kallahar writes The next ice age could come about in as little as a decade, reports Dr. Robert B. Gagosian, President and Director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "These warm-to-cold transitions happen in about 3 to 10 years. The cold periods lasted for 500 to 1,000 years. Such oscillations in temperature and ocean circulation have occurred on a regular basis." "The 16th-century Flemish artist Bruegel couldn’t have painted his famous frozen landscapes today, because now canals in the Netherlands rarely freeze, as they regularly did back then. And likewise, the winter in Valley Forge might not have been so cold, and Washington’s crossing of the ice-bound Delaware River wouldn’t have been so dramatic, if he had done it a century later—because our climate conditions have shifted since then, and today, the Delaware River rarely freezes."