How to Trigger an Ice Age the Easy Way, Killing Billions of People

The secret to killing billions and billions of people without being too obvious about it, is to make it difficult or impossible to grow enough food to feed them. Geological history demonstrates that the best way of doing this -- short of a global thermonuclear war -- is by triggering a global ice age. If winters are too long and summers are too short and cold, crops cannot be grown, and livestock will starve. Without enough food, billions of people will die, until there are only enough people to match the dwindling food supplies.

Who would want to do such a thing? Well, no one will actually come out and admit to planning a great global human dieoff. But there are some people who are playing with the idea of significantly cutting back on Earth's solar allotment, in the name of mitigating "climate change." But since Earth's climate is always changing no matter what humans do, why would a cooler planet -- with shorter growing seasons and less food -- be better than a warming planet, with more food and longer growing seasons?

One of the backers of the new "geoengineers" is Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame. Mr. Gates feels strongly about "climate change," strongly enough to help finance a planetary geoengineering scheme to reduce solar input to the planet.

As well as Gates, other wealthy individuals including Sir Richard Branson, tar sands magnate Murray Edwards and the co-founder of Skype, Niklas Zennström, have funded a series of official reports into future use of the technology. Branson, who has frequently called for geoengineering to combat climate change, helped fund the Royal Society's inquiry into solar radiation management last year through his Carbon War Room charity. It is not known how much he contributed.

Professors David Keith, of Harvard University, and Ken Caldeira of Stanford, are the world's two leading advocates of major research into geoengineering the upper atmosphere to provide earth with a reflective shield. They have so far received over $4.6m from Gates to run the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (Ficer). Nearly half Ficer's money, which comes directly from Gates's personal funds, has so far been used for their own research, but the rest is disbursed by them to fund the work of other advocates of large-scale interventions.

According to statements of financial interests, Keith receives an undisclosed sum from Bill Gates each year, and is the president and majority owner of the geoengineering company Carbon Engineering, in which both Gates and Edwards have major stakes – believed to be together worth over $10m. _Guardian

Another Geoengineering Scheme
Big money backers of geoengineering schemes hide behind the IPCC and the "scientific consensus" which supposedly backs the theories and computer models of "climate change." But after ClimageGate, and some other huge public embarassments hitting the orthodoxy of climate hysteria, it rather looks as if these wealthy climate barons are either not keeping up with the evidence, or they have other hidden motives behind their actions.

Bill Gates is already involved with a super-wealthy cabal of individuals working to limit overpopulation. When combined with his interest in altering the global climate, his concerns over the level of human populations of Earth could well be seen in something other than a completely innocent light.

Do Al Fin analysts think that Gates is intentionally setting the planet Earth onto a path toward a great human dieoff? Of course not. Most of the recipients of Mr. and Mrs. Gates' charities are entirely uncontroversial and untainted by any quasi-genocidal stain. But a person of Mr. Gates' stature should be very clear about the causes which he supports, without having to hide behind a faux consensus of phony fantasists such as certain IPCC controlling climate grifters.

It would take a very small ongoing reduction of incoming solar radiation to spin the planet's climate in a cooling direction. When combined with natural feedbacks and other pertinent factors which climatologists refuse to consider in their expensive models, the downward spin of temperatures could quickly reach the point where growing seasons and food supplies are adversely affected.

A human dieoff from lack of food is probably not something that Mr. Gates or Mr. Branson want to be associated with, after the fact. Certainly either gentleman could easily afford to live anywhere on the planet they wished. But after the onset of a global ice age, it is unlikely that they could live in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed without the service of other people. And for someone who is even partially responsible for a massive crime against humanity, such as the triggering of a great human dieoff by ice age, living among strangers could never be entirely safe.

Cross-posted from Al Fin Potpourri

Earth's Climate Has Always Been Chaotic & Out of Control

Average temperatures in Britain could fall by two degrees centigrade, according to the study led by Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at Reading University, because of a drop in the amount of sunspot activity. _DailyMail

Little Ice Age Plunging In?
The Earth's climate is chaotic by nature, and given to drastic changes and shifts as a matter of course. The many overlapping natural cycles which contribute to global climate have been largely ignored by climate scientists -- until now.

Professor Lockwood's findings could mean the average winter temperature could drop below 2.5C, compared to the average British winter now of 5C, the newspaper reported.

In June, three different studies all concluded that sunspot activity looks set to decline over the next 10 years.

Experts said the next upswing in sunspot activity, which follows an 11-year cycle, will not be as strong as normal - or might not even happen at all.
The findings were presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's solar physics division.

They said a decrease in global warming might result in the years after 2020, the approximate time when sunspots are expected to disappear for years, maybe even decades. _DailyMail

Meanwhile, climate scientists are just now beginning to admit the importance of the urban heat island effect, which has biased global temperature records upward -- contributing to the carbon hysteria which has sustained the orthodoxy of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and helped drive the bandwagon and steamroller of the great climate panic of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

More honest scientists are likewise admitting that extreme weather events have nothing to do with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

You Mustn't Believe the Lies that Green Zealots Tell. Not only about nuclear power, but about climate change, resource depletion, overpopulation, etc.

Previously published at Al Fin, the Next Level

Prolific and innovative thinker and scientist J Storrs Hall takes a look at where the climate has been, compares current climate with similar climate curves in the past, and slyly invites readers to guess where the climate is likely to be heading.

First -- Where the climate has been over the past 10,000 years or so... :

Images from WUWT
Next -- Comparing our current climate curve with similar climate curves from the past, to get an idea of a possible trajectory... :

Here I’ve plotted the 400 years following each minimum in the record that leads to a sustained sharp rise. There were 10 of them; the first five are plotted in cyan and the more recent 5 in blue. You can see that in the latter part of the Holocene the traces settle down from the wilder swings of the earlier period. Even so, every curve, even the early ones, seems to have an inflection — at least a change in slope — somewhere between 200 and 250 years after the minimum.

The hatched black line is the average of the 5 recent (blue) spikes. The red dots are the uptick at the end of GISP2 and HadSST, spliced at 1850. Note that ALL the minima dates are from GISP2. _WUWT

Then Josh invites readers to guess what will happen next, if history is any guide.

For some parts of the northern hemisphere, it may be time to get out the summer parkas.

Climate simpletons who believe that the global climate is controlled by one trace gas which constitutes less than 0.04% of the planetary atmosphere, have controlled the microphones, printing presses, funding agencies, and public stage for far too long. It is time for science to displace the politically convenient (and economically lucrative) climate hysteria, so that ordinary people can make rational plans.

Previously published at Al Fin Potpourri

Humans cannot control the climate. Humans cannot even significantly influence the climate except on a regional basis -- via land use changes and black soot effluents etc. The popular madness and delusion of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming reflects badly on human governments, inter-governments, environmental organisations, and human gullibility in general.

A resilient, more skeptical, and less easily led type of human is badly needed.

More__ 6July11 __: A Reminder that Climatology is just an infant science

Nuclear Energy Needed to Prevent Blackouts in Age of Global Cooling

If Texas had made the same dollar investment in new coal and/or nuclear power plants they would probably be snug and warm tonight. Do we we really want to sacrifice our families’ safety and security along with business productivity during extreme cold for the sake of political correctness? _WUWT

The rolling blackouts experienced in Texas recently were caused by problems with wind, gas, and coal systems to adjust to freezing conditions and increased power demands. Nuclear power is different from the other power sources mentioned above, and is clearly the power source of choice for an ice age or an age of global cooling (possibly along with enhanced geothermal).

US President Obama's Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been excessively slow to license and approve safer, more reliable new reactor designs, which makes it almost impossible for the US to provide more secure and reliable power to the people. Amazingly, the Obama NRC has still not given approval for construction of new plants using the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor.

If the NRC approves the AP1000 design, the agency could decide by the end of 2011 on whether to issue construction licenses to Southern and SCANA to build their nuclear reactors, according to Jaczko.

"We will continue to work on a schedule that puts us in a position to make some final decisions possibly by the end of this year," he [NRC's Jazco] said. _Reuters

Take your time, Jazco. It's only the future of the American society and global security that is at stake. Bureaucrats rule in the modern US, so pay no attention to the little people and their needs.

It should be obvious that the US can no longer allow its bureaucracy and Luddite political class to drag its feet on the future.

It is clear that, were our reactors allowed to retire as originally planned, the nuclear industry’s contribution to clean energy production would all but disappear by 2035. Fortunately, some license renewals, which extend a reactor’s lifetime by 20 years, have been approved and others are in line.... even in the best case, in which all licenses are renewed, about 25% of our fleet will be retiring in 2035, making it very unlikely that the US’s clean energy portfolio can grow in that time frame.

This alarming scenario should hurry the construction of new reactors. Though building 784 new plants is an impossible target, the AEF Committee judged that 5 to 9 additional nuclear plants could be brought online by 2020. As espoused in my first article, there is no need to wait around for research breakthroughs; proven reactor technologies are ready to be built now, as China continues to demonstrate. _leadenergy

The Obama administration and its Luddite counterparts at state and local levels, continue to drag their feet on providing reliable power sources -- while they continue to spout nonsensical gibberish about the "promise of wind and solar power."

But what good are wind and solar power when solar panels are covered with snow and ice, and ice-covered propellers on wind turbines prevent power generation -- even in perfect winds?

Wind generators also appeared to be having problems, said Fraser; he had received reports of some turbines shutting down because of issues with ice on the blades. "The wind was blowing yesterday, but I'm not sure wind generation was available because they had problems with ice," he said. _MetMusings

In the recent Texas power blackouts, wind was not the only power source to fall down on the job. Water pipes at coal plants froze and broke, gas pipelines failed to provide adequate pressures to gas plants, and huge piles of coal froze to unusable condition in the ice and snow storms.

The problem had several causes, but we have learned one thing -- in conditions of extreme cold, wind power and solar power are not sources that can be reliably depended upon.

The system needed all of the power it could get. Had more thermal plants been built, at least some of them would have been in service and helpful. Outages would have been moderated a little. Wind generated power was used and useful, but couldn’t be dialed up to produce more during a time of need. Wind power was neither the cause of the problem, nor of any special value in reaching a solution. _MasterResource

It is time for voters and ordinary people to jettison the lefty-Luddite politicians and bureaucrats who are exposing them to potentially fatal risks, all in the name of a failed ideology of faux environmentalism and pseudo-scientific carbon hysteria.

Nuclear power is the best power source for extreme cold -- for most advanced nations -- since all components of the generation system are contained indoors, well protected from the elements -- and do not rely upon the supply of fuel from the outside, which can be disrupted in many ways during extreme weather.

Sure, we need to replace above-ground transmission and distribution lines with secure, buried, and preferably super-conducting lines. But that will take time, and will require severe budget cuts in entitlement spending and public sector union benefits to provide the necessary resources. Before that can happen, heads will need to roll -- in a figurative sense, naturally. (human heads are not perfectly round, so they do not roll as smoothly as one might wish) ;-)

Al Fin was once an enthusiastic supporter of all types of wind energy -- and still supports small wind turbines for niche and off-grid uses. But human minds which are functional will continually monitor the world around them, and take in new information and data. In the course of time, working minds will change and grow with experience. Those minds which are incapable of learning, growing, and changing, may as well not even exist, for all the harm they are likely to do. Particularly when they are in positions of power and responsibility.

Other perspectives on this issue from nuclear bloggers Charles Barton, and Rod Adams.

Power blackouts play hell with electric vehicles. Best to keep your own reliable backup power source at home or place of business -- along with necessary fuels. Relying on the dumbed-down commons for life and death needs can be a fool's play, but in a society of perpetual incompetents -- the Idiocracy -- it is what it is.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Always keep an ample supply of food, water, fuels, necessary medicines, cash, power source, communications gear, etc., and the means to prevent riff-raff from taking it from you. The police are never more than 10 minutes away, whenever a situation calls for an instantaneous response. Perhaps a bit longer if they belong to public sector unions.

Caution: Glaciation In Progress

ImpactLab
The Arctic winter of 2009:2010 reached its chill fingers an "unprecedented" distance into spring -- to March 31. Never before in the reliable human record of Arctic sea ice extent, has the freeze season lasted until so late in the year.

Does this mean that we are on the brink of a new ice age? Not necessarily. Earth's climate consists of cycles within cycles within cycles. And the satellite human record of Arctic sea ice extent only goes back to 1979.

Meanwhile, orthodox catastrophic predictions of the demise of the Arctic are proving to be somewhat premature. Time to abandon carbon hysteria? Only if you are intelligent and honest. If you owe your livelihood to the alarmist orthodoxy of climate catastrophe, you may feel obligated to maintain the pretense a bit longer -- until retirement, or the kids get through college, or some other arbitrary guidepost allowing a reversion to honesty.

Colonising the Arctic: Ample Fuels Under the Ice

EES.LANL.GOV
Methane hydrates are found worldwide in large quantities -- under the seabed, under the arctic tundra, and in other parts unknown. Intensive research has led to increasingly feasible methods of harvesting these frozen methane hydrates -- which when added to huge new terrestrial natural gas finds will increase methane supplies worldwide significantly.

the U.S. Department of Energy's Methane Hydrate Research and Development Program has made considerable progress in the past five years toward understanding and developing methane hydrate as a possible energy resource.

"DOE's program and programs in the national and international research community provide increasing confidence from a technical standpoint that some commercial production of methane from methane hydrate could be achieved in the United States before 2025," said Charles Paull, chair of the committee that wrote the report, and senior scientist, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. "With global energy demand projected to increase, unconventional resources such as methane hydrate become important to consider as part of the future U.S. energy portfolio and could help provide more energy security for the United States."

Methane hydrate, a solid composed of methane and water, occurs in abundance on the world's continental margins and in permafrost regions, such as in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska's North Slope. Although the total global volume of methane in methane hydrate is still debated, estimates yield s that are significant compared with the global supplies of conventional natural gas. The existence of such a large and untapped energy resource has provided a strong global incentive to determine how methane might be produced from methane hydrate safely, economically, and in an environmentally sensible way. _SD

Significant challenges to safe harvesting of frozen methane hydrates remain, and must be overcome before economic use of these massive deposits can become commonplace.

Significant challenges to the use of algal fuels also remain to be tackled, but that doesn't stop some researchers from predicting that algal fuels will be available commercially within 5 years! University of Arizona researchers believe that their new photobioreactor -- dubbed "Accordion" -- will help to accelerate commercial development of algal fuels significantly.

Above cross-posted to Al Fin Energy

Which brings us to the topic of colonising the Arctic (and perhaps the Antarctic?). In the frozen wastelands of the great north, one finds ample supplies of oxygen, nitrogen, and water (frozen and thawed alternatively). Carbon sources are typically scarce, as are energy sources. But if viable methods of harvesting methane hydrates are developed, both carbon and energy may suddenly become plentiful. Power, heat, and carbon for synthesis of materials is suddenly available, which opens the door to long term settlement.

Global warming catastrophe is not in the cards, so predictions of a sudden warming of the Arctic appear to be par for the course for climate hysterics. That being the case, it is up to cold climate pioneers to open the vast "wasteland" of the north (and south?).

Conditions in the far north and far south are near-equivalent of ice age conditions. It might be good practise for the not so distant future, to learn survival in a glacial age.

Prepping for the Coming Ice Age

An Ice Age is an example of a long term survival setting. If you are prepared to survive an ice age, you are prepared for almost anything. But the chances are that you are like the residents of New Orleans during Katrina -- not even prepared for a few days without electrical power, ATMs, and supermarkets. Where do you go to learn to prepare, beyond the silly mainstream media offerings of "survival-lite"?

Preparedness Pro is a website that offers good articles on survival and preparedness, as well as on-site, hands-on preparedness classes. For example: Are you interested in a backup generator for your home or cabin? Backup Power Generators: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 take you through the selection process and tell you where you can obtain them for the best price.

Survival Blog is a well-known and respected personal effort by James Wesley Rawles. Survival Blog offers a wide range of survival advice -- much of it provided in letters and emails relating first-person experiences with different devices and approaches to surviving difficulties.

The Survivalist Blog is another well-known preparedness blog. Here is his "Best of 2009 Survivalist Articles".

The Prepper E-Book site offers practical articles from The Survival Mom on a wide range of "be ready" topics. Example: this posting provides links to 9 articles on the topic of "bugging out / evacuating" in a hurry. By preparing ahead of time, you can have what you need, where and when you need it. There is also a prepper forum where people can compare experiences and recommendations with others with similar concerns.

Tactical Intelligence is a site that deals largely with "gear" -- survival implements that are either ready-made or improvised.

The sites above usually have links to other prepper and survival websites and services. There are at least hundreds of them, but it is generally best to start with those that are well known that serve a wide audience. You can find fairly decent free online survival videos at YouTube and other "how-to" video sharing sites listed on the Al Fin sidebar in the "Reference" section.

So, how would you prepare for an ice age, anyway? Ice sheets have been known to grow miles thick. How does one live, stay warm, grow food, maintain transportation networks, and provide schools, health care, power, sanitation, and other essential services when the land is covered with ice 1 mile thick?

First, you need a large source of combined heat and power -- a nuclear plant is ideal, a coal or bitumen / kerogen plant might also work. You would need plenty of fuel to last hundreds of years. (You should begin to see the advantage of a nuclear plant, thinking of fuel volume for that length of time. Remember that next level humans will live hundreds of years or longer, on average.)

Second, you need a method of distributing heat over a large area, preventing that area from accumulating snow and ice on a year-to-year basis (winters may last 9 or 10 months). Al Fin ice age architects recommend redundant systems of conductive, convective, and radiative transfer of heat. A village-sized geodesic dome incorporating a network of heat-pipes should provide safe shelter for the community itself. Similar structures for croplands should extend the ice-free area well beyond the residential zones. (Crops and living zones will require artificial lighting most of the year -- confirming the wisdom of locating a nuclear power plant close by. Imagine trying to survive an ice age with solar and wind power!)

Third, you need to provide a wide range of human expertise for your community -- and sound means of transferring that expertise to new members. The community will need to provide its own power, water, farming, health care, education, defence, sanitation, entertainment, maintenance, construction, search and rescue, clothing, and a wide range of other services generally overlooked.

Fourth, although the coming ice age is unlikely to progress to "Snowball Earth" -- when the ice reached the equator from both North and South -- it won't hurt to plan for extremes. To achieve a Minimum Viable Population, plan for a village of about a thousand breeding pairs -- or a group of villages whose combined populations provide a thousand breeding pairs. (Most geneticists may recommend a founder population of at least 10,000 breeding pairs, but Al Fin geneticists have discovered that 1,000 breeding pairs should be sufficient for most situations where "time-to-discovery" of other compatible human populations is no longer than 10,000 years.)

Fifth, follow a plan of expanding the "ice-free zone" around your village(s) and agricultural / industrial / power generation zones. Always incorporate your ice-melting infrastructure into any new construction. Nature will never stop trying to defeat your efforts, so you must never stop using your brain and body to assert your own intentions.

Prepare yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally to be a survivor. Then begin prepping for yourself, your family, your closest associates. Learn, teach, experiment. Always think in terms of "what could go wrong, and what could I do about it?" That should teach a bit of humility, and hopefully provide motivation for what you will have to learn to know and to do.

More: The Lifeboat Foundation has several projects dealing with existential risks which might be helpful in the event of a glaciation, including space habitats and "lifeshield bunkers." Josh Hall has devised a "weather machine" concept that would have the power to throw the Earth into an ice age, to bake the planet beyond livability, or anything in between.

Fear the Cold: Solar Magnetic Activity Dropping

Right now, the sun is stuck in a period of extremely low sunspot activity, not unlike the "Maunder Minimum" that may have been responsible for the Little Ice Age that cooled Europe in the late 17th century as well as the fall of imperial dynasties in China. _SciAm

Sunspots underlying solar magnetic activity.

“Sunspot magnetic fields are dropping by about 50 gauss per year,” says Penn. “If we extrapolate this trend into the future, sunspots could completely vanish around the year 2015.”

This disappearing act is possible because sunspots are made of magnetism. The “firmament” of a sunspot is not matter but rather a strong magnetic field that appears dark because it blocks the upflow of heat from the sun’s interior. If Earth lost its magnetic field, the solid planet would remain intact, but if a sunspot loses its magnetism, it ceases to exist.

“According to our measurements, sunspots seem to form only if the magnetic field is stronger than about 1500 gauss,” says Livingston. “If the current trend continues, we’ll hit that threshold in the near future, and solar magnetic fields would become too weak to form sunspots.”"This work has caused a sensation in the field of solar physics,” comments NASA sunspot expert David Hathaway, who is not directly involved in the research. “It’s controversial stuff.” _NASA

Anthony Watts has more

The Ap Solar Magnetic Index is at its lowest level in over 75 years, and sinking lower. Solar scientists are at a loss to explain the sun's behaviour -- unprecedented in recent times.

The sun is in the pits of the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century. Weeks and sometimes whole months go by without even a single tiny sunspot. The quiet has dragged out for more than two years, prompting some observers to wonder, are sunspots disappearing? _NASA

If the sunspots "disappear" for decades or longer, the chances for another little ice age -- or worse -- grow far more significant.

Earth doesn't need a nuclear war or a large comet crash to throw the climate into a long-term state of glaciation. All it needs is an incremental increase in cloud layers that reflect more of the sun's heat back out into space. Time would do the rest. And there is nothing that humans could do to bring back the heat. Without the heat, growing seasons shrink to the point that many crops become non-viable.

At that point, the breadbaskets of the world become basket cases. Third world dictatorships perpetually dependent upon food aid suddenly go without outside food. The four horsemen of the apocalypse follow as naturally as night follows day.

Cold kills. We should not be fearing the warmth. Warmth has made the Earth a more prolific producer of food. Fear the cold.

Lake Superior During an Ice Age? Last Tuesday

Due to the recent cold spell and below normal temperatures for much of the winter of 2008-2009, ice covers nearly all of Lake Superior. Only small areas of open water remain. This image was taken on Tuesday, March 3rd. _WattsupWithThat

Judging by past geologic history as read through ice cores, the Earth could enter a new ice age in as little as ten years. The sun has been behaving a bit sluggishly over the past couple of years, and we really do not understand the triggers of an ice age in any depth.

Imagine if your hometown were like Lake Superior is now -- 365 days a year, for years on end. Crops would not grow in the frozen fields, food supplies would run low. Keeping the roads, train tracks, and airfields clear of ice becomes harder the longer that glaciation conditions last. Food could be airdropped in, weather permitting, but supplies of heating and transportation fuel would run low.

Power transmission lines would fail under crushing loads of ice, and repair efforts would be constantly hampered by cold and gale force winds. Under President Obama, nuclear power is being curtailed and fossil fuels are being made artificially scarce by ruinous carbon regulations, restrictions, and taxes. And unfortunately, this president hears only the voices of revolution inside his head. For the sounds of the real world, his ears are made of tin.

Sun Goes on Strike! Ice Age Imminent?

Contrary to NASA predictions, the number of sunspots appearing in the year 2008 were the second lowest number since the year 1900. As solar scientists at NASA ponder where they went wrong in failing to foresee the flagging solar cycle 24, more far reaching scientists see their predictions of slowing solar cycles vindicated (PDF).

Russian solar scientists have been predicting an imminent ice age for a few years now. A recent story in Pravda provides some background:

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years....

The main flaw in the AGW theory is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past one thousand years at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years -- evidence which is essential for a true understanding of climatology. The data from paleoclimatology provides us with an alternative and more credible explanation for the recent global temperature spike, based on the natural cycle of Ice Age maximums and interglacials....

The reason that global CO2 levels rise and fall in response to the global temperature is because cold water is capable of retaining more CO2 than warm water. That is why carbonated beverages loose their carbonation, or CO2, when stored in a warm environment. We store our carbonated soft drinks, wine, and beer in a cool place to prevent them from loosing their ‘fizz’, which is a feature of their carbonation, or CO2 content. The earth is currently warming as a result of the natural Ice Age cycle, and as the oceans get warmer, they release increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Because the release of CO2 by the warming oceans lags behind the changes in the earth’s temperature, we should expect to see global CO2 levels continue to rise for another eight hundred years after the end of the earth’s current Interglacial warm period. We should already be eight hundred years into the coming Ice Age before global CO2 levels begin to drop in response to the increased chilling of the world’s oceans. _Pravda

Global warming celebrities such as Gore, Hansen, Jones, Mann, etc. have ridden a tsunami of credulous political and media acclaim, giving them fame, fortune, or at least job security. These "legends in their own minds" will not take kindly to a cooling climate. So they must deny, deny, deny, for as long as they can.

From Watts Up With That, we find yet another reason for global cooling: accumulating sea ice around Antarctica. Due to its lower latitudes, Antarctic sea ice has a much greater effect on Earth's energy balance than does Arctic sea ice. Consequently, the excessive attention played to Arctic sea ice extent has distracted world attention from the much more relevant Antarctic sea ice extent.

How long can we continue to tolerate this media misdirection, a clear abdication of media's role to inform the public of the facts. As long as mainstream media -- including reporting by science journals such as Science and Nature, and science news websites such as Scientific American, Sciencedaily, and Physorg.com -- continue to function as little more than cheering squads for the climate orthodoxy, rather than as honest reporters of the best science data, intelligent searchers will be forced to go out of the mainstream. Fortunately, they can easily find honest reporters of the data such as Roger Pielke Sr., Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, Roy Spencer, Matt Briggs, and the many others who have donated their own time and resources to provide a fuller and more objective view of the many unresolved issues in climate.

The new Obama / Pelosi reich wants to waste trillions of taxpayer dollars chasing after the global warming phantom. They want to starve the US of vital energy resources and place the US at the mercy of foreign oil suppliers, in the same way that Europe is at the mercy of Russia and Iran. These deranged dilettantes want to put the US in precisely the wrong posture to be ready for anything that an unpredictable climate sends our way.

It was moronic for American voters to place these fools in such a position of power. Forget about that now. Is it too late for enough Americans to wake out of their deep slumber of psychological neoteny, academic lobotomy, and programmed attitudinal obsolescence, in order to prevent a catastrophe of global proportions? We may soon see.

More on solar cycles here and here.

H/T Tom Nelson

Geoengineering the Next Ice Age

Climate is a cyclic phenomenon. We know that the Earth goes through long glacial ice ages punctuated by much shorter, warmer inter-glacial periods such as the one we are presently enjoying. Orthodox believers in the holy warmer religion, CAGW, believe strongly that our current inter-glacial is already too warm, and in danger of becoming even warmer--all because of human influence on climate. So what do they want to do? They want to magnify the human influence on climate beyond all belief. Do you think they have heard of "unintended consequences?"

In the new climate modeling study, which appears in the May 27-30 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bala and his colleagues Karl Taylor and Philip Duffy demonstrate that the sunshade geoengineering scheme could slow down the global water cycle.

The sunshade schemes include placing reflectors in space (found to be extremely costly), injecting sulfate or other reflective particles into the stratosphere to emulate the effect of a massive volcanic eruption (found to be dangerous to the water cycle and could destroy the ozone layer), or enhancing the reflectivity of clouds by injecting cloud condensation nuclei in the troposphere. When CO2 is doubled as predicted in the future, a 2 percent reduction in sunlight is sufficient to counter the surface warming.

...While the surface temperature response is the same for CO2 and solar forcings, the rainfall response can be very different. The team found that while climate sensitivity can be the same for different forcing mechanisms, the hydrological sensitivity is very different. The global mean rainfall increased approximately 4 percent for a doubling of CO2 and decreases by 6 percent for a reduction in sunlight in his modeling study. _Biopact

The study referred to here was based on a computer model. Understanding the limitations of computer models, we skeptical few must wonder why anyone would contemplate shutting down Earth's sunlight based upon such a "study." Even worse, the study's authors seem to be extremely confused about what they are trying to accomplish.

According to greenhouse theory, it is the increase of water vapour in the atmosphere that causes most of the runaway greenhouse positive feedback effect from the anthropogenic CO2 trigger. It seems that in such a case you would want to trigger more rainfall--to remove the water vapour from the atmosphere. According to the model, reducing sunlight would significantly reduce rainfall. Not what you would want at all.

The sun is already at an atypically low point in its cycle as it is. Solar scientists are anxiously watching to try to discover why their predictions for a hyper-active new solar cycle have been so abysmally wrong--or at least remarkably delayed. Proposing to further reduce the solar influence on Earth at this time appears incredibly naive and ideologically driven.

The difference between a glacial ice age and an inter-glacial period is not well understood. It is not actually known what would be required to trigger the next glaciation. The type of reduction in solar radiation impacting Earth that is being proposed appears to fall within the range of possible glaciation triggers. What type of carbon hysteria would cause scientists to propose such bold measures to counteract something that is not even a crisis--and is unlikely ever to become one?

The problem with grand geoengineering schemes, is that they are far more likely to generate unpredictable and unwelcome results, than to create the "perfect climate" that so many neo-utopian environmentalists of the PN/AL (psychologically neotenised / academically lobotomised) generation seem to expect as their due. What is needed is a movement back toward science and away from ideology.

Even "the new Al Gore" should be able to understand that.

Greener Cars, Snow to Antarctica, a Coming Ice Age

This prototype electric car has some impressive stats: a battery range of over 150 km per charge, and speeds up to 120 km/hr.

Staff and students at the University of South Australia have designed and built a prototype of what they reckon might be the future commuter car for Australian cities. Trev sounds rather impressive. He goes from 0 to 100kph in 10 secs, has a top speed of 120 km/h, with a travel range of 150+km between charges of his 7kWh 44kg lithium ion polymer battery....When charged from mains power he costs you $1 AUD per 100km to run, using what is said to be 1/5th of the energy of conventional car. TH

Speaking of lithium ion batteries, a recent announcement of Li ion nanowire batteries claimed a 10 times greater capacity than conventional Li ion batteries. New Energy and Fuel has taken a look at those claims, and carefully explains why it will take some time just to achieve a 3X or 5 X increase in energy density from nanowires in Li ion. But in the long run--with radical improvements in cathode design, the silicon nanowire modification should work very well.

On a colder front, Russian Acadamician Khabibullo Abdusamatov updates his predictions for a coming (little) ice age.

"A year ago, many meteorologists predicted that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would make the year 2007 the hottest in the last decade, but, fortunately, these predictions did not become reality," Abdusamatov said.

He also said that in 2008, global temperatures would drop slightly, rather than rise, due to unprecedentedly low solar radiation in the past 30 years, and would continue decreasing even if industrial emissions of carbon dioxide reach record levels.

By 2041, solar activity will reach its minimum according to a 200-year cycle, and a deep cooling period will hit the Earth approximately in 2055-2060. It will last for about 45-65 years, the scientist added. Source
via Tom Nelson

As for melting polar ice caps, think again. There has been a doubling of snow accumulation in parts of Antarctica, and prospects of rapid snowmelt in Greenland or Antarctica causing catastrophic sea level rise does not seem to be in the cards.

Personally, I like to think and act clean and green--within reason. Global warming catastrophism is not being green. It is being mindlessly faddish and fashionable. Being caught with your pants down when the next ice age hits could involve some painful frostbite.

Record Antarctic Sea Ice Sinks Cruise Ship

The southern hemisphere winter of 2007 was particularly cold and harsh. Antarctic sea ice was the highest ever recorded--and MS Explorer out of Toronto has paid the ultimate price for underestimating the ice.

A Canadian cruise ship struck submerged ice off Antarctica and began sinking Friday, but all 154 people on board, including Americans and Britons, took to lifeboats and were plucked to safety by another cruise liner. The Explorer struck submerged ice and began taking on water through its cracked hull. Photos released by the Chilean navy showed the ship later lying nearly on its side, surrounded by floating blocks of ice. Passenger and crew were picked up by a passing Norwegian cruise ship, the Nordnorge, after several hours in eight semi-rigid lifeboats and four life rafts.

Icecap

G.A.P. Adventures of Toronto owns the stricken MS Explorer. Company representative Susan Hayes revealed the reasoning behind the ship's dauntless charge into the ice hazard: "...it's highly unusual . . ." When the world is supposedly in the grip of "global warming" a ship's captain might be excused for not believing his own eyes, and supposing his small ship might get away with a little game of "dodge the ice." The captain of the Titanic felt the same way, though the northern hemisphere was barely out of the "Little Ice Age" at the time.

Earth's southern hemisphere has failed to show the same small bit of warming that has been seen in the northern hemisphere. Natural climate cycles depend upon solar effects and other cyclic weather phenomenon caused by the interaction of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and land masses with naturally varying incoming solar radiation. CO2's heat trapping effect should extend over the entire planet almost uniformly, although other non-anthropogenic climate forcings are distributed unequally over the globe.

Interestingly, while much was made of the 2007 northern summer sea ice, the media is largely silent about the record 2007 southern winter sea ice. Any ideas?

Is The Sun Preparing to Enter Hibernation?

The Earth's star, Sol, passes through natural cycles of magnetic activity. During a particularly slow sunspot cycle known as the Maunder Minimum, the Earth experienced the Little Ice Age.

There is talk about of an extended solar minimum occurring, or perhaps a recurrence of a Dalton or Maunder type minimum. There are signs that the sun’s activity is slowing. The solar wind has been decreasing in speed, and this is yet another indicator of a slowing in the suns magnetic dynamo.

...One thing is certain, based on past climate history and solar history, if in fact the suns magnetic activity slows, or collapses and we enter a prolonged period of little or no sunspot activity, we’ll see a global cooling trend.

Source

The climate of Earth is subject to many influences. While many climate scientists have won big-money research grants and considerable public fame by emphasizing the influence of anthropogenic CO2 on climate, in reality it is likely that many influences largely ignored by contemporary climate modelers will easily eclipse the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on world climate. Current climate modelers have a serious case of "tunnel vision." Time and continued observations are likely to cure this malady, although the subsequent weaning from big-money research grants is likely to be painful for them--unless they can dream up another "crisis-du-jour."

Hat tip Hall of Record

An interesting question: Does the Southern Hemisphere's exceptionally cold winter predict a coming cold winter for the Northern Hemisphere?

Eternal Mindshine of the Spotless Sun

We take the sun's light and heat for granted, particularly during the summer. But the sun's activity is cyclic. Today is the fifth day without a sunspot.

The 11 year long solar cycle is marked by two extremes, solar minimum and solar maximum. Solar minimum is the period of least solar activity in the solar cycle of the sun. During this time sunspot and solar flare activity diminishes, and often does not occur for days at a time.

When spots begin to appear on the sun once again, scientists know that the sun is heading into a new season of extreme solar activity. At the cycle's peak, solar maximum, the sun is continually peppered with spots, solar flares erupt, and the sun hurls billion-ton clouds of electrified gas into space.

Source

If you are interested in monitoring solar activity, check in with Solar Cycle 24.

Analysis of Solar Active Regions and Activity from 22/2100Z to 23/2100Z: Solar activity was very low. The visible disk remains spotless.

Solar Activity Forecast: Solar activity is expected to remain very low.

NASA scientists tell us that the solar conveyor, which helps determine solar activity, is expected to continue slowing--possibly triggering decades of sub-normal temperatures beginning around 2015 to 2020.

The Little Ice Age, from which we are still recovering, was thought to have been triggered by a solar minimum similar to the one we are expecting within the next decade or so. We need our Sunshine for warmth and food.

How ironic would it be for the sun to "fade" when oil supplies were beginning to plateau, and so many of the developed nations are firmly fixed in a politically correct prejudice against nuclear power? So many neotenates of pristine mind, who have never experienced hunger, cold, or deprivation. What in their experience could possibly have prepared them for the difficult decisions they will need to make?

Why, nothing at all. Which is why they will not be able to think the thing through, and make good decisions.

The Coming [Little] Ice Age

Global cooling has always been the real climate threat. When the sun's activity ramps downward, as it did during the Little Ice Age, there is very little that humans can do to moderate the killing effects of cooler weather.

Recent study of solar activity points toward another cooling period, beginning within the next ten to fifteen years.

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

...In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that "the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases." About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all.

Source
Climate theory is far from settled--in fact it is still a baby science, in its infancy. It is past time for intelligent observers to learn what is available on this topic--beyond what the media chooses to dish out. It is your responsibility to look beneath the veneer, to the vigorous debate below the surface.
The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science -- The Deniers Part III

Polar scientists on thin ice -- The Deniers Part IV

The original denier: into the cold -- The Deniers Part V

The sun moves climate change -- The Deniers Part VI

Will the sun cool us? -- The Deniers Part VII

The limits of predictability -- The Deniers Part VIII
Look to Mars for the truth on global warming -- The Deniers Part IX

Limited role for C02 -- the Deniers Part X

End the chill -- The Deniers Part XI

Clouded research -- The Deniers Part XII

Allegre's second thoughts -- The Deniers XIII

The heat's in the sun -- The Deniers XIV
Unsettled Science -- The Deniers XV
Bitten by the IPCC -- The Deniers XVI
Little ice age is still within us -- The Deniers XVII
Fighting climate 'fluff' -- The Deniers XVIII
Science, not politics -- The Deniers XIX
Gore's guru disagreed -- The Deniers XX
The ice-core man -- The Deniers XXI
Some restraint in Rome -- The Deniers XXII
Discounting logic -- The Deniers XXIII
Dire forecasts aren't new -- The Deniers XXIV
They call this a consensus? - Part XXV
NASA chief Michael Griffin silenced - Part XXVI
Forget warming - beware the new ice age - Part XXVII

Ice Age Theory: More on the Natural Cycle of Cooling and Warming

A new theory trying to explain the natural warming/cooling cycles of the earth's climate has been proposed by astrophysicist Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University.

In an article appearing in the journal New Scientist, Ehrlich describes how some of these oscillations reinforce one another and become long lasting temperature variations, with the sun's core temperature to oscillating around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years.

According to the scientist random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations between the two cycles which correspond to the Earth's ice ages.

Over the past million years, ice ages have occurred roughly every 100,000 years and before that roughly every 41,000 years.

Source.

We know the sun goes through natural cycles of radiative output that significantly affect the climate. Current alarmist factions in politics, the media, and computer modeling have tried to downplay the importance of solar forcing, for obvious reasons. Time is not on their side.

The earth naturally goes through cycles of cooling and warming. Whether this is caused by the changing orbital patterns of the earth around the sun, or whether it is due to a natural cycle of solar dimming and warming--or a combination of both with other natural and human activities--remains to be established.

Current climate patterns are not extraordinary, despite alarmist claims. The sooner the public is given a balanced assessment of the climate, the sooner it can turn to more significant concerns that need addressing.

Global Cooling--The More Frightening and More Likely Climate Catastrophe: Nuclear War in the Third World

Very few members of the general public are aware of the stealthy growth of the threat of a climate crisis beyond "global warming." Global cooling has always been a greater danger to humans than global warming. The recent little ice age resulted in a loss of life in the many millions. Another severe episode of global cooling would be immeasurably worse.

We've been warned about nuclear winter for decades now. Before catastrophic global warming became so fashionable in the popular media, nuclear winter was fashionable among politicians and journalists. But the nuclear winter that appears more likely with each passing day is not the same nuclear winter that Carl Sagan warned against. Sagan was worried about an all-out nuclear war between super-powers, with a resulting nuclear winter that could potentially finish humans for good.

The new concerns about nuclear winter center upon the growing likelihood of a small scale nuclear war that originates in a third world nation such as Iran or Pakistan. It seems that even a limited nuclear war could have devastating consequences for the world's climate--far more devastating than global warming is likely to be.

The scientists' research is a new twist on the nuclear winter hypothesis, which attracted attention in the early 1980s. Back then, planetary scientist Carl Sagan and others warned that a much larger nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union would lead to extensive atmospheric cooling and agricultural failure on a much greater scale and kill far more people.

The hypothesis sparked widespread scientific and political controversy. It faded from public attention toward the end of the Cold War, after which many U.S. strategists concluded that major nuclear wars that threatened all civilization were improbable.

But that judgment was premature, because of the recent emergence of small- and medium-sized nations that either have or are trying to develop nuclear weapons, the scientists warned. They said that worldwide, a regional nuclear war could kill tens of millions of people, partly because even a small number of nuclear blasts could generate enough smoke to trigger a global climate change.

The nuclear explosions and smoke could also damage the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, they said. That layer shields Earth's surface from cancer-causing radiation from the sun.

Initially, about 20 percent of the soot would be washed out of the atmosphere by rainfall, said Turco, who was one of the pioneers of the original nuclear winter hypothesis.

However, much of the rest of the soot would rise skyward and warm as it was baked by the sun. That warming would make the soot more buoyant and force it even higher into the sky until it penetrated the stratosphere -- just above the tops of thunderclouds -- where high-speed winds would quickly spread the soot throughout the atmosphere, Turco and his colleagues said.

Source.

Personally, I think the threat of severe global cooling from a low level nuclear war in the third world is overblown. The threat of global cooling, on the other hand, is dire enough to be taken seriously. Climate on earth is a chaotic phenomenon--constantly changing, and not well simulated by current overly simplistic climate models. There is no reason to believe these models by Turco et al are any better. Nevertheless, long before humans reached the top of the food chain, earth's climate changed abruptly and unpredictably.

If the northern hemisphere suffers another Little Ice Age scale disaster, billions of people would be a risk of starvation, or dying of violence or ordinarily preventable disease.

It is not surprising that the media focuses on the less likely and less dangerous phenomenon of "catastrophic global warming." The crisis du jour is all the media, and most politicians understand. Thinking people, on the other hand, must look at all the possibilities--all the possible etiologies.