BYE BYE TO GLOBAL WARMING

GLOBAL WARMING FADES IN A WAVE OF CHANGE

Andrew McKillop

June 2011

Time was, as recently as 2008, when Al Gore could demand and get $ 100 000 for a 45-minute climate hysteria talkshow, plus his expenses including the fuel for his Gulfstream jet and the best hotel room money can buy. Times have changed, and Mr Gore talks less and much less loud today in 2011, following a series of disasters for Doom Boomers selling global warming catastrophe.

It might not happen, it also might never have happened. Global warming outbreaks of the magnitude peddled by the Boomers have always had a whole range of factors, cyclic or other, that prevent them attaining catastrophic intensity – except if we go back a lot further than 20 million years into the past. When human beings like you, me or Mr Al Gore simply didnt exist.

To be sure the folksy tune of “Nature will look after us” is also peddled by Big Business defenders of doing nothing, and pretenders there is no such thing as climate change. Full stop and end of paragraph.

What in fact we have is coinciding change. Just one monitored parameter alone, the bugaboo of atmospheric CO2 will likely not yield significant symptoms enabling us to diagnose imminent and massive climate change – notably sudden cooling or sudden heating – but what can look like unrelated trends for several monitored parameters can start co-evolving. They start running together and building change, not at all the theory of tipping points but the start of a new system, as the old one shifts into instability, weakens and moves to the status of a sub-system.

MAUNDER MINIMUM

(Sunspot cycles since 1600  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sunspot_Numbers.png)

In the last 1000 years, and forgetting all about Greenland, Iceland and why the icy one was called green by Viking and Scandinavian colonists, and the green one was called icy, climatologists and historians have no problem about accepting – and no possibility of denying – Europe’s Little Ice Age of around 1650 to 1750. This little ice age was particularly big in its impacts, starting with climate cooling, lower crop yields, forced emigration, social strife, religious wars, European culture change and the growth of scientific rationalism, humanitarian values and the desire for democracy.

The Maunder Minimum is shorthand for the 1645-1715 period of extreme low sunspot activity and reduced “stirring” of the solar crust or surface, both north-south and east-west. The fall in solar output received at the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere was the seemingly tiny amount of 0.1%-0.2%, but global warming boomers ask us to get scared about CO2 levels in the atmosphere rising from 0.038% today, to perhaps 0.045% by 2040, if the global economy hangs together that long.

Sunspots look small, to us here on Earth at about 149 million kilometres away, but they can cover ten to a hundred million square kilometres of the Sun’s surface. These “small” dark spots are conceived by modern astrophysicists to be intense bubbles of magnetic energy which somehow cool the hot gases inside them, making them appear darker compared with the surrounding solar subsurface, surface and atmosphere in chemical and nuclear fusion. These “cool” bubbles are quite often the size of the Earth (128 million sq kms) and their instantaneous impact on solar flux, or output can attain + or – 7% from any one average value in their local region of the giant Sun.

Recovery from the 70-year Maunder Minimum was slow and unsure, with a relapse into very low levels of sunspot activity, but for a shorter period through 1790-1830, called the Dalton Minimum for meteorologist John Dalton.

This very well-monitored period was the last time before 19 December 2010 that no sunspot was visible on the Sun’s surface.

During the 1790-1830 minimum, we can note, global temperatures plummeted like they did in the “mother cycle” of the Maunder Minimum, with for example the German Oberlach climate station reporting a 2.05°C decline over 20 years and “The Year With No Summer” of 1816. The most alarmist of global warming boomers feel able to say that a temprise of around 1 – 2 degrees centigrade is possible “by about 2075″, if global consumers do not get hungry enough for the right ecological gadgets and gimmicks and keep spewing CO2 into the atmosphere.

We have, today in 2011, the prospect of a much faster and bigger change in temperatures: downwards. The fall in temperatures at the entry to a sunspot minimum cycle is always rapid. During the Maunder and Dalton cycles, temperatures fell within 10 years of cycle entry, with early, consistent and progressive change of related indicators and effects. For agriculture and food this especially concerned falls in average soil moisture and water availability for crops. 

VOLCANIC MAXIMUM – TEMPERATURE MINIMUM

Much more controversial, less sure, but highly possible are volcanic and seismic, or geotectonic cycles which coincide with sunspot cycles – noting that all upticks in volcanic activity reduce global temperatures. The overlap of cycles is not at all necessarily causal. Cyclic periods or lifetimes for geotectonic, seismic and volcanic outbreaks may simply sometimes coincide with solar sunspot cycles.

Outbreaks of volcanic activity are usually unexpected – and can be catastrophic. Peru’s 1601  Huaynaputina eruption was large enough to be felt worldwide, but the volcano’s name itself means ‘New Volcano’. The explosion probably injected as much as 12 cubic kilometres of ash high into the atmosphere in the first 2 days. Analysis of tree ring data throughout the Northern Hemisphere indicate that 1601 was, on average, the coldest year out of the last 600 years, only rivalled by the coldest years in the Maunder Minimum, and not equalled in the shorter Dalton period. In Switzerland, 1601 was a year of record cold. In Estonia, the winter of 1601–1602 was the coldest in a 500-year period. In Latvia, ice breakup records for the harbor at Riga shows the winter was the worst in the 485 years before today. In Sweden, record amounts of snow in the winter of 1601 were followed in the spring by record floods. The Russian famine of 1601–1603 was Russia’s worst ever in terms of population loss, killing about two million people, a third of Russia’s population at that time, and weakening Russia so much that it was easily invaded and occupied by the Polish Commonwealth linking Poland with several East European countries of today. By 1606, we can note, the climate chilling effects had disappeared but sunspot activity was already falling consistently, dragging down average temperatures.

Timing volcanic cycles is not easy, making their prediction very difficult. At the longest-possible scale of the volcanic “mother cycle”, of geotectonic cycles, we can take the probable – but unprovable – Gondwana breakup and reconstitution cycle. In brief, about every 250 million years the Earth’s continents fuze into a single continuous super-continent with a mega ocean around it. They then break apart, reaching a maximum separation or continental isolation which was last reached about 50 million years ago, and had major effects on plant and animal evolution. Volcanic cycles therefore certainly have hyper-long periods, like sunspot cycles. Although the best known of these are 11-year and 22-year, they also extend to a known 400-year sunspot cycle, and probable much longer cycles.

Short-run volcanic cycles however also certainly exist. Some show quite close coincidence with the best known and powerful 11-year and 22-year sunspot cycles. In brief and since the early 1990s, world volcanic, seismic and geotectonic activity has been rising, with the high sunspot cycle of 1988-1999. More specifically, the probable date of entry to the current sunspot cycle was the very start of 2010, even late 2009, and not some period later on in year 2010. The possibly sunspot-triggered volcanic cycle can then act independently, and unrelated to a sudden change – upwards or downwards – in sunspot activity.

The already monitored and proven fall in the expected number of sunspots, for what should be an uptrending solar cycle (cycle 24 of 2010-2021) shows close similarity for entry to the well-monitored Dalton cycle, but more important for possible linkage with volcanoes, it also corresponds well with observed and much larger global volcanic activity since late 2009. The two mega factors in global climate change – volcano and sunspot cycles – can therefore shift in and out of interdependence, pursuing totally different pathways, but leaving a new system in place.

For us here on Earth this can mean fast climate cooling, much drier conditions, bad harvests and a host of other predictable impacts, and plenty of them scary.

Copyright AMK 2011