alt Hacker News>>But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters
I was in Switzerland last summer, in Glarus Alps, and walking around I found a sign that basically said that the reason why all the mountains around it were "smooth" in appearance is because during last ice age all of it was covered in ice, and the rock got smooth as the ice started to shift and slide over the course of hundreds of years. It said that only the highest peaks would be free of ice, and even then just barely - and all of those were above 2000m above(current) sea level. It's crazy to think that an ice age doesn't just mean "it's very cold" - it means there is enough ice to bury europe under 2 kilometers of ice. That's not survivable in any way, we would just have to move south somewhere - but like you said, even if it happens again it will take thousands of years to get to that point.
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Not sure it would take that long - the Younger Dryas only lasted 1,200 years and resulted in fairly significant glaciation here in Scotland - although nothing like the depth of ice of the full ice age.
You should study a bit of physical geography and glacialology.
Not all ‘ice ages’ are the same.
A true ice age as you discuss is due to the distance we are from the sun. Unfortunately, we are in the opposite and the compounding effects of human induced greenhouse effect will doom us. It’s a bit like nature/nuture.
There is stuff we can control. How we handle our species and our home, the earth.