Our cooling world

Walter

Hall of Fame Member
Jan 28, 2007
34,843
92
48
Prepare for Cooling, not Warming
By Dr. Tim Ball Friday, October 5, 2007


By Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris
The world is cooling. Global temperatures have declined since 1998 and a growing number of climate experts expect this trend to continue until at least 2030. This, happening while carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continue to rise, is in complete contradiction to the theory of human-induced (anthropogenic) global warming (AGW). The CBC and other die-hard AGW proponents respond by publicizing selected glacial melts and the impact of dramatic but improbable sea level rises, the only warming issues that seem to grab public attention.


Climate change campaigners are frightened that, if the lid is lifted off the Pandora’s Box of modern day climate science, the vast uncertainties and contradictions in the field will become apparent and public support for multi-billion dollar climate change schemes will quickly die.”Canadian politicians simply follow along, parroting scientifically unjustified AGW rhetoric while lamenting that “climate change is real!” They either don’t know, or hope the public don’t know, that climate changes all the time no matter what we do.
For most of the world’s plants and animals, humanity included, cooling is a far greater threat than warming. This is especially true for Canada where energy usage, and consequently pollution levels, will rise as temperatures drop. More importantly, if we prepare for warming and it cools, Canada’s food supply is seriously at risk since we are already at the northern limit to agriculture.
Even a small amount of cooling would necessitate increased genetic engineering of crops and animals to sustain ourselves and further cooling still would end much of today’s farming in Canada.
Yet, if we prepare for cooling and it warms, we simply adopt farming practices used to the south of us. It is the case in most parts of the world that adaptation to warming is far easier than adapting to cooling. Canada’s situation is just that much worse due to our latitude.
Despite this very real threat of continued cooling, our leaders still press for developed nations to dramatically curb CO2 emissions to counter possible warming. That the forces driving this backwards policy have little to do with protecting the environment was revealed last week at the UN high level climate summit in New York City. Developed nations were chastised for their emissions record in the opening speech by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon while he had no criticism for developing countries that are responsible for most of the recent growth in worldwide emissions. What is now needed, Ban Ki-moon recommended, is “enhanced leadership by the industrialized countries on emission reductions.” Developing nations are merely to be given “incentives… to act, but without sacrificing economic growth”, he said. China’s foreign minister clearly agreed and advised the forum, “Developed countries should meet their emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol,...and continue to take the lead in reducing emissions after 2012.”
But Canada and other developed nations accepted severe targets in 1997 with the understanding that developing countries would follow after the protocol expires in 2012. Now, this is highly unlikely. The next round of UN negotiations starting in December in Bali, Indonesia will undoubtedly formalize new emission restrictions only for the one fifth of the world’s population who live in the developed world. Is it any wonder Osama Bin Laden promotes a UN climate process that threatens to cripple the West, but no one else?
The UN’s approach to climate hasn’t really been about science or ‘saving the planet’ since their Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988. Its goals were firmly positioned in the political and emotional arena at the Rio Conference in 1992. Canadian politicians assume the public overwhelming accepts the IPCC’s AGW claims even though polls show this is increasingly not the case. For example, a March 2006 Ipsos Reid poll revealed that 39% of Canadians believe recent climate change to be natural.
Nevertheless, global warming remains a massive, taxpayer-funded ‘industry’ in Canada. Most of the money goes to institutes, policy centers and government departments that effectively block proper scientific investigation. Scientists who study the impact of hypothetical warming are given significant support even though their research is based on the faulty assumption that AGW is proven. In a frightening circular argument their research is then listed as ‘proof’ of the hypothesis. Dissenting science is also excluded from government hearings, the most recent being the Commons committee hearings into the Kyoto Implementation Bill and the Clean Air Act where only AGW-supporting scientists were permitted to testify.
In the late 1980s, the Mulroney government ignored scientists’ advice that fishing quotas should be drastically cut and so implemented policies that led to the depletion of the cod stock with the resultant loss of 40,000 jobs in Newfoundland’s fishing industry. Will today’s Conservative government ignore scientists again and implement unfounded policies that lead to the destruction of Canadian agriculture?
In 2006, sixty-one climate experts asked Prime Minister Harper to order open, unbiased climate science hearings, something that has never happened in Canada. Like Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, Harper ignored their request. He must no longer. It is time to finally lift the lid off the Pandora’s Box of modern day climate science and let the public hear what scientists are really concluding about this complex and immature discipline. With billions of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake, not to mention the future of our food supply, there is no other ethical choice.
 

Walter

Hall of Fame Member
Jan 28, 2007
34,843
92
48
There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998


By Bob Carter

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/04/2006

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.
advertisement

Does something not strike you as odd here? That industrial carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of earth's recent decadal-scale temperature changes doesn't seem at all odd to many thousands of independent scientists. They have long appreciated - ever since the early 1990s, when the global warming bandwagon first started to roll behind the gravy train of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - that such short-term climate fluctuations are chiefly of natural origin. Yet the public appears to be largely convinced otherwise. How is this possible?
Since the early 1990s, the columns of many leading newspapers and magazines, worldwide, have carried an increasing stream of alarmist letters and articles on hypothetical, human-caused climate change. Each such alarmist article is larded with words such as "if", "might", "could", "probably", "perhaps", "expected", "projected" or "modelled" - and many involve such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific facts and principles, that they are akin to nonsense.
The problem here is not that of climate change per se, but rather that of the sophisticated scientific brainwashing that has been inflicted on the public, bureaucrats and politicians alike. Governments generally choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself. No matter how accurate it may be, cautious and politically non-correct science advice is not welcomed in Westminster, and nor is it widely reported.
Marketed under the imprimatur of the IPCC, the bladder-trembling and now infamous hockey-stick diagram that shows accelerating warming during the 20th century - a statistical construct by scientist Michael Mann and co-workers from mostly tree ring records - has been a seminal image of the climate scaremongering campaign. Thanks to the work of a Canadian statistician, Stephen McIntyre, and others, this graph is now known to be deeply flawed.
There are other reasons, too, why the public hears so little in detail from those scientists who approach climate change issues rationally, the so-called climate sceptics. Most are to do with intimidation against speaking out, which operates intensely on several parallel fronts.

Full text:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/...0907.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html
 

Niflmir

A modern nomad
Dec 18, 2006
3,460
58
48
Leiden, the Netherlands
States without evidence that the world is cooling, contrary to the best data available, for example.

What then follows is a continuation of such dishonesty: conflation of climate change, suggests we lead by following, bad analogy to Mulroney and the fisheries, misunderstanding about how physicists study. Its really a trashy journalistic rant full of negative rhetoric, and nothing more.
 
Last edited:

Tonington

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 27, 2006
15,441
150
63
Dr. Timothy Ball has lead some serious hackney approaches. National Resources Stewardship Project and Friends of Science, both prime examples of astroturfing.
 

Niflmir

A modern nomad
Dec 18, 2006
3,460
58
48
Leiden, the Netherlands
drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

In direct contradiction to what the University researchers are saying.

Here is what the scientists support, as opposed to what some dishonest journalist is saying,

'Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.'

'Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations12. This is an advance since the TAR's conclusion that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations". Discernible human influences now extend to other aspects of climate, including ocean warming, continental-average temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns'

where you should understand likely in the Bayesian sense. Emphasis theirs.
 

Dexter Sinister

Unspecified Specialist
Oct 1, 2004
10,168
536
113
Regina, SK
This thread is really about what's been called the pseudo symmetry of scientific authority. The scientific consensus is that the climate is warming, it has been for about 15,000 years since the Pleistocene glaciation ended, and the best available evidence suggests human activities are contributing to it, though the precise nature and degree of that contribution remains problematic. These things happen over very long time scales, data from 1998 to today suggesting a cooling are on too short a time scale to draw any useful conclusions from, assuming they're correct in the first place.
 

Pangloss

Council Member
Mar 16, 2007
1,535
41
48
Calgary, Alberta
What about fluctuating solar output? I've read a little and it sounds interesting: if the argument is correct, a more radiant sun would overwhelm and earth based influences and heat everything up, no matter how many or few cows were belching.

I've only read one paper on this, and that means so far I know nothing. Anyone here got anything?

Pangloss
 

Tonington

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 27, 2006
15,441
150
63
It's always amusing to me Pangloss. In one instance, the climate deniers/delayers will trumpet things like this cooling story. Then in other instances, they will say, hey, the warming is all from the sun. Not contradictory in their skepticism at all....

The fact is that, the output from the sun has not correlated to the rise we've seen in temperature. The graph fits nicely right up until about 30 years ago, then the correlation is lost.

The Danes are famous for this. Svensmark, Friis-Christensen may be the recent paper you came across. The fellas at RealClimate break it down nicely here.
 

#juan

Hall of Fame Member
Aug 30, 2005
18,326
119
63
It's always amusing to me Pangloss. In one instance, the climate deniers/delayers will trumpet things like this cooling story. Then in other instances, they will say, hey, the warming is all from the sun. Not contradictory in their skepticism at all....

The fact is that, the output from the sun has not correlated to the rise we've seen in temperature. The graph fits nicely right up until about 30 years ago, then the correlation is lost.

The Danes are famous for this. Svensmark, Friis-Christensen may be the recent paper you came across. The fellas at RealClimate break it down nicely here.

Another thing we've seen often is people confusing weather with climate. We can have a spot of cool weather in a warming climate.
 

Niflmir

A modern nomad
Dec 18, 2006
3,460
58
48
Leiden, the Netherlands
This thread is really about what's been called the pseudo symmetry of scientific authority. The scientific consensus is that the climate is warming, it has been for about 15,000 years since the Pleistocene glaciation ended, and the best available evidence suggests human activities are contributing to it, though the precise nature and degree of that contribution remains problematic. These things happen over very long time scales, data from 1998 to today suggesting a cooling are on too short a time scale to draw any useful conclusions from, assuming they're correct in the first place.

Interesting link. I am glad I finally have a name to put on that phenomenon.
 

Pangloss

Council Member
Mar 16, 2007
1,535
41
48
Calgary, Alberta
Thanks Tonington - and yeah, I think that is the guy.

Regardless of temperature change, we are pumping an awful lot of crap into the atmosphere and doing stupid things like acidifying our oceans. Why there is ideology involved in not pooping where we eat befuddles me.

Pangloss
 

Locutus

Adorable Deplorable
Jun 18, 2007
32,230
45
48
65
Thanks Tonington - and yeah, I think that is the guy.

Regardless of temperature change, we are pumping an awful lot of crap into the atmosphere and doing stupid things like acidifying our oceans. Why there is ideology involved in not pooping where we eat befuddles me.

Pangloss

Exactly. Land, sea, air and space. Now if we could focus on that as a species for a change, we'd eliminate ourselves a lot slower. Mother earth is very very patient. She will outlast us our evolution.
 

Walter

Hall of Fame Member
Jan 28, 2007
34,843
92
48
Without sunspots it's going to get pretty cold around here. Better start burning more tires.

Bloomfield man concerned about the sun's future

Monday, November 12, 2007

To the Editor:
Each morning I turn on my computer and check to see how the sun is doing. Lately I am greeted with the message "The sun is blank - no sunspots."
We are at the verge of the next sunspot cycle, solar cycle 24. How intense will this cycle be? Why is this question important? Because the sun is a major force controlling natural climate change on Earth.
Our Milky Way galaxy is awash with cosmic rays. These are high speed charged particles that originate from exploding stars. Because they are charged, their travel is strongly influenced by magnetic fields. Our sun produces a magnetic field that extends to the edges of our solar system. This field deflects many of the cosmic rays away from Earth. But when the sun goes quiet (minimal sunspots), this field collapses inward allowing cosmic rays to penetrate deeper into our solar system. As a result, far greater numbers collide with Earth and penetrate down into the lower atmosphere where they ionize small particles of moisture (humidity) forming them into water droplets that become clouds. Low level clouds reflect sunlight back into space. A large increase in Earth's cloud cover produce a global drop in temperature.
Some scientist feel they have developed sufficient understanding to predict the intensity of future sunspot cycles. A Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel was hosted on 25 April 2007 with officials from NOAA, NASA, ISES and other agencies. They issued a consensus statement which came to the conclusion that the next solar cycle could be severe, peaking at around 140 International Sunspot Numbers (Ri) or moderate, at around 90 Ri. But a few scientist disagree. A number of well regarded solar physicists are predicting the next solar cycle will be far weaker than the last one.
A paper by David C. Archibald published in Energy and Environment in 2006 forecasted a low intensity solar cycle with a peak Ri of approximately 50. A few scientist have even claimed that we might be headed into another Solar Minimum. For the past few months, the actual sunspot numbers have been below NOAA's lower predicted threshold, approaching zero.
One of the last Solar Minimums was the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715 AD). During the 30-year period from 1672-1699 AD, there were less than 50 sunspots detected, whereas during the past century over the same period between 40,000-50,000 sunspots appeared. The Maunder Minimum corresponded to the depths of the Little Ice Age.
It wasn't too far back in time when the Mississippi River froze solid above Saint Louis. This permitted wagon trains to cross in the winter and continue their journey west. You can still observe old two story houses in Wisconsin where second floor doors open out into nothingness. This allowed the inhabitants a method for exiting their homes in the middle of winter when snow depths reached 8-feet and above.
So each morning, I get up and turn on my computer to see how the sun is doing. And I wonder!
James A. Marusek Bloomfield
 

Unforgiven

Force majeure
May 28, 2007
6,770
137
63
Thanks Tonington - and yeah, I think that is the guy.

Regardless of temperature change, we are pumping an awful lot of crap into the atmosphere and doing stupid things like acidifying our oceans. Why there is ideology involved in not pooping where we eat befuddles me.

Pangloss

I found this place mentioned in the paper, and it looks interesting on first browse.
I haven't really looked deeply into it yet, not really know the affiliations it has that speaks to it's credibility. But I must say that the concept I find intriguing.

http://carma.org/?hpid=topnews
 

Tonington

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 27, 2006
15,441
150
63
Some scientist feel they have developed sufficient understanding to predict the intensity of future sunspot cycles. A Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel was hosted on 25 April 2007 with officials from NOAA, NASA, ISES and other agencies. They issued a consensus statement which came to the conclusion that the next solar cycle could be severe, peaking at around 140 International Sunspot Numbers (Ri) or moderate, at around 90 Ri. But a few scientist disagree. A number of well regarded solar physicists are predicting the next solar cycle will be far weaker than the last one.

Oh my. The actual consensus statement said that the next cycle was impossible to predict accurately. What it actually said was this:
The Solar Cycle 24 Prediction Panel anticipates the solar minimum marking the onset of Cycle 24 will occur in March, 2008 (±6 months). The panel reached this conclusion due to the absence of expected signatures of minimum-like conditions on the Sun at the time of the panel meeting in March, 2007: there have been no high-latitude sunspots observed with the expected Cycle 24 polarity; the configuration of the large scale white-light corona has not yet relaxed to a simple dipole; the heliospheric current sheet has not yet flattened; and activity measures, such as cosmic ray flux, radio flux, and sunspot number, have not yet reached typical solar minimum values.
In light of the expected long interval until the onset of Cycle 24, the Prediction Panel has been unable to resolve a sufficient number of questions to reach a single, consensus prediction for the amplitude of the cycle. The deliberations of the panel supported two possible peak amplitudes for the smoothed International Sunspot Number (Ri): Ri = 140 ±20 and Ri = 90 ±10. Important questions to be resolved in the year following solar minimum will lead to a consensus decision by the panel.
The panel agrees solar maximum will occur near October, 2011 for the large cycle (Ri=140) case and August, 2012 for the small cycle (Ri=90) prediction.

Then they talk of the Maunder Minimum. Theres no conclusive evidence to suggest that that is where we are heading, but even if we do experience a similar period, the forcing events will only reduce the net positive forcing that currently exists.

The difference in solar radiative forcing between Maunder Minimum levels and current solar activity is estimated between 0.17 W/m2 to 0.23 W/m2 .

The radiative forcing of CO2 since pre-industrial times of anthropogenic emissions is 1.66 W/m2 , far outstripping solar influence
 

Walter

Hall of Fame Member
Jan 28, 2007
34,843
92
48
A cold spell soon to replace global warming


13:54|03/ 01/ 2008


MOSCOW. (Oleg Sorokhtin for RIA Novosti) – Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.
Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.
The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.
Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.
This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.
It determines decisions and instruments of major international organizations—in particular, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signed by 150 countries, it exemplifies the impact of scientific delusion on big politics and economics. The authors and enthusiasts of the Kyoto Protocol based their assumptions on an erroneous idea. As a result, developed countries waste huge amounts of money to fight industrial pollution of the atmosphere. What if it is a Don Quixote’s duel with the windmill?
Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt. The classic hothouse effect scenario is too simple to be true. As things really are, much more sophisticated processes are on in the atmosphere, especially in its dense layer. For instance, heat is not so much radiated in space as carried by air currents—an entirely different mechanism, which cannot cause global warming.
The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions—a point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.
Temperature fluctuations always run somewhat ahead of carbon dioxide concentration changes. This means that warming is primary. The ocean is the greatest carbon dioxide depository, with concentrations 60-90 times larger than in the atmosphere. When the ocean’s surface warms up, it produces the “champagne effect.” Compare a foamy spurt out of a warm bottle with wine pouring smoothly when served properly cold.
Likewise, warm ocean water exudes greater amounts of carbonic acid, which evaporates to add to industrial pollution—a factor we cannot deny. However, man-caused pollution is negligible here. If industrial pollution with carbon dioxide keeps at its present-day 5-7 billion metric tons a year, it will not change global temperatures up to the year 2100. The change will be too small for humans to feel even if the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions doubles.
Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolution—the phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.
Carbon dioxide has quite a different pernicious influence—not on the climate but on synoptic activity. It absorbs infrared radiation. When tropospheric air is warm enough for complete absorption, radiation energy passes into gas fluctuations. Gas expands and dissolves to send warm air up to the stratosphere, where it clashes with cold currents coming down. With no noticeable temperature changes, synoptic activity skyrockets to whip up cyclones and anticyclones. Hence we get hurricanes, storms, tornados and other natural disasters, whose intensity largely depends on carbon dioxide concentration. In this sense, reducing its concentration in the air will have a positive effect.
Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man’s influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.

Earth is unlikely to ever face a temperature disaster. Of all the planets in the solar system, only Earth has an atmosphere beneficial to life. There are many factors that account for development of life on Earth: Sun is a calm star, Earth is located an optimum distance from it, it has the Moon as a massive satellite, and many others. Earth owes its friendly climate also to dynamic feedback between biotic and atmospheric evolution.
The principal among those diverse links is Earth’s reflective power, which regulates its temperature. A warm period, as the present, increases oceanic evaporation to produce a great amount of clouds, which filter solar radiation and so bring heat down. Things take the contrary turn in a cold period.
What can’t be cured must be endured. It is wise to accept the natural course of things. We have no reason to panic about allegations that ice in the Arctic Ocean is thawing rapidly and will soon vanish altogether. As it really is, scientists say the Arctic and Antarctic ice shields are growing. Physical and mathematical calculations predict a new Ice Age. It will come in 100,000 years, at the earliest, and will be much worse than the previous. Europe will be ice-bound, with glaciers reaching south of Moscow.
Meanwhile, Europeans can rest assured. The Gulf Stream will change its course only if some evil magic robs it of power to reach the north—but Mother Nature is unlikely to do that.
Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, is staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute.