Tag Archives: global cooling

If the planet’s warming, why is it getting colder?

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There’s more to global temperatures than atmospheric carbon. An interesting story today on January in November: Arctic blast to hit USA. It’s been a pretty miserable spring in these here parts as well, but this is the US in late autumn:

Snow will accompany the frigid air in areas including the northern Rockies, northern Plains and upper Midwest. Milwaukee and Grand Rapids, Mich., could be the cities that see the most snow, the Weather Channel predicts.

“It looks like winter’s starting early,” Oravec said.

The Plains, western Great Lakes and Upper and mid-Mississippi Valleys will see high temperatures 10 to 30 degrees below average by Monday and Tuesday, the Weather Channel predicts.

Cities such as Minneapolis, Chicago and St. Louis will endure the worst cold as high temperatures reach only the 30s, said Alex Sosnowski, AccuWeather meteorologist.

Highs may struggle to top the freezing mark in the Twin Cities for several days, and strong winds will add to the wintry feel.

Though the heart of the cold air will be anchored over the northern Plains and Midwest, by late in the week, some of the chilly air will reach the East Coast and South, though it will be lessened by that time.

It’s just the weather, of course, but eventually the weather is the climate. No one can know what the weather will be like over the next decade but why leave global cooling out of your range of possibilities? As I discussed here, if the planet is warming, it will be a minor problem. If it is is cooling, it will be a catastrophe.

How to stop greenies in their tracks

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I went to hear a quite entertaining presentation by the former comedian, Rod Quantock today, speaking on global warming. Well, we are all doomed and he has a pitch that is well honed and nicely presented. And myself now being ready to believe that we are past peak oil and may well be heading into very rocky terrain no matter whether the planet is warming, cooling or doing nothing at all, I asked what he thinks we should do. So he said, as a joke I suppose, that what we should be doing is starting twenty years ago. Since in his view we are anyway locked into massive heating with water and oil running out in the reasonably near future, and since there is nothing that can now be done about it, I cannot see why he believes it’s his duty to go around terrifying young children about a world with no Tim Tams (well I guess it’s a living). I am a bit on the aged side so most of this when it happens will be well past my bedtime (and his as well since we were born in the same year, apparently), so I might as well keep flying and enjoying life, along with Al Gore and the American President. No self restraint of mine today will make the slightest difference so why bother trying?

Yet in the conversations afterwards although not with him, I trotted out my global cooling story which really is a great pleasure for me in such moments. Because if you really do think we are at peak oil, and who is to say we are not, and we don’t switch pronto to some form of nuclear power, there is no story so pessimistic that it may not fit the facts of the world as it will unfold if oil really does become scarce. I don’t know and you don’t know what is happening. But David Archibald, who teaches strategic energy policy in Washington, wrote this in his Twilight of Abundance:

The logistic decline plot of world oil production shows that the year of peak output arrived in 2005. The oil market began tightening slightly earlier, in June 2004. The oil price today is three times what it was in that year, but oil output has not increased in response to that price signal. The reason it has not is because it cannot. Almost all of the world’s oilfields are producing as fast as their owners can make them. There is only a little spare capacity on the planet. Global production of conventional oil has been flat since 2005. The logistic decline plot tells us that the world’s supply of conventional oil will fall away soon, and rapidly.

There are seven billion on the planet. If we run out of oil without a cheap replacement a very large number of us will not survive into old age. We have the technology to build safe nuclear power but those, too, are off every green agenda. So just for fun, next time you are in such a conversation, do what I did:

Agree that we are running out of oil, in fact insist on it

Point out there are no cheap substitutes for oil

Say you think hundreds of millions if not more may die and relatively soon if some cheap source of energy is not found

Point out that neither wind nor solar are cheap and reliable and cannot be used as a replacement

Ask what should we do?

You will by doing this outdo any green-leftist on the planet with your pessimism. You will leave them as the optimists in the room and you as the only stone cold sober realist. The only problem then comes when you start to wonder yourself whether you might in fact be right. Because what if you are?

More evidence the planet is cooling

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lowmax_sep_11_sep_20_2014

Sure the planet is warming. Look at all the evidence: NOAA: 1695 Low Max Records Broken or Tied From Sept 11 to Sept 20. One record broken by 25F. I wrote my article on Global Cooling because the evidence that the planet is cooling and not heating is becoming more abundant. This is from the link:

1695 Low Max Records Broken or Tied From Sept 11 to Sept 20 according to the NOAA.

A “Low Max” means that the maximum temperatures for the day was the lowest it has ever been. This indicates daytime cooling.

Above is a screenshot showing location and the biggest difference between old record and new record.

The list is just the ones I could capture in a screenshot.

The ice age cometh

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ice age

The stupidity of policies to counter global warming may yet turn out to be one of the most lethal set of policies ever devised by the human race. We found ourselves able after a million years of primitive existence to harness various forms of energy to keep us warm, power our businesses, cook our food and transport us from place to place. For this, we have been using various forms of carbon-based fossil fuels that, because they have defied the leftist fools who predicted capitalist misery, have decided to bring on this misery on their own. They are despicable in their worm-eaten destructive impulse. But in this particular episode, may yet contribute to a catastrophic future of such immense misfortune, that there are no words to describe how misbegotten their effects will be.

Maurice Newman has a review of David Archibald’s The Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short in today’s Australian, a book that I have a much longer review of coming out in the September Quadrant. But Newman, whose piece begins by asking What if David Archibald is Right?, spells out what ought to be part of our communal conversation.

Russian scientists at the Pulkovo Observatory are convinced the world is in for a cooling period that will last for 200-250 years. Respected Norwegian solar physicist Pal Brekke warns temperatures may actually fall for the next 50 years. Leading British climate scientist Mike Lockwood, of Reading University, found 24 occasions in the past 10,000 years when the sun was declining as it is now, but could find none where the decline was as fast. He says a return of the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830), which included “the year without summer”, is “more likely than not”. In their book The Neglected Sun, Sebastian Luning and Fritz Varen­holt think that temperatures could be two-tenths of a degree Celsius cooler by 2030 because of a predicted anaemic sun. They say it would mean “warming getting postponed far into the future”.

What worries me even in this review is that it merely suggests that AGW may be wrong. It doesn’t set out what happens if there is an actual global cooling. The effects, if Archibald is anywhere near right, are the deaths of tens of millions of people in a world that can no longer feed, clothe and house its population where energy supplies are lower while growing seasons are cut short. If you think it’s science fiction, the Great Plague wiped out between one-third and half of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century. This is a future we can actually prepare for if we start thinking that we might have to. In the meantime, we are savaging our energy industries and raising the cost of all forms of production, including farm production. Human stupidity knows no upper bounds. If this is yet another instance, well that’s how it will be. But we have been warned, and if you are still of a mind to side with the likes of Obama and Julia Gillard, you may yourself be complicit in one of the greatest crimes in human history.

And what if the planet is cooling?

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There is so much evidence of global cooling at the moment so that given the preoccupation with AGW, the consequences could be more catastrophic than anything anyone is remotely contemplating precisely because no one is thinking about this at all. Here’s how the article starts:

We may be witnessing the sun’s last dying gasps before entering into a long slumber. The impact of that slumber on Earth’s climate remains the subject of growing scientific speculation.

In 2008 William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, in a controversial paper that contradicted conventional wisdom and upset global warming theorists, predicted that sunspots could more or less disappear after 2015, possibly indicating the onset of another Little Ice Age. They stated, “The occurrence of prolonged periods with no sunspots is important to climate studies, since the Maunder Minimum was shown to correspond with the reduced average global temperatures on the Earth.” The Maunder Minimum lasted for approximately 70 years from about 1645 to 1715, and was marked by bitter cold, widespread crop failures, and severe human privation.

And this is how the article ends:

The upshot for scientists and world leaders should be clear, particularly since other scientists in recent years have published analyses that also indicate that global cooling could be on its way. Climate can and does change toward colder periods as well as warmer ones. Over the last 20 years, some $80 billion has been spent on research dominated by the assumption that global temperatures will rise. Very little research has investigated the consequences of the very live possibility that temperatures will plummet. Research into global cooling and its implications for the globe is long overdue.

Make hay while the sun shines is a concept a bit out of fashion. But there may come a time not that far off that we will deeply regret our attempts to keep the planet from warming by killing off our carbon-based energy production. If the planet is about to cool we will find what “severe human privation” really means in practice.

The science is unsettled

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What do you make of this?

Scientists are now beginning to rethink their climate change models and are seriously discussing the possibility the earth is entering into a period of global cooling.

Environmentalist Lawrence Solomon writing in the Financial Post cites the fact that solar activity is currently decreasing at one of the fastest rates as anytime the last 10,000 years. Because of this, he says many scientists are actually reverting from the mantra of global warming and are now subscribing to the possibility of global cooling as occurring.

When the shift finally comes from global warming to global cooling, the important thing will be to ensure that the anti-free-market types are prevented from using falling temperatures to attack the capitalist system. That’s all they were interested in anyway. Anyone who had publicly worried about global warming without a degree in climate science should be prohibited from commenting on any area of public policy for the next ten years.

[Via Instapundit]