Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age. Average magnetic field …
"This could overturn decades of received wisdom on such things as CO2 emissions, and lead to radical shifts in government policy worldwide"
How? No-one is actively doing anything to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Or did you mean that it's going to get so cold that the CO2 will freeze out of the air in a delightful display of physics?
I've just whistled for a fast pick up from the mothership, so i'll be off this stinking rock before you monkeys start eating each other when all your cabbages are under 6 feet of ice for 8 months of the year.So long losers!
PS I've given you a 1 out of 5 star planet rating - what with the religious wars, impending cannibalism and everything ever transmitted by Fox news, the whole place is just a bit too "council"
Can anyone just answer this:
1) Previous eras in the Earth's history has been warmer? How come 'everyone' are so worried about a small increase now?
2) Every human (or animal) breathes oxygene and expells CO2. Doesn't the mere existance of mammals disturb our climate? If we abandoned fossil fuels and trippled or quadrupled the number of humans, what effect would this have on the CO2 level?
I enjoy a good doomsday prophecy as the next guy, but before we move all of our industry to third world countries, let us at least sit down and have a good think about it.
FWIW: I'm from Norway and our government taxes CO2 quite heavily. Yet they continue producing oil AND search for new areas to drill for oil. Does anyone else here see the beauty of that scheme?
The idea that we're heading into a maunder minimum has been around for a few years, what's happened now is that some more researchers have published on the topic & they may well be right.
According to GWPF that means "The Earth - far from facing a global warming problem - is actually headed into a mini ice age"
However
In 2010 researchers calculated what would happen to global temperatures if a grand minimum started now and continued until 2100. They found that it would lower temperatures by a maximum of 0.3 °C
greenhouse gas emissions are predicted to increase temperature by anything from 2 °C (Sceptiks) to 4.5 °C (Alarmists) by 2100
So in the Best Case scenario a rise of 2 °C would be reduced to 1.7 °C
Now Solar Minimums are pretty unpredictable things, the figures could be wrong but I wouldn't bet on them being that far out & even if they were, a grand minimum will only delay the problem a bit not fix it permanently. We are actually overdue a proper ice age though, it will come, sometime in the next half a million years or so, holding your breath for that one might be a better bet than a flutter on a mini ice age.
From TFA:
In response to news inquiries and stories, Dr. Frank Hill issued a follow-up statement:
"We are NOT predicting a mini-ice age. We are predicting the behavior of the solar cycle. In my opinion, it is a huge leap from that to an abrupt global cooling, since the connections between solar activity and climate are still very poorly understood. My understanding is that current calculations suggest only a 0.3 degree C decrease from a Maunder-like minimum, too small for an ice age. It is unfortunate that the global warming/cooling studies have become so politically polarizing."
Jeez. Talk about knee-jerk reactions, hundreds of comments later.
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It's all part of the multi-trillion dollar global socialist corruption conspiracy hysteria socialism corruption unscientific omg omg socialists omg honest tax payers' money climategate corruption wind farm conspiracy omg hockey stick schmockey stick socialism "scandal" scandal. I heard the editors of New Scientist all fly around in private jets bought by Al Gore using money that he stole from YOUR bank account. Sheeple.
You do realise that we still are technically in an Ice Age... An Ice Age is when the poles of a planet are snow covered/frozen, as with our planet, our North and South poles are snow covered, therefore we are still in an Ice Age...
So basically our Ice Age is going to get worse...
why don't the climate change advocates and the climate change deniers get together, shut the fuck up and crawl back under the rock they came from. Not one of you dozy c**ts has the slightest clue about the climate and what its going to do so fuck off wasting everyone's time. Oh and by the way, I include those so called 'professional' meteorologists in this - you seem to think that looking out of the window and publishing the fact that its raining/sunny is a weather forecast - guess what dullards, its not.
first of all "Hang them all" and then hack their corpses and feed them to the dogs...
But besides of the euphoria I just found out that there seems to be a little bit of 'bad science'here, check this out:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon-14_with_activity_labels.png
and this
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Sunspot_Numbers.png
Well, it seems that we are going to an expected minimum and that the max will take some time ANYWAY. But well, it's just graphics, we all know how the all the graphics are crated by the climate hippies and the Illuminati Alien Government of Atlantis... But this will not stop us from having a good time!!!!
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/17/are-we-headed-for-a-new-ice-age/
>"The answer — spoiler alert! — is almost certainly "no". I want to make sure that’s clear, because I will bet essentially any amount of money that some climate change denial sites will run with this story and claim that we don’t need to worry about global warming. That’s baloney, and what follows is why."
Hey Lewis. Why don't you take a read how a real scientist interprets self-publicising press releases. Note in particular the use of skepticism to interpret data, rather than wish-fulfilment to confirm pre-existing dogmatic beliefs.
[Fukushima icon]
Can they *backcast*.
Given your model with the *known* data for the last say 50 years (1960-2010) can they deliver the gross climate over that period?
How many times do they have to be run? What proportion of those runs come *close* to what happened?
In fact I'd like to see it run as an international contest.
If you can show you can do the *last* 50 years you should have a shot at the next 50 years.
And that's a timescale *most* people will be concerned about as (except for some areas of Glasgow in the UK) they have a pretty fair chance of being *alive* for it.
There is one thing that both Warmists and Deniers agree on, and that is that hydrocarbon fuel reserves are limited. We need to conserve coal, oil etc until a replacement is found.
Yet, carbon capture technology threatens to significantly reduce the efficiency of hydrocarbon-based power generation. This might or might not prevent 'global warming' but it will have one certain result, namely that we run out of fuel sooner than otherwise.
So, if we squander our fuel reserves on 'carbon capture' and THEN suffer a mini ice-age, oh boy will we look daft. Not only will we have made temperatures even lower, but we won't have any heating either.
If the lead paragraph had stopped after "...lengthy spell of low solar activity" it would have been accurate.
Jumping to the conclusion and indicating that solar physicists accept the rest, about heading to a mini ice age in a few decades, is rubbish, for a few reasons.
First, his graph of the last few years just shows the downward leg of the typical 11 year up-down solar cycle. It would have been much more honest to show the full cycle. While the recent few years of cooling are an anomaly and interesting, they need to be seen in context.
More important is to understand the scale of impact he is implying. The full range of solar cycles for many centuries adjusts the solar energy we receive by about 0.3 watts per square meter of the Earth's surface. That is about one tenth of one percent of the 342 watts received globally, enough to have some effect.
The problem is that greenhouse gases, largely carbon dioxide, now have a warming effect measured at 2.4 watts per sq m, according to NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen. That means the greenhouse warming effect is about 80 times stronger than the solar cooling effect. With our current emissions, it is hard to see how there could ever be another ice age.
The recent cold winters and snow in much of Europe and North America, are largely due to a change in the lattitude of the jet stream. While many of us have been colder, the Arctic has been MUCH warmer than normal--accelerating the melting. Overall Earth had the warmest year on record in 2010, and it was a decade of record warmth.
For anyone interested, all of the above are explained and illustrated on my own blog, johnenglander.net as well as many other good science sites, like skepticalscience.com
The whole issue of warming/cooling is "complex"
I work with climate physicists. They _hate_ the media "chicken little" syndrome.
The sun has warmed and cooled for millions of years and the amount of change is known to a pretty good accuracy. The recent issue is that increases in solar output (up to this dropoff) did not fully account for increases in global temperature (and FWIW the sun is 50% brighter than it was a couple of hundred million years ago)
Yes, a Maunder Minimum will result in a slightly cooler earth, BUT the indications are that antropgenic-generated greenhouse warming effects (ie, us burning fuels) will outweigh this cooling effect. When Solar output rises, temperatures will too.
Long-term trends (millions of years) have this as a tiny blip. Over those kinds of timescales everything adapts. The issue is rapid (century-scale) warming events and how the planet's biological systems can adjust to cope. Indications are that the changes are happening too fast for adaption.
As for sea level rises - the last 9000 years have seen a remarkably stable period of sea level - unusually stable. We have been living through a period of almost unnatural "calm" which appears to be ending for various reasons. The only reason it's an issue is because many cities are low lying and people aren't thinking of the multi decade timescales available to move - there will be natural retreats from rising seas just as there have always been (Lots of english villages have been "lost to the sea" in history, it's not unusual, just happening at a time when we think of our cities as "permanent" - they're not.).
FWIW climate physicists spend an inordinate amount of time "backcasting" to try and see if the calculations match reality (for what levels of reality can be determined from fossil records and tree rings, etc etc)
The single biggest problem with predicting anything is that the earth's levels of atmospheric CO2 and other pollutants never seem to have changed so much in such a short period (perhaps if they did in the fossil records it'd be proof of ancient advanced civilisations).
"We" (there is no we) quite simply don't know what's going to happen next. Everything is educated guesswork until it happens.
The fighting is because using calculations which have worked in the past give wildly varying answers for extrapolations into the future. Some trends are clear but the question is "will we warm a lot, or a little - and over what time period?"
Additionally - and something most physicists don't take into account - is what happens if deep ocean methane hydrates get warm enough to bubble out? This happened about 10,000 years ago off the coast of Norway (at the end of the last ice age) and was accompanied by sharp rises in both sea level and temperature - where "sharp" is "a period of a few hundred years".
Whatever happens, there won't be a Waterworld and civilisation is unlikely to collapse, but predicting what's going to happen is as important for predicting migration trends as anything else (what happens if the Sahara desert doubles its area for instance?)
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