On Saturday I received my first piece of marketing as a blogger – for some reason this made me oddly excited and it’s a very strange experience. I looked in my mailbox to find a funky-looking black envelope with a stamp from the US nestled in the top-right. Stamped across the envelope seal were the words “Nobody Knows It Yet” and inside was a single piece of card that’s the same length as two iPhones (photos below).

The design of the card is modelled on a block of ice and on one side, in very stark lettering, is the phrase:

“NOBODY KNOWS IT YET BUT IT HAS ALREADY STARTED.”

On the other side is the silhouette of a person apparently trapped in the ice, the phrase “READY FOR THE BIG CHILL” and the web address: facebook.com/ReadyforTheBigChill.

If you go to their Facebook page, the idea behind it is quite interesting. Essentially, what can we do to prepare for a new ice age? Now, my first reaction was “huh?”. In a world which we’re repeatedly told is warming up, would it not make more sense to prepare for quite the opposite? However, as the website points out, there are several plausible scenarios in which a new ice age could occur (that’s plausible of course, not probable) including the “explosion of a super-volcano or the impact of a large asteroid” and just because we prepare for one possible future doesn’t mean we can’t prepare for its polar opposite (no pun intended).

As made clear by the stamp on the envelope, this is an American initiative, but the repercussions for the UK are perhaps more pressing than those for the US. As I mentioned earlier, climate change due to a warming world is a much more obvious thing to be thinking about and preparing for it seems much more urgent.

Except one possible outcome of a warming world is the shutting down of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream, which would end up giving the UK and the Nordic countries a similar climate to that of Siberia, which is notoriously chilly just in case you weren’t aware.

So maybe this isn’t as bad an idea as my initial reaction first suggested. The website is moving apace and there are loads of posts giving ideas for how we could survive such an event. Why not head over and give it a look?

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