Claim: The earth is 15 years from a “mini ice-age” that will cause bitterly cold winters during which rivers such as the Thames freeze over, scientists have predicted.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: Canals and rivers in Great Britain and the Netherlands were frequently frozen deeply enough to support ice skating and winter festivals.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: During a series of cold winters the Thames froze over above London Bridge: in the first Frost Fair in 1607, a tent city was set up on the river, along with a number of amusements, including ice bowling.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: After temperatures began to rise again, starting in 1814, the river stopped freezing over.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: In the UK, snow drifts remained on hills until late July, and the Thames froze in September.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: The Thames remained frozen over for about 8 weeks.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: [citation needed] The amount of heat trapping gases emitted into Earth's Oceans and atmosphere will prevent the next ice age, which otherwise would begin in around 50,000 years, and likely more glacial cycles.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: The cryosphere (from the Greek "kryos", "cold", "frost" or "ice" and "sphaira", "globe, ball") is an all-encompassing term for those portions of Earth's surface where water is in solid form, including sea ice, lake ice, river ice, snow cover, glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, and frozen ground (which includes permafrost).

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: Thus current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this interval, and the conventional terms of "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period" appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries.... [Viewed] hemispherically, the "Little Ice Age" can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C relative to late twentieth century levels.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: There are also longer-term cycles, the mini ice-age that preceded the medieval warm period may have been a transition to an ice age, the last ice-age lasted from ~130,000 years ago until the onset of the Holocene.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: The current geological period, the Quaternary, which began about 2.6 million years ago and extends into the present, is marked by warm and cold episodes, cold phases called glacials (Quaternary ice age) lasting about 100,000 years, and which are then interrupted by the warmer interglacials which lasted about 10,000–15,000 years.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: According to a UN climate report, the Himalayan glaciers that are the sources of Asia's biggest rivers – Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Yellow – could disappear by 2035 as temperatures rise.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: In the history of the Earth, many ice ages are known to have occurred.