This delight leads to tragedy (see: the
predictable holiday on the beach scene, where Annie cavorts without properly
warm clothing, apparently leading to her illness, a scene that is collapsed into parents» feelings of overwhelming guilt), a logic that is profoundly emotional, and hard to reconcile with religious faith (Innes offers up the explanation that «God works
in mysterious
ways»).
As astronomical cycles they are
predictable into the future and will cause another ice age probably
in around 50,000 years (that depends on where the threshold for glaciation is, and what future CO2 levels will be at that time), but there is no
way the Milankovich cycles could explain the current global
warming.