Global Warming / Climate Change / New Ice Age

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Right now, scientists are monitoring what is being called a "methane time bomb" in the Arctic. As the permafrost melts away, and it's doing so at an increasingly snowballing rate, massive stores of the gas may be released. This could happen slowly or all in one giant earth-fart, but either way would cause climate change at a rate that would cost the world economy no less than $60 trillion in damage. Not a believer in this whole global warming thing? Here's some food for thought. You know the North Pole? That frozen place where Santa and the Abominable Snowman live? Well, it resembles a great place for some trout fishing right now.

Martin: The thing the scientists don't understand is how quickly it happens. It was originally thought to work like a dimmer would on a light switch, you slowly turn it and they dim, but now it looks like it may be a regular switch, where you just push it down, and it goes and goes until it suddenly flips the electricity. Scientists are actually finding out this could happen in a matter of months. Once the balance of the great conveyor belt loses its momentum — and once the climate changes, it temporarily stops the conveyor belt — it wreaks havoc on the globe. It stopped for a couple minutes in the late 1980s, and again in the early '90s, so it's kind of on the teetering point right now, If that stops completely, we'd have a full ice age in a matter of months. In fact, we are due for an ice age, actually 150 years overdue.