Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

Re: Yep

"Should be a 'heated' discussion"

It doesn't get off to a bright start, though:

"This could overturn decades of received wisdom on such things as CO2 emissions, and lead to radical shifts in government policy worldwide."

How solar activity somehow overturns the documented effects of carbon dioxide (and people don't need to start whining about whole-climate-level effects and the jury being out and all that, but just concentrate on the laboratory stuff, if that doesn't rock their little boat as well) remains yet another Lewis Page mystery of science.

Or maybe the reference to overturning "received wisdom" concerns Orlowski, Lawson and pals who may suddenly develop a zeal for bioengineering.

Denier?

Woman's hosiery? And here I was thinking ancient french coinage. Mine's the one with the numismatist manual in the pocket!

not right

"There isn't a food shortage just uneven distribution."

I was reading about this a while ago. There are countries where people are starving that are growing plenty of food, but because of global markets , the workers that grew the crops cant afford to buy them.

Maxima to Minima

"Climate change deniers have been claiming point blank that the sun is getting into a hotter cycle causing the recent global warming."

I don't know any who have. We've gone from a period of unusually high solar activity as solar activity ramped up following the Dalton Minimum. As activity increased, it seems to have gotten warmer. Funny that. The Modern Maximum peaked around 1950, then again in 1990. So did warming. Funny that. Now we've been in minima mode for a few years and the rate of global warming has decreased, despite record amounts of CO2. Funny that.

The IPCC didn't think much of solar variability when it cobbled together AR4 and only devoted a couple of pages to it. The assumption was it didn't vary much, so the great space heater in the sky couldn't possibly be responsible for variations in climate. Subsequent data from instruments like SORCE or the observatories show it varies more than originally expected. Solar scientists haven't been the biggest beneficiaries of AGW handouts but still doing research like the stuff reported here. They've now had more opportunity to study solar variability during a maxima, and now into a minima.

Less funny is if Svensmark's GCR theory is correct. Declining Earth magnetic field plus declining solar activity should mean more GCR's, and if they cause negative feedback and more cooling making any Minima worse. Then again, it may all be a bit '70s and a repeat of ice age fears might be exagerated. If it does get cold, it'll also mean datacentres have an easier time cooling.

@stratofish

Re: Climate change deniers have been claiming point blank that the sun is getting into a hotter cycle causing the recent global warming.

And there was me thinking that it was the opposite and that those claiming warming had to change it to climate change because the warming stopped happening over the last few years.

Now that would tend to support this theory wouldn't it.

Reference: See the comments about having to explain something they couldn't understand in the famous email releases.

Feralmonkey

Um no we have been saying that climate changes and mankind can do piss all to stop it or push it around co2 is the only greenhouse gas that mankind puts into the atmosphere in any real quantities so that was the only thing the warmista's could hang their religion on with the sun going quiet their religion will go just as quiet.

@stratofish

"Why would they issue a rebuttal on proven and widely accepted facts?"

Because the IPCC is offering a hypothesis that the facts don't support. It's based on the premise that, "Gee, well, we can't think what ELSE it must be other than anthropogenic CO2 emissions, so our money is on anthropogenic CO2 emissions".

You don't appear to know the difference - back to school.

Meat production is largely a way to keep grain consumption high.

What kind of twisted reasoning is that? Meat farmers buy grain and sell meat, because they make a profit. Grain farmers grow grain and sell it to meat farmers because they make a profit. Consumers buy meat rather than grain because they like it better and can afford to pay for it.

As others have pointed out, there is no world food shortage. We could easily produce much more food than we do now, if there was a market for it. Millions of poor people are starving? Sure, but that's because they don't have the money to buy food, not because the food doesn't exist, or couldn't be easily produced. Western governments have been known to pay farmers NOT to produce food.

You might equally well argue that there must be a world Ferrari shortage, because most people haven't got one and can't afford one.

@Charles Manning...

I don't think you really get it.

Look where your farmland is located.

Here in the Midwest of the US... you're going to continue to see more rain and flooding which will have a negative impact on the crops. Its not just the cold temp but the overall weather patterns and timing.

You will see droughts continue where it was once lush farmlands.

You could potentially see blight on crops or cross contamination of bacteria causing food to be destroyed en mass. (See Germany).

I agree this is nothing to panic about, but I don't agree that we will continue to sustain good growing conditions globally.

Its not just a shift in the sun's solar flare rate, but also a shift in the earth's magnetic poles that can have a greater impact that human's CO2 output. But don't tell the doomsday climate 'experts' that.

That's because

The starving people die and the landwhales just place a burden on the health sector that sustains their lumpen lives.

Re: @AC

>No, more problematic than ironic, unless you have some convenient way of causing the right amount of warming, but with a simple off-switch for when the sunspots come back.

The ramifications for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) alarmists of a cooling world are major.

Their pet CAGW theory relies on solar influence being minor and +ve feedbacks being major. Or in other words their theory (and the IPCCs) is that a maunder minimum type event would only decrease the amount of warming, not stop it.

Should a maunder minimum type event result in temperatures decreasing then it means that the impact of solar changes is greater than the impact of CO2 changes and this would overturn pretty much all of the alarmists theories. It would also mean the +ve feedbacks from CO2 are small (or even -ve) and any possible increase in temperature from a doubling of CO2 would not cause a catastrophe.

Instantly invalidated by a cooling world as a result of lower solar activity would be:

1. All computer models that assume minor solar influence (all of the ones the IPCC rely on)

2. All computer models that assume large +ve feedbacks (nearly all the IPCC models)

3. From 1 and 2 all scenarios with accelerating sea level rises.

Without 1,2 and 3 CAGW is dead and buried.

So in answer to your comment, there is no need for an off switch when solar activity ramps back up because, under the scenario presented, there would be nothing to switch off.

"Well, it does give us 70 years to work out what the Physics of greenhouse gases actually are."

Yep. Panic over.

Time for some real science rather than press releases from people with degrees in Sustainability from the Polytechnic of Lunn.

Absolutely correct. Scientists aren't really helping any cause other than their own.

"It is also a sad fact of life that screaming "catastrophe" is more likely to get you funding and published than saying "no problem here, move along". This is not just a problem in climate research, but in all research. Just think back over how many times you have heard of one imminent catastrophe or another only for it never to materialise."

Absolutely correct.

Take the Big-C for example. If say we'd seen an actual 0.1% 'improvement' prognosis for every one of those new or proposed cancer treatment, or cures, or proposed cures etc. that I've actually heard of in the media or read about in science journals such as 'Science', 'Nature' etc. since I first became aware of the dreaded disease in the 1950s, then Cancer would have been eliminated years ago.

Fact one is that most of these claims are bunkum, and fact two the population at large has awoken to them--if you can't believe claims about fusion, or cold fusion, or cancer, or any other number of similar bullshit claims then why should one believe claims about climate change--even if they're true?

More often than not, the fact is that someone who is on the 'funding circuit' makes outrageous claims about a cure then absolutely nothing comes of it. And scientists don't seem the slightest bit worried about getting funding by crying 'Fire' or 'Wolf' as clearly it often works. The trouble is that with an increasingly interconnected population, increasing numbers of people are becoming aware of this deception.

Thus, it's little wonder that climate scientists, Jones et al, have been targeted as liars and so on. For not only have they been crying "Wolf" for far too long but also their extraordinary claims--whether correct or otherwise--require extraordinary proofs but they've none except a few trends and possibly inaccurate models. Exemplary proof they've none.

The best they can do is some inconclusive modelling and rough measurements which may well be correct but it's not enough to help very much, as science has had a spectacular fall from grace from about 1960 because of the disingenuous behaviour of many scientists.

Even if science could deliver, it's credibility is shot. Trouble is, none of these scientists has sufficient altruism for him to enter politics or such where he could make a difference. Right, scientist have locked themselves away from realpolitik and there's stuff-all indication that a sufficient number of them will enter the real world to make any real difference anytime soon.