Swedish boffins: An ICE AGE is coming, only CO2 can save us … A group of Swedish scientists at the University of Gothenburg have published a paper in which they argue that spreading peatlands are inexorably driving planet Earth into its next ice age, and the only thing holding back catastrophe is humanity's hotly debated atmospheric carbon emissions. "We are probably entering a new ice age right now. However, we're not noticing it due to the effects of carbon dioxide," says Professor of Physical Geography Lars Franzén, from the Department of Earth Sciences at Gothenburg university. – The Register

Dominant Social Theme: Let's ignore this one.

Free-Market Analysis: We've read about the coming cooling but this article in The Register – an irreverent, 'Net-based tech site – is fairly detailed and interesting.

We are not at all sure, however, that it constitutes a new meme; from what we can tell, it has not yet experienced sustained or expanded coverage in the mainstream media. It seems to have had about 2,000 pickups thus far but not many are mainstream news or info sites.

We tend to believe that global warming remains a main tool in the arsenal of the power elite that want to monitor everyone's use of energy and promote various kinds of carbon sequestration schemes. Of course, it can be noted that articles like the one that The Register is reporting on tend to legitimize the idea that humans can have an impact on the planet's atmosphere to begin with.

And one supposes that the elites trying to make a link between human activity and climate change can do it via the impending threat of an ice age as well as a desert. Here's some more from the article:

Franzén and his colleagues have examined various scenarios for the peatlands of Sweden, which are a continually expanding "dynamic landscape element". According to the scientists:

Peatlands grow in height and spread across their surroundings by waterlogging woodlands. They are also one of the biggest terrestrial sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Each year, around 20 grams of carbon are absorbed by every square metre of peatland.

The scientists have calculated that the potential is there for Swedish peatlands to triple in extent, enormously increasing their carbon sink effect. By extrapolating to include the rest of the world's high-latitude temperate areas – the parts of the globe where peatland can expand as it does in Sweden – they project the creation of an extremely powerful carbon sink. They theorise that this is the mechanism which tends to force the Earth back into prolonged ice ages after each relatively brief "interglacial" warm period.

"Carbon sequestration in peatland may be one of the main reasons why ice age conditions have occurred time after time," says Franzén.

With no other factors in play, the time is about right for the present interglacial to end and the next ice age to come on. Indeed, Franzén and his crew think it has barely been staved off by human activity:

The researchers believe that the Little Ice Age of the 16th to 18th centuries may have been halted as a result of human activity. Increased felling of woodlands and growing areas of agricultural land, combined with the early stages of industrialisation, resulted in increased emissions of carbon dioxide which probably slowed down, or even reversed, the cooling trend.

If Franzén and his team are right, the big chill is now under way, and is only just being held off by increasing human carbon emissions – perhaps explaining why temperatures have been merely flat for the last 15 years or so, rather than descending.

We've always had a suspicion that the powers-that-be halted the dissemination of the phrase "global warming" for a reason. It really was a remarkable event. Almost overnight the mainstream stopped using the phrase.

Usually this presages some sort of promotional reconfiguration of a failing meme. A new dominant social theme could indeed propose that human interference in the "natural" course of things had caused a cooling instead of a warming.

The subdominant social theme would remain one having to do with humanity's corrosive effect on natural processes, and the need for proactive government involvement to assuage climate change.

Whatever finally happens to this meme, we believe the skepticism that is now focused on "global warming" is one of the finest achievements to date of what we call the Internet Reformation. There is no way, in our view, that the virtual destruction of this meme was contemplated by a power elite that uses fear-based propaganda to induce globalist solutions.

The exposure of emails and a mechanism of control exercised by a few elite allies to introduce and sustain this meme proved fairly lethal and continues to poison efforts of the elites to revive the concept.

We haven't heard the last of this meme, no matter how discredited it is currently. The "solutions" are still in place. Wounded but still mobile, it lurches ahead like some sort of monster out of a horror movie. And such movies do usually have sequels …