Sorry to Ruin the Fun
“I may not have been the greatest president, but I’ve had the most fun eight years.”
– Bill Clinton
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Do you still want to see the cost of fuel go up and up and pay higher & higher taxes year after year so that we can “fight” global warming ??
Are you sure ???
– Smitty, 4-27-08
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Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23583376-5013480,00.html
Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh
Phil Chapman | April 23, 2008
THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.
What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.
Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.
All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.
There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.
It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.
This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.
It didn’t happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.
Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.
That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.
There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.
Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.
There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.
The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.
The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.
The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.
By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.
Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.
If the ice age is coming, there is a small chance that we could prevent or at least delay the transition, if we are prepared to take action soon enough and on a large enough scale.
For example: We could gather all the bulldozers in the world and use them to dirty the snow in Canada and Siberia in the hope of reducing the reflectance so as to absorb more warmth from the sun.
We also may be able to release enormous floods of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) from the hydrates under the Arctic permafrost and on the continental shelves, perhaps using nuclear weapons to destabilise the deposits.
We cannot really know, but my guess is that the odds are at least 50-50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades.
The probability that we are witnessing the onset of a real ice age is much less, perhaps one in 500, but not totally negligible.
All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.
It will be difficult for people to face the truth when their reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming, but the fate of civilisation may be at stake.
In the famous words of Oliver Cromwell, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco. He was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut.
April 27th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
You should at least consider including some facts in your rant. I have read it twice and can find nothing but wishful thinking. An ice age based on a lack of sun spots? Where is there any kind of proven link? The link you want to believe is not generally accepted because the link is based on apparently poor observation of the suns activity centuries ago when sun observations were poor at best.
April 28th, 2008 at 4:26 am
Don’t confuse me with Al Gore, he’s the one who “rants.” The Little Ice Age is a historical “fact” beyond dispute and sunspot observations have been remarkably accurate and detailed since Galileo made them in the early 1600’s (http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/sunspot_drawings.html).
The observation of sunspot activity in the 17th century corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe (INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY 2/7/2008).
Historical observations of sunspot activity by scientists such as Galileo are likely more reliable than the temperature findings reported by numerous faceless, individuals used by advocates of Global Warming.
The fact that “Global Warming” peaked in 1998 and has since leveled off or even partially declined is not “wishful thinking.” The climate is always in flux and humanity has always prospered during warm climes and always suffered during cold ones. So we should all “hope” that that it is global warming, not cooling that is headed our way. But “hoping” will not change anything.
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“Overlooked by Gore, et al, is the fact that epochs with
high-amplitude sunspot cycles coincide with warm climates,
low-amplitude cycles with cold climates. In the 16th century there
were hardly any sunspots (the ‘Maunder Minimum’), perhaps none
at all, heralding the ‘little ice age.’ In the 19th century there
was another relative minimum of sunspot activity, coinciding with
the Irish potato famine caused by miserable summer weather. With
the subsequent increase in sunspot activity, the climate began to
warm. Meanwhile, NASA reports that the south-polar ice cap on Mars
shows signs of shrinking beyond the expected seasonal cycle. We
only have two vehicles up there, and they are not even running on
gasoline. Perhaps the green Martians have hidden all their SUVs
on the other side of that planet. Draw your own conclusions on
global warming!” —Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science,
Austrian Academy of Science (http://archive.patriotpost.us/pub/06-26_Brief/page-4.php)