New ice age? Don't count on it

Source

This is a particularly good article for those of us who watch closely how the news of the dynamic and chaotic environmental changes manifesting themselves around us is delivered.

While not the exact reason I chose to share my comments here, the general sense of the article is here....

f you believe the world's newspapers today, the sun is about to send Earth into another "Little Ice Age", cooling the planet and reprieving us from global warming.

Don't believe the world's newspapers.

The reality is that, while the sun may well be about to give us a shove in the direction of cool temperatures, the evidence suggests it won't be anything like enough to drown out the warming effects of our greenhouse gas emissions.

Whether the specifics are true is the source of a number of frustrations to some; and even some conspiracy theories to others.... but this much seems undeniably true

It's beyond doubt that the sun has been acting rather oddly over the last few years. Ordinarily, its activity varies over about 11 years, but since 2007 it seems to have stalled.

This is bared out in a number observations, but to make it a bit more digestible consider this:

.... But for the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged for nearly a hundred years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise. "This is solar behaviour we haven't seen in living memory," says David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama......

....What's special about this latest dip is that the sun is having trouble starting the next solar cycle. The sun began to calm down in late 2007, so no one expected many sunspots in 2008. But computer models predicted that when the spots did return, they would do so in force. Hathaway was reported as thinking the next solar cycle would be a "doozy": more sunspots, more solar storms and more energy blasted into space. Others predicted that it would be the most active solar cycle on record. The trouble was, no one told the sun. .....

... When Hathaway's team looked over the observations to find out where their models had gone wrong, they noticed that the conveyor-belt flows of gas across the sun's surface have been speeding up since 2004.

The circulation deep within the sun tells a different story. Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, have used observations of surface disturbances, caused by the solar equivalent of seismic waves, to infer what conditions are like within the sun. Analysing data from 2009, they found that while the surface flows had sped up, the internal ones had slowed to a crawl.....

Source: What's wrong with the Sun?

Based on the understanding of solar activity, we appear to be headed for a long-lasting lull... a solar minimum which may have an impact on the earth which we, generally speaking, have not been preparing for...

While the article author disagrees, for the record The Global Warming Policy Foundation issues a statement in which they offer the following assessment:

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.

Source: GWPF - Earth may be headed towards an ice age within a decade

And here is where my interest was peaked... the author points out that immediately after the GWPF announcement...the MSM responded by showing how much press the announcement got....

Telegraph: 10 reasons to be cheerful about the coming new Ice Age
Fox News: Global Warming Be Damned, We Might Be Headed for a Mini Ice Age
S ydney Morning Herald: Quiet sun: drop in solar activity may signal second 'Little Ice Age' on Earth
Time: Claim: Sunspots to Disappear, Global Cooling May Ensue

Our author adds something that seemed to be missing in the GWPF assessment....

A) According to the author, our greenhouse gas emissions are set to raise temperatures by 2-4.5 °C by 2100.
B) Last year researchers modelled what would happen to global temperatures if a grand minimum started now and continued until 2100. They found that it would lower temperatures by 0.3 °C at most.
C) in the most optimistic scenario, in which the grand minimum has the biggest effect possible and emissions their smallest, a rise of 2 °C would be reduced to 1.7 °C.

In the author's words:

That isn't a new ice age: it's a slightly less severe heatwave.

For the conspiratorial angle, I wonder if we haven't been trying to geo-engineer our way out of this? Otherwise, in this case, doesn't it seem a little bit lucky that the unexpected solar behavior is coincidentally offsetting our industrial pollution?

reply to post by Maxmars


I was waiting for it. I knew it was coming. The AGW activists had to get ahead of this news somehow. So if it's (according to GWPF) it's going to be a less intence heatwave, does that mean we can stop all these Carbon taxes and call it equal?

I am not one to subscribe to the notion that climatologists are involved in some sort of grand scheme to hoodwink the general public to milk grant money for themselves but they do seem to be an insular lot who march in near lockstep and display a pervasive groupthink.

One of the most revealing Climategate emails was from Kevin Trenberth to Michael Mann regarding the lack of observed warming when their computer models were predicting the exact opposite.

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate

The conclusion that the instrument data MUST be wrong because it doesn’t jive with an unverified un validated computer model smacks of hubris. Typically, SOP is that when a model doesn’t match observations, you question the model first and then investigate the reliability of you instruments.

This kind of groupthink is dangerous for their credibility, more so because they have the ears of many powerful decision makers and the media.

Are we on the cusp of a mini ice age .. I couldn’t tell you, but its apparent that the climatologists cant either despite their emphatic statements to the contrary.

reply to post by Maxmars

The reality is that, while the sun may well be about to give us a shove in the direction of cool temperatures, the evidence suggests it won't be anything like enough to drown out the warming effects of our greenhouse gas emissions.

Let's see...

If there is an active sun and solar flares, our electronics get fried and there is still global warming.

If the sun goes into a minimum and the world cools, there will be no fried electronics but we still get global warming.

Following this predictable line of reasoning, we now know that the sun could wink out altogether but our world would still heat up because of global warming. We can also safely assume that we are now safe from either volcanic or nuclear winters because global warming is going to happen.

Global warming is stronger than the sun, stronger than the universe, stomps Superman into the dirt, wins at poker, cures ingrown toenails and will happen even if God says that it won't.

All bow for the theory of global warming.

"a less intense heat wave" like 1.7 C is such a furnace.

no one knows what the sun is doing, these conditions haven't been seen before. offering a -.3 degree C estimate for the next 100 years is naive.

There is no man made global warming. There is only sun related global climatic change. The Earth is a cool planet, history tells us this, and it merely warms up a little from time to time. Do the research. Don't listen to quacks with junk science.

reply to post by Maxmars

the evidence suggests it won't be anything like enough to drown out the warming effects of our greenhouse gas emissions.

Has Al Gore really convinced everyone?? The greenhouse gases that the "Global Warming" propagandists point to is of course human CO2 production, but it is PROVEN that global temperatures drive CO2 levels, NOT the opposite.



Much more on that than just this..

Either way, this guy's gonna be pissed!
IceAgeNow.com...

The clime is like a living being and we haven’t found all the changes that have happened over time. What happened in the past may not be what happens today. To say we aren’t influencing the clime of the planet is like putting you head in the sand, it would be impossible to not influence the clime just look at some of the city’s, you can’t see more than a few miles because of the pollution. We won’t know what will happen until it does. If we or the sun stops the conveyer belt in the ocean’s currents we will be screwed. It happened in the past and some scientist have speculated that the last ice age could have happen within ten years, with some places in Europe freezing much faster. No matter what you believe I think it would still be a good idea to stop as much pollution as we can, if only for our children. Unless you enjoy breathing in toxins.
An ice age or mini ice age will happen one day unless we became advanced enough to stop it. Of that there is no argument; the planet goes through cycles if we like it or not. The sun will do what it wants’ and we will have to deal with it. I would like to live on a planet where its atmosphere isn’t being used as a garbage dump.

reply to post by Maxmars

The straightforward answer is: not enough. Last year researchers modelled what would happen to global temperatures if a grand minimum started now and continued until 2100. They found that it would lower temperatures by 0.3 °C at most.

That's not enough to compensate for our greenhouse gas emissions, which are set to raise temperatures by 2-4.5 °C by 2100. So in the most optimistic scenario, in which the grand minimum has the biggest effect possible and emissions their smallest, a rise of 2 °C would be reduced to 1.7 °C.

According to science we have been warming since the late 1970s, when it was a bit cooler. Despite the fact that they set the benchmark as that time the current temperature anomaly is only 0.13 deg C (See the widget in the side bar of Watts up with that

As yet there seems to be little evidence of the impending supposed 2 deg C rise by 2100 and if 30 years has only produced 0.13 deg and we ARE headed into a cooler period due to less insolation then how is this going to reach 2 degrees? Even if as this article says it was only a reduction of 0.3 degrees at the current rate that would leave us at the level we are at right now.

Both camps obviously only come out with figures that suit their particular cause. The warmists would say it will get warmer and the cooling effect will be minimal, the 'coolists' would say no it will get much colder and the supposed warming will not compensate.

Frankly I don't believe the article mainly because it is written in a publication with an agenda on the AGW side by a Michael Marshall, an environment reporter. His reason for stating that this will only be a 'slightly cooler heatwave' is a link to this.

Stefan Rahmstorf and Georg Feulner of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany modelled what would happen to temperatures on Earth if a grand minimum started now and lasted until 2100. They found that while temperatures would go down by as much as 0.3 °C, global warming would ...

also in the New Scientist and put out by yet another organisation with an AGW agenda.

They are all scientists and basically as my better half says all men in white coats guessing.

As a final comment it is interesting to note that these men in white coats on the AGW side are beginning to have to admit that the sun may have an effect on the climate - something that was vehemently denied and excluded from their 'models'. Unfortunately Mother Nature does not give a fig about their models which are designed by people with an agenda and fed by people with data with an agenda - no matter which side of the coin.

It is going to get colder. There are many other indicators. Ice age? No not a full blown ice age yet, but a Maunder style Grand Minimum during which what these stupid scientists seem to have forgotten is that for instance the Thames was SO frozen that they could have ox roasts on the ice. That is not an overall drop of 0.3 degrees. It is way more than that.

reply to post by Maxmars


damage limitation .. or balance

like i said in my thread Earth heading for a mini ice age ..( resisting urge to shamelessy plug thread with link :p )

these people make best guesswork on the tiny amount of information avialable.

The sun will do what it wants with us and no amount of pumping stuff into the atmosphere is gonna change that , it would be like trying to transfer one ocean into another using a coffee mug ,, you aint gonna make a dent.

short term maybe .. long term .. hold on for the ride , its not up to us how and when said ride ends

Ironic isn't it what science tries so hard to shun and skepticise (if that's a word lol) Psychics or Neo-Pagans, yet pump billions into trying to forecast tomorrows weather and they can't even do that right with all these "supercomputers" in the world. Its handy then the Scientists use each other in a game of 'tug-of-war' in order to justify the funding as there's never a middle ground of either agreeing that simply we don't know what tomorrow will bring, nevermind next month or even the next 100 years.

Ironic isn't it what science tries so hard to shun and skepticise (if that's a word lol) Psychics or Neo-Pagans, yet pump billions into trying to forecast tomorrows weather and they can't even do that right with all these "supercomputers" in the world. Its handy then the Scientists use each other in a game of 'tug-of-war' in order to justify the funding as there's never a middle ground of either agreeing that simply we don't know what tomorrow will bring, nevermind next month or even the next 100 years.

I did think it was a bit funny that they effectively said " Ohh well, look at that. All our global warming fears seem to have melted away." Pardon the pun

Now this whole ice age fiasco. People can't ever take a bit of good news eh? Unfortunately my knowledge of how the Sun works and being able to understand the data they actually put forth is rather slim.

So for now I'll wait until I have more information that will undoubtedly show up in this thread among others, before I make up my mind about what to believe.

~Keeper

reply to post by Maxmars


My friend the AGW blind believers forget the SEVERAL fiascos that the proponents of the AGW SCAM were caught making...

From the fact that the IPCC, and the scientists proponents of the AGW SCAM lied, and presented FALSE information to PUSH governments to accept their scam, and for global governance to occur, to the fact that the cream of the crop scientists proponents of the AGW SCAM were caught with the hacked emails to the point that at least one of the AGW proponents, Jones even thought about suicide, which he should have done if he really wanted to serve mankind and the Earth.

How easily some people forget these facts which have been posted, and reposted despite the claims from the AGW blind believers that the evidence which shows their idols have been lying, and the AGW scam is based on nothing else but lies really does not matter at all and only their BELIEF matters, according to them of course...

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.
‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.
The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.
Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’
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www.dailymail.co.uk...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there's no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.

Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that "up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state."

But as Jonathan Leake of London's Sunday Times reported last month, those claims were based on a report from the World Wildlife Fund, which in turn had fundamentally misrepresented a study in the journal Nature. The Nature study, Mr. Leake writes, "did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning."

The IPCC has relied on World Wildlife Fund studies regarding the "transformation of natural coastal areas," the "destruction of more mangroves," "glacial lake outbursts causing mudflows and avalanches," changes in the ecosystem of the "Mesoamerican reef," and so on. The Wildlife Fund is a green lobby that believes in global warming, and its "research" reflects its advocacy, not the scientific method.
***
All of this matters because the IPCC has been advertised as the last and definitive word on climate science. Its reports are the basis on which Al Gore, President Obama and others have claimed that climate ruin is inevitable unless the world reorganizes its economies with huge new taxes on carbon. Now we are discovering the U.N. reports are sloppy political documents intended to drive the climate lobbys regulatory agenda.

The lesson of climategate and now the IPCC's shoddy sourcing is that the claims of the global warming lobby need far more rigorous scrutiny.

online.wsj.com...

A BRITISH climate scientist at the centre of a controversy over leaked emails is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in temperature data on which his work was based.

An investigation of more than 2000 emails apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations was seriously flawed.

Climate scientist Phil Jones and a collaborator have been accused of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming.

Dr Jones withheld the information requested under British freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Dr Jones' collaborator, Wei-chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had ''screwed up''.

The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN's embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.

The IPCC has already been criticised for its use of information that had not been rigorously checked - in particular a false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

Of 105 freedom of information requests to the University of East Anglia over the climatic research unit, which Dr Jones led until the end of December, only 10 had been released in full.
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www.theage.com.au...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

The first person to post this story was seattletruth in the BAN forum. Here is a link to his story Link

A BRITISH climate scientist at the centre of a controversy over leaked emails is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in temperature data on which his work was based.

An investigation of more than 2000 emails apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations was seriously flawed.

Climate scientist Phil Jones and a collaborator have been accused of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming.

Dr Jones withheld the information requested under British freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Dr Jones' collaborator, Wei-chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had ''screwed up''.

The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN's embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.

The IPCC has already been criticised for its use of information that had not been rigorously checked - in particular a false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

Of 105 freedom of information requests to the University of East Anglia over the climatic research unit, which Dr Jones led until the end of December, only 10 had been released in full.
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www.theage.com.au...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, served as a UN IPCC lead author in 2001 for the 3rd assessment report and detailed how he personally witnessed UN scientists attempting to distort the science for political purposes.

“I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol,” Christy told CNN on May 2, 2007. – (For more on UN scientists turning on the UN years ago, see Climate Depot’s full report here. )

Christy has since proposed major reforms and changes to the way the UN IPCC report is produced. Christy has rejected the UN approach that produces “a document designed for uniformity and consensus.” Christy presented his views at a UN meeting in 2009. The IPCC needs “an alternative view section written by well-credentialed climate scientists is needed,” Christy said. “If not, why not? What is there to fear? In a scientific area as uncertain as climate, the opinions of all are required,” he added.

‘The reception to my comments was especially cold’

[The following is excerpted from Andrew Revkin's January 26, 2009 New York Times blog Dot Earth. For full article go here.]

Excerpt: Last March, more than 100 past [UN IPCC] lead authors of report chapters met in Hawaii to chart next steps for the panel’s inquiries. One presenter there was John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, who has focused on using satellites to chart global temperatures. He was a lead author of a section of the third climate report, in 2001, but is best known these days as a critic of the more heated warnings that climate is already unraveling under the buildup of heat-trapping gases.
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www.prisonplanet.com... ve-to-sign-kyoto-protocol.html

Here are the statements by Dr. John Christy who happens to be a Climatologist and was trying to warn people years ago as to what he wtinessed the IPCC policy makers" wanted to do to coerce all nations into accepting the Kyoto Protocol.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

About one-half of Blunder is a non-technical description of our new peer reviewed and soon-to-be-published research which supports the opinion that a majority of Americans already hold: that warming in recent decades is mostly due to a natural cycle in the climate system — not to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning.

Believe it or not, this potential natural explanation for recent warming has never been seriously researched by climate scientists. The main reason they have ignored this possibility is that they cannot think of what might have caused it.

You see, climate researchers are rather myopic. They think that the only way for global-average temperatures to change is for the climate system to be forced ‘externally’…by a change in the output of the sun, or by a large volcanic eruption. These are events which occur external to the normal, internal operation of the climate system.

But what they have ignored is the potential for the climate system to cause its own climate change. Climate change is simply what the system does, owing to its complex, dynamic, chaotic internal behavior.

As I travel around the country, I find that the public instinctively understands the possibility that there are natural climate cycles. Unfortunately, it is the climate “experts” who have difficulty grasping the concept. This is why I am taking my case to the public in this book. The climate research community long ago took the wrong fork in the road, and I am afraid that it might be too late for them to turn back.

NATURE’S SUNSHADE: CLOUDS
The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.
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www.drroyspencer.com...

Dr. Roy Spencer has a PhD in Atmospheric science, which means he is a climatologist

www.abovetopsecret.com...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by Maxmars


For the conspiratorial angle, I wonder if we haven't been trying to geo-engineer our way out of this? Otherwise, in this case, doesn't it seem a little bit lucky that the unexpected solar behavior is coincidentally offsetting our industrial pollution?

Interesting take on the matter, yes ....or are we confused by the geo-engineering process underway?
*ducks and runs from the room*

p.s. s&f