Our cooling world

jimshort19

Electoral Member
Nov 24, 2007
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Avro, "Old Walt... Nothing but weak munded blather coming from the ole chap.:lol:

It's not nice to lol at old folks Avro. Have you ever seen a 100 year-old man cry? Walter and liberals don't mix. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
 

jimshort19

Electoral Member
Nov 24, 2007
476
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Dark Beaver, as usual your news sources are fantastic! The Tunguska explosion was an alien spaceship! The black death was a biological warhead from nasty space aliens! The Machine, blah, blah, blah...!

Why don't you read the Wall Street Journal? The Fraser Forum? The news of the Machine? You'd feel better. hahahahahaha!
 

Avro

Time Out
Feb 12, 2007
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Dark Beaver, as usual your news sources are fantastic! The Tunguska explosion was an alien spaceship! The black death was a biological warhead from nasty space aliens! The Machine, blah, blah, blah...!

Why don't you read the Wall Street Journal? The Fraser Forum? The news of the Machine? You'd feel better. hahahahahaha!


It appears being alone in the wilderness with no one to talk to other than your mother upstairs makes people go nuts......who knew.:lol:

Dark would be more realistic if he got out more and met some women instead of saturday night with the sheep.
 

Avro

Time Out
Feb 12, 2007
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Avro, "Old Walt... Nothing but weak munded blather coming from the ole chap.:lol:

It's not nice to lol at old folks Avro. Have you ever seen a 100 year-old man cry? Walter and liberals don't mix. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.


I know, I know, can't teach an old dog new tricks, but it sure is fun trying.
 

Walter

Hall of Fame Member
Jan 28, 2007
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Russian scientist says Earth could soon face new Ice Age


14:31|22/ 01/ 2008


ST. PETERSBURG, January 22 (RIA Novosti) - Temperatures on Earth have stabilized in the past decade, and the planet should brace itself for a new Ice Age rather than global warming, a Russian scientist said in an interview with RIA Novosti Tuesday. "Russian and foreign research data confirm that global temperatures in 2007 were practically similar to those in 2006, and, in general, identical to 1998-2006 temperatures, which, basically, means that the Earth passed the peak of global warming in 1998-2005," said Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of a space research lab at the Pulkovo observatory in St. Petersburg.
According to the scientist, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has risen more than 4% in the past decade, but global warming has practically stopped. It confirms the theory of "solar" impact on changes in the Earth's climate, because the amount of solar energy reaching the planet has drastically decreased during the same period, the scientist said.
Had global temperatures directly responded to concentrations of "greenhouse" gases in the atmosphere, they would have risen by at least 0.1 Celsius in the past ten years, however, it never happened, he said.
"A year ago, many meteorologists predicted that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would make the year 2007 the hottest in the last decade, but, fortunately, these predictions did not become reality," Abdusamatov said.
He also said that in 2008, global temperatures would drop slightly, rather than rise, due to unprecedentedly low solar radiation in the past 30 years, and would continue decreasing even if industrial emissions of carbon dioxide reach record levels.
By 2041, solar activity will reach its minimum according to a 200-year cycle, and a deep cooling period will hit the Earth approximately in 2055-2060. It will last for about 45-65 years, the scientist added.
"By the mid-21st century the planet will face another Little Ice Age, similar to the Maunder Minimum, because the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041," he said.
The Maunder Minimum occurred between 1645 and 1715, when only about 50 spots appeared on the Sun, as opposed to the typical 40,000-50,000 spots.
It coincided with the middle and coldest part of the so called Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters.
"However, the thermal inertia of the world's oceans and seas will delay a 'deep cooling' of the planet, and the new Ice Age will begin sometime during 2055-2060, probably lasting for several decades," Abdusamatov said.
Therefore, the Earth must brace itself for a growing ice cap, rather than rising waters in global oceans caused by ice melting.
Mankind will face serious economic, social, and demographic consequences of the coming Ice Age because it will directly affect more than 80% of the earth's population, the scientist concluded.

I find this article incredulous; what would a Russian know about cold weather?
 

Walter

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Jan 28, 2007
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The Sun Also Sets

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al Gore's mythical "consensus." Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.


Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.
To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.
And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.
Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.
Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.
Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.
This solar hibernation 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.
Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.
Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a "stethoscope for the sun." But he and his colleagues need better equipment.
In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun's emissions more rapidly and accurately.
As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth's climate over time has been the sun.
For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.
R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."
Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."
Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."
"Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."
In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming "community" — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by "dramatic changes" in temperatures.
A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.
"The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100," according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.
The study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."
The study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."
But if the sun shuts down, we've got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that's hanging in the balance.

Getting very cold in Ontario this week.
 

Walter

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Jan 28, 2007
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Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age


Global Cooling comes back in a big way
Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago — and it signaled a solar event known as a "Maunder Minimum," along with the start of what we now call the "Little Ice Age."
Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, says it may be happening again. Overseeing a giant radio telescope he calls a "stethoscope for the sun," Tapping says, if the pattern doesn’t change quickly, the earth is in for some very chilly weather.
During the Little Ice Age, global temperatures dropped sharply. New York Harbor froze hard enough to allow people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island, and in Britain, people reported sighting eskimos paddling canoes off the coast. Glaciers in Norway grew up to 100 meters a year, destroying farms and villages.
But will it happen again? (Daily Tech)
 

s243a

Council Member
Mar 9, 2007
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s243a

Council Member
Mar 9, 2007
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Jan08 Northern Hemisphere snow cover: largest anomaly since 1966

9 02 2008
There have been a number of indications that January 2008 has been an exceptional month for winter weather in not only North America, but the entire Northern Hemisphere.
We’ve had anecdotal evidence of odd weather in the form of wire reports from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and China where record setting cold and snow has been felt with intensity not seen for 30-100 years, depending on the region.
From our remote sensing groups, we have reports of significant negative anomalies in both the RSS and UAH global satellite data for the lower troposphere. The there’s NOAA’s announcement that January 2008, was below 20th century averages, plus news that Arctic sea ice has quickly recovered from the record low extent of Summer 2007. Finally, there’s the massive La Nina said to be the driver of all this but may be a harbinger of a more permanent phase shift according to veteran forecaster Joe Bastardi.
Now to add to this, we have images and reports from NOAA and Rutgers University of large anomalies of snow cover extent for the northern hemisphere in January 2008.
First lets start with NOAA’s Snow and Ice chart for January 31st, 2008
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.co...ern-hemisphere-snow-cover-largest-since-1966/

 

Walter

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Walter

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The Coming of a New Ice Age





BY GERALD E. MARSH


CHICAGO — Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the real danger facing humanity is not global warming, but more likely the coming of a new Ice Age.

What we live in now is known as an interglacial, a relatively brief period between long ice ages. Unfortunately for us, most interglacial periods last only about ten thousand years, and that is how long it has been since the last Ice Age ended.

How much longer do we have before the ice begins to spread across the Earth’s surface? Less than a hundred years or several hundred? We simply don’t know.

Even if all the temperature increase over the last century is attributable to human activities, the rise has been relatively modest one of a little over one degree Fahrenheit — an increase well within natural variations over the last few thousand years.

While an enduring temperature rise of the same size over the next century would cause humanity to make some changes, it would undoubtedly be within our ability to adapt.

Entering a new ice age, however, would be catastrophic for the continuation of modern civilization.

One has only to look at maps showing the extent of the great ice sheets during the last Ice Age to understand what a return to ice age conditions would mean. Much of Europe and North-America were covered by thick ice, thousands of feet thick in many areas and the world as a whole was much colder.

The last “little” Ice Age started as early as the 14th century when the Baltic Sea froze over followed by unseasonable cold, storms, and a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea. That was followed by the extinction of the Norse settlements in Greenland and the loss of grain cultivation in Iceland. Harvests were even severely reduced in Scandinavia And this was a mere foreshadowing of the miseries to come.

By the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, wiping out farms and entire villages. In England, the River Thames froze during the winter, and in 1780, New York Harbor froze. Had this continued, history would have been very different. Luckily, the decrease in solar activity that caused the Little Ice Age ended and the result was the continued flowering of modern civilization.
Complete Article: http://www.winningreen.com/site/epage/59549_621.htm
 

Walter

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Jan 28, 2007
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Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Michael Asher (Blog) - February 26, 2008 12:55 PM
Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming


World Temperatures according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop over the last year.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let’s hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans — and most of the crops and animals we depend on — prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.
 

Walter

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Jan 28, 2007
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Famed Hurricane Forecaster William Gray Predicts Global Cooling in 10 Years
Expert states ocean cycles will have a more profound effect on climate than CO2; criticizes James Hansen's climate models.

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
3/4/2008 11:47:32 AM




It turns out Al Gore was wrong. The scientists aren’t all in greement on global warming; thus there is no “consensus.”

Prominent hurricane forecaster Dr. William M. Gray, a professor at Colorado State University, told the audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 4 in New York that a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures related to the salinity (the amount of salt) in ocean water was responsible for some global warming that has taken place. However, he said that same cycle means a period of cooling would begin within 10 years.

“We should begin to see cooling coming on,” Gray said. “I’m willing to make a big financial bet on it. In 10 years, I expect the globe to be somewhat cooler than it is now, because this ocean effect will dominate over the human-induced CO2 effect and I believe the solar effect and the land-use effect. I think this is likely bigger.”

Gray, 79, wasn’t sure if he’d be around to see his prediction come true.

“I may not be around by that time,” Gray said. “But, I’ve asked some of my students to put dandelions on my grave if that happens.”

Gray criticized NASA scientist and global warming alarmist James Hansen, calling him “the most egregious abuser” of data. According to Gray, Hansen’s alarmism is exaggerated because the models he uses to predict the increase in global warming count on too much water vapor in the atmosphere.

o he puts that much vapor in his model and of course he gets this,” Gray said. “He must get upper troposphere where the temperature is seven degrees warmer for a doubl[ing of] CO2. Well, the reason he got that was – why this upper-level warming was there – was he put too much water vapor in the model.”

At the same conference March 3, the founder of The Weather Channel advocated suing carbon traders, including former Vice President Al Gore, to expose what he called “the fraud of global warming.”

 

Walter

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Jan 28, 2007
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Sydney's Coolest Summer in 50 Years Leaves Empty Cafes, Gloom

By Shani Raja and Simeon Bennett



March 5 (Bloomberg) -- Sydney residents and tourists are cursing La Nina as the harbor city says goodbye to the summer that wasn't.
While the La Nina weather pattern is delivering rain to farmers after the worst drought in a century, it's cutting profits for cafe owners, travel agents and insurers. Insurance Australia Group Ltd., the nation's largest home insurer, last week posted a sixth straight profit decline after hail storms cost it A$105 million ($97 million). The yearly `Symphony in the Park,' which usually attracts 80,000 people, had 700 this year as the orchestra played behind a tarpaulin during a downpour.
``Everyone always thinks Australia is the best place for perfect weather, but I'm not sure I'll believe it any more,'' says Minsoo Seo, a 28-year-old marketing executive from Korea's Jeju Island, as he gazes at the waves crashing toward Bondi Beach on Australia's last day of summer. ``The wind's too strong,'' he says after deciding against surfing on a grey, gusty morning.
After four years of water restrictions, Sydney saw about 50 percent more rain than usual this summer, according to Mike De Salis, a spokesman at Australia's Bureau of Meteorology.
No day topped 31 degrees celsius (88 degrees fahrenheit) for the first time since 1956. Average daily sunshine totaled 6.7 hours, an hour less than normal and the lowest since 1991-92. The average maximum temperature was 25.2, the coolest since 1996-97.
``Suddenly we get one cool, wet summer and everyone's complaining,'' said De Salis.
Matthew Hassan, an economist at Westpac Banking Corp., said the soggy summer has weighed on Sydney's $285 billion economy.
``The endless rain is certainly adding to the sense of gloom,'' Hassan said. Employment and housing data show Sydney is already struggling with rising interest rates and gasoline prices.
More Rain
Surfer Seo's contribution to the tourism industry -- and the local economy -- will soon end. Seo is cutting his three-month Sydney stay short by a month because of the rain, which is forecast to remain for at least three months, according to the meteorology bureau.
La Nina, which means ``little girl'' in Spanish, is created by the cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. It's the opposite of El Nino, or ``little boy,'' which can cause drought.
Dam levels rose to 64.4 percent at the end of February from 37.1 percent a year ago. Rain fall reached 439 millimeters this summer, compared with an average of 298 millimeters.
``We're not whinging about the rain,'' said Ben Fargaher, chief executive officer of the National Farmers' Federation in Canberra, Australia's capital city. ``Good living weather is not good farming weather.''
 

Walter

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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.

Complete article: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23583376-7583,00.html
 

darkbeaver

the universe is electric
Jan 26, 2006
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RR1 Distopia 666 Discordia
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/154424-Sorry-to-ruin-the-fun-but-an-ice-age-cometh Comment: Chapman has it only partly right. He excludes the evidence for cometary dust loading that contributed to the last ice age (and most likely previous ones). The increased depositional flux evidenced from Gabrielli's paper shows that it was not the sun alone that caused the last ice age:

©Nature And from Victor Clube's talk:

You first take the modern sky accessible to science, especially during the Space Age, and you look at its' darker debris with a view to relating its behavior to the more accessible human history which we can, in principle, really understand. And by this approach you discover from the dynamics of the material in space which I'm talking about that a huge comet must have settled in a Taurid orbit some 20,000 years ago, whose dense meteor stream for 10,000 years almost certainly produced the last Ice Age.
Now the question must be asked, Is there a relationship between the sun's missing spots and a 100,000 year ice age cycle coupled with cometary debris entering the solar system?
 

Avro

Time Out
Feb 12, 2007
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Oshawa
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.

Complete article: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23583376-7583,00.htmlhttp://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23583376-7583,00.html

We're all gonna die!!!
 

Walter

Hall of Fame Member
Jan 28, 2007
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Warming on 11 year hiatus? How about cooling?

23 06 2008
A guest post by Basil Copeland
Lucia, at rankexploits.com, has been musing over Tilo Reber’s posting of a graph showing flat 11 year trends in the HadCRUT land-ocean global temperature anomaly and the two MSU satellite data sets, UAH and RSS. In answer to the question whether global warming is on an 11 year hiatus, “not quite,” says Lucia. She challenges Tilo’s omission of the GISS data set, because notwithstanding questions about the reliability of GISS, it still shows a positive trend over the 11 year period in question. Unless all the measures show a flat trend, Lucia’s not ready to conclude that global warming has been on an 11 year hiatus.
I understand the desire to look at as many metrics as possible in trying to divine what is going on with globally averaged temperature. I also understand the reasons for questioning the reliability of GISS. What I don’t understand is why the only measure of trend that seems to count is a trend derived from linear regression. William Briggs recently had an interesting post to his blog on the relationship between trends in CO2 and temperature in which he introduced the use of loess lines to track trends that are not represented well by linear regression. Loess refers to a type of locally weighted regression that in effect fits a piecewise linear or quadratic trend through the data, showing how the trend is changing over time. Especially in an environment where the charge of cherry-picking the data — choosing starting and ending points to produce a particular result - is routinely made, loess lines are a relatively robust alternative to simple trend lines from linear regression.

Click for a larger image
Figure 1 fits a loess line through the data for GISS using the same 11 year period used by Tilo Reber (except that I’ve normalized all anomalies in this discussion relative to their 11 year mean to facilitate comparison to a common baseline). The red line is the GISS anomaly for this period, about its mean, and the blue line is the loess line. While it varies up and down over the period in question, I would argue that the overall trend is essentially flat, or even slightly negative: the value of line at the end of the period is slightly lower than at the beginning of the period. What this loess line shows is that a linear regression trend is not a particularly good way to represent the actual trend in the data. Without actually fitting a linear trend line, we can reasonably guess that it will trend upwards, because of the way the loess line is lower in the first half of the period in question, and higher in the second half. Linear regression will fit a positive, but misleading, slope through the data, implying that at the end of the period the GISS is on an upward trend when in fact the trend peaked around 2006 and has since declined.

Click for a larger image

Figure 2 is rainbow of colors comparing all four of the metrics we tend to follow here on WUWT. Not surprisingly, the loess lines of HadCRUT, UAH and RSS all track closely together, while GISS is the odd duck of the lot. So what does this kaleidoscope of colors tell us about whether global warming is has gone on an 11 year hiatus? I think it tells us rather more than even Tilo was claiming. All of the loess lines show a net decline in the trend over the 11 year period in question. It is relatively minor in the case of GISS, but rather pronounced in the case of the other three. Of the other three, the median anomaly at the beginning of the period, as represented by the loess lines, was 0.125; at the end of the period, the median anomaly had dropped to -0.071, for a total decline of 0.196, or almost 0.2C.
Global warming on hiatus? It looks to me like more evidence of global cooling. Will it continue? Neither linear regression nor loess lines can answer that question. But the loess lines certainly warn us to be cautious in naively extrapolating historical trends derived by simple linear regression.
Not even GISS can support the conclusion from the last 11 years of data that global warming continues to march upward in unrelenting fashion.