That glaciation was not unique, as the same scenario had happened time and again over millions of years. The in-between times were sometimes very hot all over the world, but the ice always came back. It was two miles thick and nothing could ever stop its advance.

Although it's a very unpleasant and scary prospect, everyone should realize that right now, we are experiencing an interglacial period. After this brief moment in time, and after an interval of increased warmth, the massive ice will come again, down from the north, up from the south, regardless of our industrial, automotive, or agricultural emissions. Nothing we can possibly do will stop this re-glaciation, as the cycle continues, in harmony with sun spots and earth orbital variation and the tilting of the earth on its own axis. So let us cope with the coming of a period of increased global warming before the deep freeze. Some island nations in the Pacific will be inundated, as polar ice melts in this cycle. Many of the world's coastal cities are going to be covered with sea-water within the next few hundred years. Some of the earth's leaders are going to experience political pressure to "stop the warming" by decreasing industrial emissions. These efforts are certainly laudable from a perspective of doing what is humanly possible to improve the immediate environment. No people, no area of the earth, should have to suffer from industrial emissions that can be diminished or prevented.

It would be criminal to ignore the problem. Yet, some nations' leaders believe it would be lunacy to sign the Kyoto protocol when less developed nations are given the go-ahead under it, to continue to emit pollutants that could be prevented. People have to come up with a better way to curtail pollution as much as possible. We may be a part of global warming, but even with that trend happening, we are absolutely not capable of staving off the next glaciation.

Against this backdrop of impending chill, the campaigns of organizations such as Greenpeace seem incredibly simplistic and self-serving. Campaigns against industrial emissions, with dire predictions of the dangers of global warming, all make millions of dollars and increase the political credibility of those organizations that promote them. They will not significantly diminish industrial pollution, however, because the world's leaders are all watching their own industries, their employment figures, and the welfare of their own people. We can't ever go back to a non-industrial existence, until the world itself gives us no other choice. When the globe is through warming, (a time, incidentally, of great benefit to some areas' agriculture) then the next glaciation shall come along, and it won't be a good time to be a vegetarian. The environmentalist doom-sayers are happily blaming President Bush and his fellow world leaders for not signing the Kyoto Protocol.