The Coming Ice Age
Keith_Indy on Feb 26 2008 at 2:27 pm | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Environment, Keith's Page
Brrrr… it sure is cold out there. And now the data is in to prove it.
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.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. 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.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change every recorded, either up or down.
So, what should good scientists do when the hypothesis doesn’t match real world results? Look for flaws in the hypothesis and add the knowledge gained through observation.
My biggest beef with much of the AGW crowd is their over-reliance on computer models for “forecasting” the future. They’ve continued to be incomplete, missing whole sets of factors that effect the weather and climate. The closer these models get to including these factors, the more I will trust them. In fact, the more they accurately predict changes in the climate, the more I’ll trust them.
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.
It is interesting that the more I hear about climate and the weather, the more I hear about cycles. Cycles of solar activity, winds, cloud cover, hurricanes, etc.
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.
Now, if in 5-10 years, the consensus swings around to saying that we’re really in danger of another ice age, I’ve got to wonder what the AGW zealots are going to do.
Sphere: Related Content5 Responses to “The Coming Ice Age”
Trackback URI | Comments RSS
“Now, if in 5-10 years, the consensus swings around to saying that we’re really in danger of another ice age, I’ve got to wonder what the AGW zealots are going to do.”
They are already doing it. AGW is being replaced with ‘climate change’.
No way. I thought that “climate change” was being substituted because melting ice would cause some places to cool even though the average global temperature was rising. Is it now really that no matter what the average temperature is doing, it’s the fault of C02, the greenhouse effect be damned? You can’t possibly blame C02 for an effect that’s completely the opposite of what you’ve been predicting all along.
After thinking about it, if forced to choose between the two, I’d take the warming. The effects of warming can be more easily mitigated, and for the most part warming is good for agriculture. Growing enough food, on the other hand, with fewer and shorter growing seasons on less land would be iffy to say the least.
yours/
peter.
[…] notes the same link, by way of Keith at A Second Hand Conjecture : Not only do we have all the sea ice back, we have more than we once had. Record low temps. Record […]
I have to disagree with the above point. I think warming would be much more catastrophic for the world. We have proof of multiple Ice Ages, yet animals managed to survive the climate change. My dad used to say, “It’s better to live in the cold because you can always put more clothes on, but can’t keep taking more off!”. Even adapted plants can survive in colder weather than warm adapted plants can in warmth. there is a certain range the plants can use photosynthesis effectively, and that range dips much lower on the temperture scale. Although I have no doubt global freezing would be disasterous, I think I would prefer it over a global heating.