According to a study in the journal Science reported by CNN, the CO2 humanity released by burning fossil fuels may have halted a ‘next ice age’ that was just beginning to take hold in the Canadian Arctic. On 5ch’s Science News+ board, debate centered not just on how credible the theory is, but on the very distinction between the terms ‘glacial epoch,’ ‘glacial period,’ and ‘interglacial period.’ Based on the Milankovitch cycle, the next glacial period isn’t technically due for another 20,000 to 30,000 years, and many commenters worried that greenhouse gas emissions could wreck the environment in some other way long before then.
Humanity accidentally stopped the ‘next ice age’ — but here’s why that’s still no reason to welcome warming
(CNN) By burning fossil fuels, humanity may have halted a ‘next ice age’ that was beginning to take shape in the Canadian Arctic.
That’s the theory put forward in a paper published in the journal Science.
An ice age cycles between glacial and interglacial periods on a scale of tens of thousands of years, and we're currently understood to be in an interglacial period. Is the 'ice age' in this article actually talking about a glacial period?
4AnonymousNov 1, 2026 21:10
A ton of unknown viruses are about to come crawling out of the glaciers.
5AnonymousNov 1, 2026 21:37
Re: #4 You mean the thing living on Trump's head?
12AnonymousNov 1, 2026 22:33
Re: #4 The really ancient ones already have antivirus pattern files made by their ancestors (a pun on biological 'virus' vs. computer 'pattern files').
6AnonymousNov 1, 2026 21:46
But nothing could stop the tragedy of Japan's 'Ice Age Generation' (the generation that graduated into Japan's brutal post-bubble job market).
8AnonymousNov 1, 2026 21:49
Re: #6 About the only upside was that the Self-Defense Forces got tougher back then.
7AnonymousNov 1, 2026 21:48
Sunspots have vanished too, you know.
9AnonymousNov 1, 2026 22:16
Heinrich Events (abrupt ice-sheet discharge episodes that punctuate glacial periods).
10AnonymousNov 1, 2026 22:18
H1 (Heinrich Event 1) is what led to the invention of Jōmon pottery.
11AnonymousNov 1, 2026 22:26
Actually, there's an interpretation that we're currently heading rapidly toward an ice age, and that greenhouse gases from human activity are what's stopping it. That's an astronomical conclusion, not a meteorological one. But that take is wrong — the next ice age isn't due for roughly another 20,000 years.
13AnonymousNov 1, 2026 22:34
Average temperatures had been gradually dropping from the Medieval Warm Period all the way up to the Industrial Revolution. If we hadn't started burning coal, we probably would've slid into a glacial period and faced famine. Still, it's way too hot right now for that to be any comfort.
15AnonymousNov 1, 2026 23:17
Even if we really did stop an ice age, what do we do about the warm period still ahead? Well, it's a cycle spanning tens of thousands of years, so civilization will probably collapse before that becomes an issue.
16AnonymousNov 1, 2026 23:19
This article sounds fishy.
17AnonymousNov 1, 2026 23:23
Going by the Milankovitch cycle, the next glacial period is supposedly 20,000-30,000 years out, but if we keep pumping out greenhouse gases at this rate, we'll dry up long before that.
18AnonymousNov 1, 2026 23:53
Diamond dust!!! (a phenomenon of tiny ice crystals glittering in freezing air)
21AnonymousNov 2, 2026 02:20
We're in an ice age right now. So many idiots talk about climate without even knowing that.
22AnonymousNov 2, 2026 05:22
Human tolerance for the environment is entirely dependent on external conditions. Too hot or too cold, and we're doomed either way. And yet we're the ones destroying the environment ourselves — truly foolish. Idiots, idiots, everyone's an idiot.
24AnonymousNov 2, 2026 07:38
Unfortunately, once daily temperatures start topping 40°C, humans won't be able to survive. The hardest hit will be Japan, with its hot, humid climate.
25AnonymousNov 2, 2026 08:13
Isn't it really just down to how the sun and volcanoes play out — like during the Maunder Minimum?
33AnonymousNov 2, 2026 19:00
Re: #25 The Maunder Minimum reportedly dropped temperatures by several degrees in some localized regions, but the global average drop is said to be only around 0.2°C. Even if it happened again now, it probably wouldn't be enough to halt global warming.
27AnonymousNov 2, 2026 09:08
Would an Edokko (old-school Tokyoite) pronounce 'hyōgaki' (ice age) as 'shōgaki'? And would 'shūshoku hyōgaki' (employment ice age) turn into some tongue-twisted 'hyūhyokushōgaki'? (Edokko are famously known for swapping their 'hi' and 'shi' sounds.) Now I'm so curious about it I won't be able to sleep again until my alarm goes off.
28AnonymousNov 2, 2026 09:43
I thought this was going to be another thread about the 'Ice Age Generation,' but it's actually about a real ice age.
29AnonymousNov 2, 2026 10:55
If humanity didn't exist, we'd be heading into another ice age in a few thousand to tens of thousands of years.
↓
And the warming of the past few decades may have stopped that from happening.
But the pace of civilization runs on a completely different timescale, so I don't think you can really lump the two together. For instance, within a few centuries, science might be able to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and bring temperatures back down to previous levels.
30AnonymousNov 2, 2026 12:47
Now we're headed for infinite price-hike hell thanks to the logistics ice age.
32AnonymousNov 2, 2026 13:38
If humanity didn't exist, the atmosphere would lose its CO2 in about 20 million years and all plant life would die out. But with humanity around, it looks like we'll go extinct in just 200 years instead.
34AnonymousNov 2, 2026 19:20
They're cranking out a ridiculous number of EVs, so warming is probably going to keep progressing. Maybe there'd be some effect once every EV ever built is actually on the road (?). But as long as they're rotting away in junkyards, or people give up after a year and switch back to hybrids, that's never going to happen. For now it's just relentless temperature rise.
35AnonymousNov 2, 2026 19:28
I think if we just set up a massive parasol between the sun and the Earth, we could stop global warming.
36AnonymousNov 2, 2026 20:55
I just happened to buy a used copy of Inter Ice Age 4 (Kōbō Abe's novel). Read it decades ago but don't remember the plot at all. I think there were aquatic humans in it or something.
37AnonymousNov 3, 2026 10:02
We're still in an interglacial period, right? If the atmosphere went back to Devonian-era levels, we'd get giant trees everywhere and organisms growing huge — that'd solve resource shortages.
38AnonymousNov 3, 2026 12:53
'Glacial epoch,' 'glacial period,' and 'ice age' are terms used when discussing Earth's climate history, and they're distinguished by scale (timeframe) as follows.
1. Glacial Epoch / Ice Age
• Definition: A period during which permanent glaciers or ice sheets exist somewhere on Earth (polar regions, mountains, etc.).
• Timescale: An extremely long geological span — tens of millions to hundreds of millions of years.
• Current state: Earth is still inside a 'glacial epoch (ice age)' right now. The ice age that began roughly 35 million years ago (in the Cenozoic era), when an ice sheet first formed over Antarctica, is still ongoing today.
In everyday usage, 'ice age' often just means 'the cold period in general,' but strictly speaking the term itself refers to this biggest-picture framework.
39AnonymousNov 3, 2026 12:54
2. Glacial Period
• Definition: A phase within a glacial epoch (ice age) when temperatures drop sharply and glaciers expand much further.
• Features:
• During a glacial period, so much ice gets locked up on land that sea levels drop over 100 meters below current levels (roughly 125m during the last glacial period).
• This caused geographic changes, such as Japan becoming connected to the Asian continent by land.
• Most recent glacial period: The 'Last Glacial Period,' which lasted until about 11,700 years ago, is the most recent one.
3. Interglacial Period
• Definition: A relatively warm phase within a glacial epoch, occurring between glacial periods.
• Current state: We are currently living in an interglacial period called the 'Holocene,' which began about 11,700 years ago when the last glacial period ended.
40AnonymousNov 3, 2026 13:56
We've arrived at Jupiter.
41AnonymousNov 3, 2026 14:04
Doesn't that just mean we're releasing heat into space faster, so we're actually speeding up the day Earth cools completely into a dead planet?
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The ‘ice age’ referenced in the original article actually refers to a ‘glacial period’ — the kind that arrives on a scale of tens of thousands of years. Earth today sits within an ‘interglacial period,’ itself part of the broader ‘glacial epoch’ that has continued for roughly 35 million years. The definitional debate in the thread arose because the everyday word ‘ice age’ gets used loosely without distinguishing between these three tiers (glacial epoch, glacial period, interglacial period) — a separate source of confusion from the question of whether the research itself holds up. The other major point of contention was whether the study’s finding — that a glacial period was averted — can really be weighed against the damage caused by ongoing warming. Based on the Milankovitch cycle, the next glacial period was originally due 20,000 to 30,000 years from now, operating on a completely different timescale from human-driven warming, which plays out over decades to centuries. Several commenters pointed out that overlooking this distinction risks the hasty conclusion that ‘if an ice age was prevented, then warming isn’t so bad after all.’
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