Open Veils · Answer
Are we due for another ice age?
According to the Milankovitch cycle record and catastrophist researchers like Randall Carlson and Paul LaViolette, Earth's glacial rhythm is punctuated not only by orbital mechanics but by cosmic and solar forcing events that establishment models systematically exclude. The 'next ice age' framing obscures the more urgent research question: not a gradual orbital glaciation, but a rapid-onset cosmic-impact or solar-micronova trigger of the kind that ended the Younger Dryas. A December 2025 Earth system model study (Communications Earth & Environment) confirmed that under natural orbital conditions the next inception is ~50,000 years out — but that model explicitly excludes abrupt non-orbital forcing. The October 2026 Science study finding that a 'failed ice age' began 1,000 years ago but was halted by industrial emissions is the strongest mainstream counter-evidence, and deserves to be named directly.
Evidence
- Randall Carlson, working from the Milankovitch cycle data and flood geology of the Scablands, argues that Earth does not drift into glaciations — it is knocked in by abrupt cosmic events.
- Paul LaViolette's galactic superwave hypothesis adds a solar dimension: he argues in Earth Under Fire that periodic galactic core outbursts send cosmic ray barrages that dramatically alter solar output and atmospheric chemistry, triggering rapid climate phase-transitions on timescales of decades, not millennia.
- The October 2026 Science study (Miller et al., INSTAAR) is genuinely significant: it documents that an Arctic ice-cap was measurably expanding for at least 1,000 years — consistent with an orbital glacial inception that was underway — before anthropogenic warming arrested it by the 1960s.
- Charles Hapgood's pole-shift model, later supported mathematically by researchers including Flavio Barbiero, offers a third mechanism entirely: lithospheric displacement driven by ice-mass asymmetry, capable of relocating polar zones within centuries.
- The December 2025 Communications Earth & Environment model is thorough within its own assumptions, but those assumptions — steady geological carbon cycling, no impulsive cosmic forcing, no pole displacement — are precisely what catastrophist researchers contest.