Thread: Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

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

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/col ... ?id=332289

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling

Michael Asher (Blog) - February 26, 2008 12:55 PM

Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

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.

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.

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.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

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[Collapse Thread]
(12 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] Global warming or climate change?
By maven81 on 2/26/08, Rating: 0
By maven81 on 2/26/2008 1:46:37 PM , Rating: 0
Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the debate over the past few years shifted from "we're facing global warming" to "we're facing climate change"?
Because if we talk about climate change the evidence you present does not contradict it. If places that have never gotten snow before are suddenly getting snow that is indeed climate change.
Now as to what's causing it, I think that's the real question.




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(2 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By nbachman on 2/26/08, Rating: 3
By nbachman on 2/26/2008 1:49:44 PM , Rating: 3
Reduced solar activity perhaps.


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[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By 16nm on 2/26/08, Rating: 2
By 16nm on 2/26/2008 3:37:34 PM , Rating: 2
Agreed. That's exactly what I keep reading about...


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[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By ConfrontingReality on 2/27/08, Rating: 3
By ConfrontingReality on 2/27/2008 2:08:08 AM , Rating: 3
11 of the last 12 years have been the hottest 11 years on record since 1850. One year of declining temperatures should hardly be called a trend or the start of an ice age.

An alternative to the solar irradiation theory might be all the new SO2 and particulate matter coming from all the new dirty coal plants in China and India.

Both SO2 and particulate matter have the effect of reducing global warming. There is a correlation between increased global warming and when we began scrubbing our coal plants here in the USA.


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(2 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By Staples on 2/26/08, Rating: -1
By Staples on 2/26/2008 2:17:02 PM , Rating: -1
The term global warming was dumbed down for people who do not understand what the term means. Seems the author of this article does not know what the term really means either.

Global warming will bring sparatic changes in day to day climate. It does not mean that the world will get hotter.


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(2 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By porkpie on 2/26/08, Rating: 3
By porkpie on 2/26/2008 2:26:32 PM , Rating: 3

quote:
it does not mean that the world will get hotter.

Err, yes it does. Greenhouse gases trap heat, the planet gets hotter, the icecaps melt and we all drown or die from massive heat waves. Haven't you been listening to the rhetoric of the past 20 years?

Ever since the world started cooling off in 1998, enviros have been hedging their bets by referring to it as 'climate change'. But man-made CO2 doesn't cause the whole planet to cool off. It can't.

Climate Change is what's happening right now. The sun changes a little, and the earth gets colder. Global warming is what's not happening. SUVs are not causing the end of civilization as we know it.


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(3 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By Esanity on 2/26/08, Rating: 1
By Esanity on 2/26/2008 2:35:24 PM , Rating: 1
Thank you for speaking truth to power. Golbal warming isn't a science or based on one. It is a political movement to end the use of fossil fuels. If climate change does not mean warming, then why do we care if we add greenhouse gasses. And if the ice isn't going to melt, what are we worried about?


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[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By cheetah2k on 2/26/08, Rating: 2
By cheetah2k on 2/26/2008 9:43:07 PM , Rating: 2
Did Tom Cruise and Scientology have anything to do with starting the Global Warming rumors???


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[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By StevoLincolnite on 2/26/08, Rating: 2
By StevoLincolnite on 2/26/2008 10:57:49 PM , Rating: 2
Actually it is a Science, To much green house gases WILL cause the heat to get trapped, and thus the planet get warmer, To little green house gases will allow the heat to escape the planet and thus cool the planet down, thus we must have a "Balance" in between the "Too little and to much" areas.

What happens after this cooling period will end? And we have a crap-load of green house gases stuck in the atmosphere? It may just get hot rather quickly. (Maybe!)


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[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By zethy on 2/27/08, Rating: 2
By zethy on 2/27/2008 12:37:05 AM , Rating: 2
You know what, you are right, i mean measuring CO2 levels is no science, looking at climatic changes and their trends is in no way a science, it just meteorology and atmospheric studies.

you are right again, ice wont melt if it is heated and THEN cooled, it will stay totally solid.
And i mean extreem snowy winters and drought filled summers just mean that countries all around the world will be forced to face flooding and drought in the summer and blizzards in the winter, and what grows in these conditions?
not crops but mosquitos and other disease carrying insects.

you're right global warming is all just a big hoax
and if you werent keen enough to note my sarcasam, well i huess you couldnt notice the problems at hand.


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(1 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By jbartabas on 2/26/08, Rating: 3
By jbartabas on 2/26/2008 4:21:47 PM , Rating: 3

quote:
Greenhouse gases trap heat, the planet gets hotter, the icecaps melt and we all drown or die from massive heat waves. Haven't you been listening to the rhetoric of the past 20 years?



Greenhouse gases trapping heat is only a component of the system, as important if not more are the feedbacks. The net feedback happen to be globally positive, that's why it gets globally warmer.

quote:
But man-made CO2 doesn't cause the whole planet to cool off. It can't.



Depends on the feedback, the highly improbable scenario of a disruption of global oceanic currents could prove your assumption wrong, at least for a while.

But to come to the point, clearly a long term decreasing global temperature is not what is predicted for climate change, at least under constant solar output. But it remains to be seen if these two conditions are verified; is it a long term trend and is it not related to change in solar output.


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[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By masher2 (blog) on 2/26/08, Rating: 3
By masher2 (blog) on 2/26/2008 5:29:30 PM , Rating: 3
> "the highly improbable scenario of a disruption of global oceanic currents could prove your assumption wrong, at least for a while."

No, not quite. In theory warming can cause circulatory changes that would cause some regions to cool. However, heat can't be destroyed -- a shutdown of circulation means some other region must warm even more to compensate. Greenhouse gases therefore can't cause cooling on a global scale. The heat has to go *somewhere*.

BTW, the second link in the story above contains statements from two prominent climate modelers, who explain how the theory of Thermohaline Circulation Shutdown was debunked. We no longer believe GW can cause cooling in Northern Europe.


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[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By jbartabas on 2/26/08, Rating: 2
By jbartabas on 2/26/2008 6:29:51 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
In theory warming can cause circulatory changes that would cause some regions to cool. However, heat can't be destroyed -- a shutdown of circulation means some other region must warm even more to compensate. Greenhouse gases therefore can't cause cooling on a global scale. The heat has to go *somewhere*.



You're right, the heat is not destroyed. And it does go somewhere, indeed. But you seem to think that the system is frozen (sic!), and think in terms of all other things being equal. But the heat is constantly added and removed to/from the system, and the net balance depends on the state of the system. If you assume one second that a major disruption occurs to the current redistributing the heat, leading to a regional cooling of large part of high and mid-latitudes (that would globally be overcome by a larger warming trend in low latitudes in the first phase, as you rightly point out), and that this cooling is enough to cover large regions with snow & ice after a while, then you have changed your forcings, more energy is reflected to space, and you may have triggered a feedback that will for a while or the long run compensate or invert the effect of increased GHG.

Now I am not saying that this is necessarily a credible scenario, and you pointed out this alternative has been dismissed as very unlikely (and the TH circulation impact would probably not change the global outcome). It is just illustrative of the fact that the direct effect of CO2 is far from being enough to understand the warming, and that feedbacks from the system are the most important and complex part of the climate response to understand.

But the bottom line is that feedbacks as they are known now would not explain a long term global cooling.


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[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By TheDoc9 on 2/26/08, Rating: 0
By TheDoc9 on 2/26/2008 2:32:58 PM , Rating: 0
I think it's great how you guys stick to your convictions about global warming when the ship is going down. Some might call it arrogant, others something worse. I like to sit back and laugh.


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[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By Bill In DC on 2/26/08, Rating: 2
By Bill In DC on 2/26/2008 2:29:05 PM , Rating: 2
Well, the concept of facing 'Climate Change' is deceptive as the climate is ALWAYS changing, therefore we are always 'facing Climate Change'. Humans cannot stop climate change. Even if we could the first question that would necessarily be asked is 'What is the optimal climate to change to?'. We don't know the answer to that question and most likely never will.

What this is beginning to show, I think, is that the human contribution to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is not the primary driver of temperature change for the planet. If this is true then the draconian measures to reduce it will be pointless.

Holding up signs that implore politicians to 'Stop Climate Change' are nonsensical.


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(1 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By jasonalwaysready on 2/26/08, Rating: 2
By jasonalwaysready on 2/26/2008 2:33:15 PM , Rating: 2
it went from global warming to climate change, so that no matter what event happened anywhere on the planet, it can be attributed to anthropogenic GH gas emissions. you people want to believe that humans are destroying the planet so badly, that when slapped in the face with scientific evidence from your own sources, you change the goal posts.

whats causing it? did you even read the article? forces more powerful than the .003% of the atmosphere youre all obsessed with. the sun. it has a lower output. temperatures go down...


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(1 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By Bill In DC on 2/26/08, Rating: 3
By Bill In DC on 2/26/2008 3:00:42 PM , Rating: 3
Not quite. Changes in radiance of the sun does not explain the changes in temps. Take a look at the work of Dr. Svensmark, Danish Climate Scientist. A good book on his theory is "The Chilling Stars".

The driver is the increased cloud cover caused by more GCR (Galactic Cosmic Rays) allowed into earth's atmosphere by low magnetic activity in the sun. The sun's magnetic activity can shield earth from GCRs. GCRs provide the 'specks' needed to start cloud formation, more GCRs, more clouds, less CGRs, fewer clouds. Estimates are that a change of 2-4% in global cloud cover can foster a 1-3 deg F change in temp. The suns magnetic activity can be tracked by observing the number of sunspots, more sunspots, higher magnetic activity. Prior to 2006 the sun has been VERY active magnetically. Since 2006 (the end of Solar Cycle 23) there have been virtually no sunspots and Solar Cycle 24 is a year overdue. The result is more clouds, lower temps.

This, of course, is a gross simplification of the process. I'd encourage any to explore this theory further.


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(1 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By rykerabel on 2/26/08, Rating: 2
By rykerabel on 2/26/2008 6:33:51 PM , Rating: 2
um, more clouds = warmer temps overall (heat passes through clouds better from the sun than it dissipates through the clouds out into space)

No clouds in Sahara desert may seem warmer, but remember how cold it gets there at night from the lack of clouds.


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(1 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By jbartabas on 2/26/08, Rating: 2
By jbartabas on 2/26/2008 6:36:15 PM , Rating: 2
Depends on altitude and type of clouds, they don't have the same forcing and they all suffer from significant uncertainty anyway.


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(1 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By masher2 (blog) on 2/26/08, Rating: 2
By masher2 (blog) on 2/26/2008 6:46:46 PM , Rating: 2
This is correct. Our current understanding is that high clouds (aka cirrus) exert a net warming effect, whereas low clouds favor cooling.


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[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By MadMaster on 2/27/08, Rating: 2
By MadMaster on 2/27/2008 1:13:31 AM , Rating: 2
The change is difficult to pin down... (There is a large degree of uncertainty associated with clouds).

These two articles might offer some better understanding...

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=105

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=110


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(1 Hidden)
[Collapse Comment] RE: Global warming or climate change?
By Misty Dingos on 2/26/08, Rating: 2
By Misty Dingos on 2/26/2008 2:45:17 PM , Rating: 2
Alright I will correct you. You are wrong. You don’t get to disown the Global Warming crown of thorns. It is yours and Al Gores forever. You should all be made to wear signs that say “I am one of the reactionary dumb asses that believed in Global Warmingâ€

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Michael Asher (Blog) - February 26, 2008 12:55 PM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Print E-mail del.icio.us 201 comment(s) - last by porkpie.. on Feb 27 at 10:26 AM





World Temperatures according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop over the last year.Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

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.

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.

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.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.


Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.


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http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Mo ... e10866.htm