Global Cooling – Not Good News

Summer is coming soon to the southern end of our planet and it’s getting cool! At the exact point furthest east in all the Americas here in Brazil, the place where the sun peeks its head up first, the wind is blowing hard every few days sending cool air into the subtropics. Great news because our air conditioning bill has plunged but not so good news if current trends continue!

In Australia it has been unseasonably cold as well. In July it was reported that nearly 14 percent of New South Wales wheat production was impacted by frost. Cold weather across Australia’s two largest wheat-growing states has slowed crop growth, officials said, threatening yields in the world’s fourth-largest exporter. Canberra Australia has experienced its coldest October in 40 years and kangaroos are jumping through snow in late spring.

Steven Hayward writes, “Did you know that climate change kills? At least that’s the claim out in a new study yesterday, as reported in The Daily Beast, which, last I checked, relies heavily upon a hydrocarbon-intensive energy system to exist. Anyway, according to the latest CO2-breathless story, climate change kills 400,000 people a year, and costs the global economy $1.2 trillion. Jeepers: Maybe the climate—or Mother Nature herself—should come with a warning label like cigarette packs.”

Today’s headlines: Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it. Figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discerniblerise in aggregate global temperatures.

The DailyMail reports, “The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported. This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010—a very warm year. Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.”

Currently most of the U.S. is experiencing unusually cool weather. Some parts of northern Minnesota have already gotten more than a foot of snow.

A reader at Watts Up With That went to the trouble of charting the high and low temperature records that were set during the week of October 1 through October 8. (You might not realize this from news coverage, but high and low temperature records are being set, somewhere, all the time.)

First the data:

Total Records: 2079
Rainfall: 402
Snowfall: 74
High Temperatures: 138
Low Temperatures: 386
Lowest Max Temperatures: 768
Highest Min Temperatures: 311
Total number of high temperature type records: 138 + 311 = 449
Total number of low temperature type records: 386 + 768 = 1154
Source: NOAA data via HW Records Center.

Here are all of the temperature records for the week of October 1 through October 8 plotted on the map:

Global Cooling: Be Very Afraid

In this essay of warning we read some very scary things indeed based on the predictions of this chart:

In Perth, Australia I’m staying with one of the country’s most brilliant polymaths David Archibald. This morning, he treated to me to a scary presentation he recently delivered to the Institute of World Policy in Washington, DC, where he is a visiting fellow. The title is Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, representing the four threats that Archibald believes are the ones we should most fear.

The four horsemen, i.e. great challenges the world will soon have to face, are: a decreasing extraction of oil, causing growing prices of energy and, by extension, food; Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, which threatens proliferation and, perhaps, even a nuclear war in the region; rapid population growth in the Middle East and North Africa coupled with higher food imports in those regions, which spells mass starvation; and a 210-year climate cooling cycle.

I’m not sure I’m quite as pessimistic as Archibald is on peak oil and shale gas—the latter, he estimates, is only good for another twenty years (the real energy solution, he reckons, is thorium reactors). But the area where I really hope he is wrong is on global cooling. If his analysis of declining sunspot activity is correct, then global mean temperatures are going to decline by about 2° C by 2040—completely undoing all that lovely beneficial (but rather meager 0.8° C) global warming we have experienced in the last 150 years.

It will mean longer, colder winters and cooler summers. But far worse than the discomfort will be the effect it has on grain production. The shift in latitudes at which corn and wheat can be grown will be the equivalent of losing a belt 300 kilometers wide all around the world, leading to the loss perhaps 400 million tons per annum of grain. The result will be raising food prices, grain shortages—and a 50% likelihood of the kind of volcanic-influenced disaster that led to the horrors of the 1816 Year Without A Summer, precipitating crop failures, weird Turner sunsets, and 200,000 deaths in Europe alone.

Still there will be at least one consolation. Phil Jones, Michael Mann, James Hansen and Al Gore will all, most likely, still be around to see their entire religious belief system collapsing around their ears.

Global Cooling Goes Mainstream

Fox News reported early in the year that, “A recent surge in scorching solar flares millions of miles long comes from a peak in the sun’s activity cycle. Yet ‘Cycle 25,’ the next 11-year activity phase, will be one of the weakest in centuries, NASA predicts—a decrease that will mean fewer flares and more fleece sweaters. “If solar output reduced below that seen [in the late 1600s] the global temperature reduction would be 0.13° C,” the U.K. Met Office said. That’s not a big change, of course. But since global air temperatures have remained more or less flat over the past 12 years, according to the newest climate data, the coming lull in the sun’s activity may mean a decrease in world temperatures.” See the beginning of this video from Fox to see more science that indicates we are moving in a cooling direction.

Joe Bastardi, one of the more prominent weathermen, was alarmed and on high alert after the dramatic turnaround in weather in August. He said that it had to be one of the greatest turnarounds in temps in U.S. history. The 16-day means of over 5° C below normal seem too cold to me,” he said. “Could be the coldest two-week period in U.S. history in August for the plains.”

2012-10-17 20:42:50

Source: http://blog.imva.info/world-affairs/global-cooling-good-news/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=global-cooling-good-news