course for her RN degree. I suggested climatology, which I was taking as part of my geography minor. I figured it would be a snap course, which she deserved after a grueling 5-year nursing program – plus a year off for maternity leave.

In addition to the novelty of a married couple being students in the same small class on a (then) 12,000 student campus, I thought it would be interesting and perhaps even useful, long before tv meteorologists started educating us all about weather phenomena.

Little did I know what a hot topic that snap course would become, 50 years later!

Oh, by the way, The Place Called Attar has been out of print for years. I was happy to get rid of the second printing… until recently. I’ve been getting requests for it again. They’re selling on the web for $35 a copy. I have none left. Some guys just can’t get anything right.