After the global warming, you get the global cooling ...

Excerpt from the Sydney Morning Herald (annotated):

5 October 2007

Australia may be spared the brunt of a future Ice Age, a climate expert says.

Dr Timothy Burrows says in a report published in the journal Science that Australia may not be affected as much as northern hemisphere countries if and when the next Ice Age hits.

Dr Burrows, from the Australian National University in Canberra, said that these periods of rapid cooling were associated with the rapid heating that occurred at the end of the last Ice Age also known as the Pleistocene epoch.

"The height of the last Ice Age was around 20,000 years ago and then progressively over the next 7-9,000 years you get the greatest global warming that we have seen in recent history, then right at the end of that warming it gets cold again," Dr Burrows said.

But Dr Burrows said that using new methods to date the glacier he was able to show that not only did the southern hemisphere not cool during this period, temperatures were actually 2 degrees warmer than today.

[Wait, isn't it supposed to be the hottest it has ever been right now?]

See - Ice ages affect Australia less: expert.

Given how sexy global warming is at present, any scientist who wants to study global cooling will probably be scratching around to get any funding ...