The Coming Ice Age

by C. A. M. Taber

I have explained how the increasing coldness of the superior oceans of the southern hemisphere affects more or less the temperature of the Gulf Stream, which meanwhile is only able to enter a small portion of its waters into the Arctic Ocean after undergoing a long cooling process as a drift current; and, while thus mingling with the arctic waters, it is not able to prevent the gathering of ice-sheets on Greenland, where glaciers are launching bergs to float southward as far as the latitude of 40° north. Consequently, the northern seas are now being cooled as well as the seas of the southern hemisphere.

Yet this cooling process is so slow there is a lack of data to show that the temperature of the high latitudes is lowering. Our thermometrical observations are of such recent date they cannot be used to determine climatic changes which requires centuries to bring about. Still, it is generally known that the climate of Northern Europe has been accused of growing colder. The vine no longer flourishes on the shores of Bristol Channel or in Flanders or Brittany; and vineyards are no longer planted on the elevated shores of France where they flourished three hundred years ago. Arago did not refuse to believe that the laws regulating the temperature of Western Europe had notably altered. This is proved, he said, by the general retrogradation of the vineyards southward.

The recent deadly freezing of the orange groves of Florida makes it uncertain whether the cultivation of the orange can again be successful in the counties where during this generation it has been very profitable.

Travellers visiting Iceland say that the old accounts of its prosperity seem strange to those who now visit its shores; and it is narrated in the Sagas that in early times sheep could shift for themselves during winter, and that there were large forests and that corn ripened. Several years ago a correspondent of the Spectator, writing from Northern Russia where the Volga is locked with ice for six months in the year, stated that “the people were beginning to show increased resentment at the climate, and that there was reason to believe that the northern government of Russia would be abandoned to the desert. The people silently glide south by the tens of thousands every year, so the life of Russia was concentrating in the south.”

It is now the opinion of travellers in arctic lands that the inhabitants of the Esquimaux regions are decreasing, as are also the inhabitants of Northern Siberia.

A writer in the North China Herald, of Shanghai, says that “the climate of Asia is becoming colder than it formerly was, and its tropical animals and plants are retreating southward at a slow rate. In the time of Confucius elephants were in use on the Yangtse River. A hundred and fifty years after this Mencius speaks of the tiger, the leopard, the rhinoceros, and the elephant as being in many parts of China.

“It is also said that the ferocious alligator, that formerly infested the rivers of South China, has retreated southward.

“The flora of the country is also affected by the increasing coldness of the climate. The bamboo is not found in the forests of North China, where it grew naturally two thousand years ago, but is still grown in Pekin, with the aid of good shelter, as a sort of garden plant only.”

A letter from Hong Kong, published in the London Standard, reports that on the 15th of January, 1893, the temperature of Hong Kong, a tropical seaport of China, was below freezing for three days, and was colder than ever before known. The rocks and also vegetation were covered with a coating of ice. The thermometer at times stood at 23° and 26° Fahrenheit.

I have previously explained how the slow increasing coldness of the northern temperate zone is also being carried out in the southern hemisphere. The meteorological records for the lofty table lands of Ecuador, although very incomplete, furnish strong evidence to show that the mean temperature of that region is gradually lowering.