Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Global Cooling



Alan Caruba's column in American Daily Sunday discussed the global climate.

There’s a wonderful irony in the fact that, back in the 1970s, the Greens were issuing warnings and even writing books about the coming Ice Age. They would abandon this issue, based in well-known and accepted solar science, in favor of a vast international hoax alleging man-made global warming.

As the global warming hoax begins to lose its power to influence public opinion and policy, the Greens are not likely to be heeded for a long time to come because they were right about an Ice Age and lying through their teeth about global warming.

Scientists and laymen who follow the Ice Age cycles have been warning that, if not a full-fledged Ice Age, at the very least a Little Ice Age comparable to one that lasted from 1300 to around 1850 is on its way

Amidst all the media coverage of Hurricane Gustav and the Republican Convention, a report in DailyTech.com was not likely to get much attention, but it forecast a very cold world in the years to come. The Earth has already started to cool and scientists date the change from 1998.

Headlined, “Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on Earth”, the news is that, for the first time in 100 years, “an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.” The author, Michael Asher, noted that “The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity—which determines the number of sunspots—is an influencing factor for climate on Earth.

As the DailyTech report notes, “In the past 1000 years, three previous such events, the Dalton, Maunder, and Sporer Minimums,” of reduced sunspot activity, “have all led to rapid cooling,” adding that, “For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.”


Global warming is the popular story in the press, but it doesn't explain how mankind's puny little effects can outweigh the influences of natural forces and the impact of solar changes--especially when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just DOES NOT CORRELATE to the global temperature.

But solar cycles DO correlate to global climate over time, so I put my faith in the scientists tracking the effects of the sun. And they're saying it's going to be getting cold.

11 comments:

paw said...

I followed that link but couldn't find anything other than opinion. The "cooling since 1998" caim catches my eye. Here is NASA data. Here it is in context. Show me the cooling please.

SkyePuppy said...

Paw,

Here's where I blogged on global cooling before:

Cooling since 1998.

Changes to the climate change conversation, including this document with lots of charts (especially p. 16).

Malott said...

The effect of solar events on our temperatures makes much more sense.

Ultimately, of course, temperatures will be in line with God's plans and purposes.

SkyePuppy said...

Chris,

Of course, God is in charge. But I've noticed over the years that He tends to work through the laws of physics (which He invented) most of the time.

Malott said...

His universe... His plan... His physics.

paw said...

I clicked through those links and beyond but found nothing to contradict the NASA data or support the claim of "cooling since 1998". Lots of dead links, opinion articles, opinion articles next to other opinion articles on such scientific and non-biased topics as why drilling for oil lowers polution, and cherry-picked anectdotal data. I am unconvinced of anything other than a contrarian agenda is at work regarding that claim. I'll keep looking for the cooling.

paw said...

Mallot, the climate of Venus can't be explained by Solar Events. You need a greenhouse theory to explain it.

I have my antenae up on that, too, an explanation of the climate of Venus using a theory other than greenhouse. Been waiting, asking, watching, waiting....

Tsofah said...

First Global warming. Now Global cooling. How am I ever going to know how to dress for the event?

:-D

Seriously, I don't think anyone really knows what to expect when. We just do our best, as G-d leads, and put the rest in His hands.

Malott said...

Tsofah,

Like you, I'll clothe myself in Christ...

So many current events may point the way to Rapture... Perhaps... And if it takes place before November, the Left is welcome to have its way... Which would suit me just fine.

I believe what is left of this world is their inheritence.

Either way... We're cool.

Charlie said...

This NASA chart, which corrects erroneous calculations made by NASA, shows a spike in 1934 that could not have been the result of industrialization, and much less modern temperature rise than should be predicted by the huge rise in global population and greenhouse gases.

Which has made many scientists who aren't chasing global warming grants to think human-caused warming is much overstated, for obvious political reasons, and solar caused warming/cooling the more likely historical cause, and one that better fits the data.

The jury is still out. It would be dumb to say that humans have no effect on the environment, but it is equally dumb to ignore the sun's role, which many environmentalists seem too quick to do.

SkyePuppy said...

PAW,

I've finally found the time (and virus-freedom) to reply to your comments.

For starters, your NASA chart is not a graph of global temperatures. It is a chart of how much the temperature departed from the norm (which I don't see defined on the NASA site, but a same-looking chart on Wikipedia says it's 1961 - 1990, but I don't know why those years in particular should be the gold standard, but whatever, it's what we've got). Until around 1940, temperatures were below normal, and they dropped back down to around normal until 1978, when satellite global temperature tracking began. Since then, the temperatures have exceeded normal by as much as .6 degrees. Hardly the screaming-high temperatures that should send us out to invest in flip-flops and ugly bermuda shorts. It's possible that satellite tracking before 1978 would have shown similarly high readings as a result of increased accuracy. It seems misleading to show one chart with two completely different sources of data and present it as one big trend, but that's just me.

As far as surface-temperature readings, the many of the land readings have been cast in doubt, because they're being taken in locations that give falsely high temperatures--on asphalt instead of grass, near air-conditioning units instead of away from heat sources. Here's my post on that issue. I don't know whether these stations are included in the chart you pointed to. If they are, those higher-than-normal readings are suspect.

I'll give you the point on "cooling since 1998." That was the year of the last El Nino, so temperatures--even high ones--are bound to be cooler.

You mentioned "dead links." Yes. In my first reply to you in the comments, the link to "Changes to the climate change conversation" has a dead link to David Archibald's presentation in May, 2007. My link to "This document" right after that in my comment has a live link to that presentation, although the chart I referenced on p. 16 is on p. 14 in the live link version. In that, Archibald makes the case that solar cycles correlate to global climate change. The Dalton Minimum (the last time the Thames River froze over during the winter) went with an unusually long preceding solar cycle followed by a low-activity solar cycle. Archibald predicted that the longer solar cycle 23 would go, the more likely we are to have a repeat of the Dalton Minimum. The timing of the start of solar cycle 24 would determine how bad the cooling would be.

The solar cycle preceding the Dalton Minimum was 13.6 years long. Lucky for us, though that solar cycle 23 didn't wait that long to end. It was two months shy of being 12 years long. Normal solar cycles are 10.7 years long. So we're still looking at cooling, especially when the sunspot activity of solar cycle 24 is extremely low. And historical records showed that the cooling comes pretty quickly (though not as fast as in the movie, "The Day after Tomorrow").

One more point, and that is that in Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth," he apparently showed charts of ice core samples, with CO2 and global temperatures tracking together. However, scientists say he was misleading us, because CO2 trailed global temperatures. They didn't lead temperatures.

In addition, the temperatures over the last couple centuries don't track with the amount of industrialization and CO2 in the atmosphere (no I don't have sources--just look at your NASA chart and tell me that 1910 was way less industrialized than 1900, which was way more industrialized than 1890).

So I stand on my (adjusted here in bold) statement in my original post: [T]he amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just DOES NOT CORRELATE to the causing of global temperature. And I stand by my statement that solar cycles do correlate and that so far, based on the current solar activity, it looks like things will be (not "already have") getting cooler.