If you read a single story about 'global warming' (or lack thereof) this month,
please read this one. Some highlights:
He [Dr. Nicola Scarfetta] believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand.
‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’.
She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
‘They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,’ said Prof Curry. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific cycle ‘flipped’ back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years .
Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997.
The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.
‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’
I've always been skeptical that CO2 is the driving force in climate as claimed by Al Gore and the IPCC. But, to me, here is the bigger concern:
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Solar cycle 24 is expected to have lower than average energetics.
Cycle 25, in the words of one astronomer, is "off the charts low."
I've circled the two cycles in question. |
There is no question there is a growing number of astronomers (including some at NASA) who believe the current and predicted drop off (to record low levels) of solar activity is a sign of danger. The Little Ice Age is believed by many to have been triggered by the low solar activity of the Maunder and Dalton Minima. The predicted Cycle 25 would be even lower than during those two periods.
Will this occur? No one knows. We have been (foolishly in my view) focusing our climate research almost exclusively on CO2 rather than solar effects. The irony, of course, is that if the sun were to cause a great cooling,
the added CO2 in the atmosphere would, at least to an extent, mitigate the cooling!
If I were a policymaker, I would be spending diverting resources to research to learn to grow high-yield crops with shorter growing seasons plus other measures that could mitigate the effects of a colder world. Otherwise, we may face the starvation that occurred in the late 1960's and 70's, the last time earth's temperature cooled. Only today, the world has more mouths to feed than it did 40 years ago. A significantly cooler climate, without mitigation, is a catastrophe waiting to occur.
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| Hadley Center earth temperature data since 1850. |
The cooling period (circled) was when
The Population Bomb and
Famine 1975! were written. The impetus was the millions who starved (remember Biafra, for example?) and the crop failures in Russia, Ethiopia, and Egypt.
So far, the U.S. has spent more than $80,000,000,000 (and counting) on global warming research. It is long past time to take some of this money and put it into researching and possibly mitigating what could be a far bigger problem: global cooling.
We don't have a cooling -- or warming -- crisis at present. Am I predicting cooling? Actually,
no. I do not believe we know enough to make that prediction.
But, with world temperatures flat to cooling for well into a second decade and with the improved confidence in predictions of low solar activity, I urge the U.S. to start diverting funds earmarked for warming research into urgent research for mitigating cooling -- should it occur.
We can't breed hardier crops overnight. The time to start on this is now.
