Welcome to the new Ice Age

[392cobra]

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age


Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

lgunter@shaw.ca

Link: http://www.nationalpost.com/most_popular/story.

[Wes Tausend]

...

Ice age??

Oh, No!

My wife just bought one of those damn hybrids that barely burn enough gas to keep the cabin warm in normal winters.


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[rdorman]

Originally Posted by 392cobra

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

Bingo. I am NO tree hugger. With that said do I think conservation is a issue? Yes. Should we do what is reasonable to preserve the environment? Yes. But, regardless of what 'Potatoe Head' said in a well produced, but conveniently lacking of evidence counter to the intended conclusion, humans have little control over global climate change. We represent about 3% of the CO2, and about 0.01% of the water vapor (even worse then CO2) then is naturally occuring. CO2 levels have been MUCH higher then they are now even before the industrial age. So, can we effect global climate change? Yes we can. But, only to a small degree. Naturally occuring phenomena, sun activity and our odd relationship to the sun (wobble, eccentricity, etc) play a much bigger roll in global climate change then we ever could imagine. Just wait a billion years when the suns output increases 10% and global warming spirals out of control and you will see what I mean. Now, go out and replace all your light bulbs with florescents will you

Signed,
I am no climatologist

[Ron61]

There was a really good show on the History Channel a few days ago that pretty much covered just what you said. It started out with how the present day oil deposits were formed from all living organic material that died millions of years ago when the Earth had a warming period so hot that you could have went swimming at the South Pole in comfort if you could have breathed the air. They showed some plant that still lives and they have fossilized leaves from it from way back then and by using that they could determine along with the rock just how much CO2 and other stuff was in the air. Oxygen was all drawn off and as this stuff sank or decayed and started to cover itself less CO2 was released and the oxygen begin to come back and ice also begin to form at the poles again. Now this took millions of years but it was a natural cycle. At the end of the show what they basically said is that what is living now and has been living for the past generations will be the next oil deposits for whatever race occupies the planet in the distant future. I thought the show was very interesting as they had a lot of samples and data to back up what they said. So based on that, we will be in the next oil deposits so we will be returning to the Earth what we have wasted during this period of time.

Ron

[Roscoe]

The Other Side of Kim du Toit

From some smart guys:

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile—the list goes on and on.

”But what a minute, Kim,” you say. “You’re always going on about how the plural of anecdote is not data. What gives?”

This:

But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C—a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year’s time. For all four sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

OMG we’re all gonna diiiiiieeeeeeeeee!!!! Quick: fire up the SUVs, tell China to build more coal-burning power stations, and send Al Gore to the Sahara!

Errrr wait a minute…

Sorry. I went away to a warm and wonderful place there, for just a moment.

So: is it Glowball KoooolingTM now? Apparently so—quite literally:

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Quick question for the climate boffins: if the reduced solar activity can cool the planet so quicky, is it not possible that increased solar activity can have the opposite effect? And if that is the case, there’s not a whole bunch we, as humans, can do to affect this, one way or the other?

Way I see it, we should ship Al Gore off to the Sahara immediately, just in case.

You can never be too careful when it comes to the weather.

[Ron61]

Well, hasn't controlling the weather long been one of man kinds biggest dreams. Whoever could control the weather could control the planet. Thank God Mother Nature doesn't answer to any of us.

Ron

[rdorman]

Perhap Gore can offset his significant carbon footprint by installing a windmill in front of the podium so when he speaks the clean energy produced can be pumped back into the grid?

[Wes Tausend]

Originally Posted by rdorman

Perhap Gore can offset his significant carbon footprint by installing a windmill in front of the podium so when he speaks the clean energy produced can be pumped back into the grid?

Now that is funny.

I can see Al now, after the election, "Curse you, George, for beating me out of my rightful place at the throne. I'm going to tell everybody, that the product your family is selling, is killing earth as we know it ...until you're sitting on tanks and tanks of worthless tar. Then we'll see who has the last laugh. Muhahahahaha". Woosh. Woosh. (windmill blades)

I wonder if petroleum will last long enough, or at least get expensive enough in time, to pay back the hybrid premium on the wifes car. God, I hope so.


...

[rdorman]

You are going to love it when my new screen play hits the big screen in 2009. It is a light hearted musical set to the tunes of the Dave Matthews Band starring Daryl Hannah and Leonardo DiCaprio entitled "All living organisms on Earth WILL DIE!". It will probably be rated R (sorry kiddies) due to a hot scene between Hannah and DiCaprio involving Ben & Jerry's Magic Brownie ice cream. Plan on starting my Nobel acceptance speech on my upcoming trip to Deep Freeze to contribute my Poppy seeds.