Question: If the world ever have an ice age will humans be able to adapt to a new environment and how will they if there won't be any solar power source anywhere to give energy? (What if it happened tomorrow?)

James Pope answered on 16 Mar 2015:

Hi Cj Fazbear,

We would still have solar power, because the sun would still be there, if the sun died suddenly, nothing would save us, the entire world would freeze inside a few weeks.

We (human kind) have already survived the Ice Ages, we did this by living in southern Europe and using caves to survive the winters. Although our population was much smaller!

If we went into a rapid ice age, we would see ice sheets expand over North America (mainly Canada) and across Scandinavia and Russia. Anywhere an ice sheet formed would become unihabitable. The change in global climate would mean much harsher winters in the USA and across Europe with cooler summers, so our growing seasons would be much reduced. We would also see a drier climate, with less rain.

Across most of the rest of the World, it wouldn’t be too bad, slightly cooler temperatures, but that might be a benefit in some regions. Our biggest issue would be food production, as with global warming, we have concerns about feeding our population, the loss of good growing land in Northern Europe and southern Canada would probably be the biggest loss, we would need to change our diets and it would massively impact on the way the world views food and economy, I would guess.

I reckon we would survive, but it would be very very hard for the first few years to a decade.