Alan Lammey, Texas Energy Analyst, Houston
Four scientists, four scenarios, four more or less similar conclusions without actually saying it outright — the global warming trend is done, and a cooling trend is about to kick in. The implication: Future energy price response is likely to be significant.
Late last month, some leading climatologists and meteorologists met in New York at the Energy Business Watch Climate and Hurricane Forum. The theme of the forum strongly suggested that a period of global cooling is about emerge, though possible concerns for a political backlash kept it from being spelled out.
However, the message was loud and clear, a cyclical global warming trend may be coming to an end for a variety of reasons, and a new cooling cycle could impact the energy markets in a big way.
Words like “highly possible,” “likely” or “reasonably convincing” about what may soon occur were used frequently. Then there were other words like “mass pattern shift” and “wholesale change in anomalies” and “changes in global circulation.”
Noted presenters, such as William Gray, Harry van Loon, Rol Madden and Dave Melita, signaled in the strongest terms that huge climate changes are afoot. Each weather guru, from a different angle, suggested that global warming is part of a cycle that is nearing an end. All agreed the earth is in a warm cycle right now, and has been for a while, but that is about to change significantly.
However, amid all of the highly suggestive rhetoric, none of the weather and climate pundits said outright that a global cooling trend is about to replace the global warming trend in a shift that could begin as early as next year.
Van Loon spoke about his theories of solar storms and how, combined with, or because of these storms, the Earth has been on a relative roller coaster of climate cycles. For the past 250 years, he said, global climate highs and lows have followed the broad pattern of low and high solar activity. And shorter 11-year sunspot cycles are even more easily correlated to global temperatures.
It was cooler from 1883 to 1928 when there was low solar activity, he said, and it has been warmer since 1947 with increased solar activity.
“We are on our way out of the latest (warming) cycle, and are headed for a new cycle of low (solar) activity,” van Loon said. “There is a change coming. We may see 180-degree changes in anomalies during high and low sunspot periods. There were three global climate changes in the last century, there is a change coming now.”
Meanwhile, Madden noted that while temperature forecasts longer than one to two weeks out has improved, “what has really gotten much better is climate forecasting … predicting the change in the mean,” he said.
And the drivers impacting climate suggest a shift to cooler sea surface temperatures, he said.
Perhaps the best known speaker was Colorado State University’s Gray, founder of the school’s famed hurricane research team. Gray spoke about multi-decade periods of warming and cooling and how global climate flux has been the norm for as long as there have been records.
Gray has taken quite a bit of political heat for insistence that global warming is not a man-made condition. Man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) is negligible, he said, compared to the amount of CO2 Mother Nature makes and disposes of each day or century.
“We’ve reached the top of the heat cycle,” he said. “The next 10 years will be hardly any warmer than the last 10 years.”
Finally, climate scientist Melita spoke of a new phase in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
“I’m looking at a new, cold-negative phase, though it won’t effect this summer, fall or winter ’08,” he said.
Conference host, analyst and forecaster Andy Weissman closed the conference by addressing how natural gas prices and policy debates would be impacted by a possible climate shift that could leave the market short gas.
This would be especially problematic if gas use for power generation were substantially increased at the expense of better alternatives.
“If we’re about to shift into another natural climate cycle, we can’t do it without coal-fired generation. So the policy debate has to change,” he said. “Coal has to be back on the table if we’re ever going to meet our energy needs.”
As for natural gas: “Next year, may see a bit of price softening,” Weissman said. “After that, fogetaboutit!”.
Looks like at least some businessmen are more interested in an unbiased look at the climate than just a rehash of political correctness. After all, the decisions they have to make today must be based on what the future holds and it’s tough to base such decisions on a love for a particular theory. Let’s just hope that the cooling isn’t too severe or long-lasting.
I can understand the way the experts qualified their projections. I think it’s becoming obvious that the climate system is much more complicated than AGW proponents would have us believe. As an example, here’s something I said on another blog about the effect of aerosols. A study done over the Indian Ocean to assess the impact of the aerosols drifting down from the Indian subcontinent came up with what appears to be a counterintuitive result. They found that the pollution was resulting in warming rather than the expected cooling. This appears to be a regional effect. {Wish I could find that study now.} This suggests that even with something as simple as aerosols a great deal more study is needed to determine how and why they impact climate. The Indian study suggested that the aerosols impacted cloud formation and water droplet formation in the clouds. This just demonstrates that understanding the mechanisms affecting climate are far more complex than AGW proponents would have us believe. Perhaps the aerosols that were in the atmosphere in the Northern Hemisphere from 1940 to 1970 actually lessened the cooling that occurred and their removal happened just at the time that the climate again started to warm due to increased solar activity. The problem with AGW theory is that it treats the climate system as existing almost in a steady state and any warming that happens is a result of increases in a minor trace gas {CO2}. We’ve still got a very long way to go.
I only wish that one of Al (I play a scientist on TV) Gore’s vacation houses gets a ton of snow on his roof this winter on one of his vacation houses (in Maui?) and it caves in!
[…] we are in the great cycle of the climate and have an interesting analysis of the situation. From Watts Up With That website: Four scientists, four scenarios, four more or less similar conclusions without actually […]
The energy industry would be most interested in what climate is going to do because it impacts demand for their products.
It should be noted that the energy industries don’t really care whether their products are used for air-conditioning in a warming scenario, or heating in a cooling scenario. In business, a sale is a sale, as long as the cheque clears.
Gray has taken quite a bit of political heat for insistence that global warming is not a man-made condition. Man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) is negligible, he said, compared to the amount of CO2 Mother Nature makes and disposes of each day or century.
That point has been made here repeatedly. The fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide is at the very low end of its range geologically, and has been at a concentration of many thousand parts per million for millions of years at a time in the past [compared with today’s less than 400 ppm], without ever causing runaway global warming, falsifies the CO2/global warming catastrophe hypothesis being put forth by James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, the UN and many others.
Whenever I hear anyone in the government, including NASA, GISS, etc., scaremongering about CO2, I can almost feel their hands digging around in my pockets for more loot.
Because that’s what it’s all about, folks: your hard-earned money, and how these scam artists can get at it.
As Leon clearly enunciated, predicting the course of the climate is far more complicated than the AGW crowd has believed.
But here in Indiana we have had the coolest spring and early summer in memory. At the 4th of July parade, people were complaining because they were cold. Never happens. Least not in Indiana.
There’s certainly a growing body of evidence that supports cooling. I wonder where the tipping point will be before the politicians and alarmists wake up.
0.5°C cooler? 1.0°C cooler?
Leon Brozyna:
Good post, but those aerosols you are talking about are soot aerosols, which cool the surface on a cloudless day but warm the atmosphere. They also fall on snow and make it melt faster. However, the more common human aerosols are sulphate aerosols, which have pure cooling effects by reflecting sunlight and MAYBE making clouds brighter by making them dirtier, creating another cooling effect.
That Indian study you are talking about is iffy, as because if it were true the lower troposphere over India and China should be warming faster, but a look at UAH temperature trends, as well as RSS trends, show that India and China have warmed much less than places devoid of significant human impact (Mongolia, North Pole, Siberia, and the Iberian Peninsula, relatively I mean) since 1978. Although the basic physics of the Asian Brown Cloud are correct, it simply does not show up well in the temperature data, especially over India which may be cooling very slightly now.
As for this gathering of scientists, it appears that every month that passes without a clear solar minimum and start for Cycle 24, the more scientists begin to warn of global cooling. I wonder who is next?
Sent to Bill Hemmer, Fox News, cc’d to Dr. James Hansen —
I want to see honest debate in this country about global warming. The raw temperature data in the USA is down dramatically in 2008 by every measure, global temperatures have gone down for the past decade, and yet we hear extreme alarm from the lead scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University who runs the widely discredited GISS temperature measurement system. Dr. Hansen has gone so far as to call for global warming skeptics to be jailed at ABC News, in The Guardian, and at Worldwatch Institute. Dr. Hansen has also claimed that that the Bush Administration has tried to silence him.
I’m offering to put up $10K in prize money for the following type of 1 hour debate between Dr. Hansen v. the Author of http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/about/ and former 25 year television meteorologist. I would like to see American Idol style voting to determine the winner, multi-media presentations instead of simply two guys at podiums and the money going to the winner. The show does not need to be live, and in fact the debate can take place over a period of weeks to ensure the best multi-media presentations, arguments, and rebuttals possible – with no talking over people etc that goes with live debate. Their can be no personal attacks … just data. The debate must not include glaciers, hurricanes, polar bears, coral reefs, frogs dying out, etc. which can all have multiple causes unrelated to Global warming. The debate should be EXCLUSIVELY about the TEMPERATURE of the earth. However, the final 5 to 10 min of the show and voting should be live. Dr. Hansen does not seem to want to have real debates but has taken quite a lot of money for his speaking engagements. Hopefully FOX will have better luck.
The topics of the debate should be
1. The Quality of Dr. Hansen’s GISS Temperature Network which has been the dominate temperature data set of record for anthropogenic global warming advocates.
2. The Differences between Dr. Hansen’s GISS Temperature Network v. satellite data from UAH.
3. The Global temperature record from 1998 to 2008 as compared to Dr. Hansen’s predictions before Congress in 1998 – see graph. As you can easily see, Dr. Hansen was widely wrong as temperatures in 2008 are roughly where they were in 1988.
(Graph from Dr. Hansen’s 1988 Congressional Hearing here)
4. Finally, I would like Dr. Hansen to respond to the great cooling events we have seen in 2007 and 2008 and give an explanation.
5. Both debaters should give an estimate of the expected global temperature record from now to 2018 and then out to 2118 – so we can have this debate again in 10 years.
Sources
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/science/earth/29climate.html?ex=1296190800&en=28e236da0977ee7f&ei=5088
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=5228739&affil=wjla
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5798
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/fossilfuels.climatechange
Here is Dr. Hansen’s contact info.
REPLY: Here’s Dr. Hansen’s contact info –
Dr. James E. Hansen
Columbia University
750 Armstrong Hall
2880 Broadway
New York, NY 10025 USA
Phone: (212) 678-5500
It should be noted that the energy industries don’t really care whether their products are used for air-conditioning in a warming scenario, or heating in a cooling scenario. In business, a sale is a sale, as long as the cheque clears.
It should be noted that they have to care because air conditioning is driven by electricity while heating is generally driven by natural gas or oil. Also, there are locations which generally need one, but not the other. So knowing what’s going to happen determines which energy company needs to be ready to supply which product to which location.
I wonder if this will lead to a new class of deniers. If these projections come true, how long before a set of “New Deniers” arises to carry on denying that the earth is cooling off?
There were some who denied that the earth was warming at all, even into the late 90’s, because for them it had become political the moment the Greens took an interest. Only later in the game did they shift to denying only the man-made aspect.
Will we see the mirror image of that from the Greens now? I’ve already had a couple of conversations that foreshadow this. The conversations went like this: “So you deny Global Warming?” Me: “Not while it was warming up I didn’t. Do you deny that its starting to cool back off?
Try it, the stunned stares are worth it. Have one of Anthony’s 2002-present temperature trend charts handy. I know that its statistically premature to be using those things, but where I live I’m surrounded by AGW missionaries, and sometimes I just can’t help myself.
REPLY: Let’s leave the word “deniers” off this website, no matter who we are speaking of. The term was coined referring to “holocaust deniers”. In science, there is no room for such labels, no matter what side of the debate you are on. “Skeptic” is the better word. – Anthony
Speaking of the energy sector and energy gurus… Has anyone seen the TV spots that T. Boone Pickens is running on a plan to increase the amount of wind power and replace oil with natural gas as a transportation fuel?
I doubt that anyone on either side of the debate has any clue what will happen more than about a week out. Enough with the long range predictions. They are a complete waste of time, no matter who they come from.
REPLY: I was thinking the very same thing right after I posted this. I’m inclined to agree. We think we know a lot about earths’ atmospheric and oceanic systems, yet new things are discovered daily. We think we know a lot about the sun’s mechanisms, yet it continues to give us surprising behavior that doesn’t follow solar cycle predictions.
Nature is more complex than many choose to admit. Simple models that don’t consider chaos and complex nonlinear systems just don’t cut it. Man has a tendency by his own arrogance to believe that he can fully understand and conquer nature. Yet if nature wishes to conquer man, she has only to flex a finger the barest of movement. – Anthony
Walter Dnes (09:48:40)
That’s true enough: “a sale is a sale”.
But, it’s easier and more profitable if the object being sold can be transported or delivered without having to deal with crappy weather.
As we have seen this year, cooler temperatures bring some really weird and unpleasant conditions.
From another angle: even with all of their very dedicated machinations directed solely at “proving” global warming, etc., the ipcc Climate Scientists have had such a difficult time even in trying to establish much of a significant “global warming” trend per se that one would tend to get the idea that we are instead in some kind of plateau phase regarding these temperatures – at best.
In my experience, people who think like the ipcc Climate Scientists – that is, unscientifically/subrationally, especially in service of a political agenda or extreme psychological need – not only usually get things wrong, they often get them exactly 180 degrees wrong. So I’m going to be moderately surprised if the global climate doesn’t cool – with the disclaimer that, since the ipcc Climate Scientists are not doing Science to begin with, anything they predict or say is going on now globally – such as catestrophic runaway anthropogenic global warming – has only a [very low] random chance of becoming or being true, so that it’s exact opposite has a similarily less chance of becoming or being true.
Regardless, if the ipcc Climate Scientists had instead done things scientifically, the World of People would have been in a better position by now to decide what doing the right thing for People and the rest of the World – including the “World” itself – actually might be.
Flowers4Stalin
Thanks for the kind words.
Another thing about that Indian study is that it involved the aerosols drifting off the Indian subcontinent over the Maldives, rather than over India itself or drifting toward China. The vast cloud apparently only covered the northern portion of the Maldives, where it seemed the temperatures were warmer than the southern part of the Maldives. If I remember correctly, the main focus of the study was to judge the effect of aerosols on precipitation patterns (their seasonal monsoons) and the temperature finding was an unexpected dividend.
I had another thought about possible effects of aerosols during the cooling that happened between 1940 and 1970. If {and that’s a very big if} the aerosols of the period had had a warming effect, rather than the usually expected cooling effect and lessened naturally cooling that may have happened in that period, then the climate would have been warmer than it would have been normally were it not for the aerosols and, as the climate then turned back to warming just as the aerosols were removed, the resulting bounce would be even greater than expected.
Oh what a complicated web we weave with so many variables.
While I may be a skeptic and doubt the significance of CO2 as a major player in climate variability, I do think we need to keep working to reduce real pollutants. My personal view is that it’s been a mistake to give utilities so much leeway in grandfathering them from current pollution {aerosol} standards.
I guess I’ll always listen to what T. Boone has to say. He’s been around the oil patch a while and has done his share of Wildcatting. Doesn’t strike me as a guy that could easily be fooled.
Maybe he has an angle on the wind turbine farms. I forget the dollar number. But, he’s throwing some big bucks at it. The little I’ve read about them, most recently at the EU Referendum Blog, indicated they’re very expensive to construct and high maintenance. The wind has to be blowing too. Some other kind of power generation has to be spooled up and running to take up the slack when the wind stops.
Several post at EU Referendum on wind turbines. They don’t think much of them at all.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/search?q=wind+turbine
Drew Latta (10:57:47) :
Pickens is promoting wind power because he’s gobbling up the water rights in the Texas panhandle; he’s getting the rights-of-way for his water pipeline to Dallas, and mainly for P.R. purposes, he’s putting windmills on the easements he took from the local ranchers. The windmills won’t make much money, if any. But the water will.
Pickens is a smart guy, but what he’s doing is entirely self-serving. Pay no attention to his song and dance about wind power. Business Week has a recent article on Pickens and his current water/wind scheme: click here.
Has anyone seen the TV spots that T. Boone Pickens is running on a plan to increase the amount of wind power and replace oil with natural gas as a transportation fuel?
I never did like him. Shallow. In Eisenhower’s quaint phrase, “He’s thin, boys. As thin as piss on a hot rock.”
Pachauri supports the Indian energy plan which is pro-development. He has wondered out loud if ‘someone didn’t get their sums wrong’ about the IPCC conception of the Greenhouse Effect. I think he’s figured out that the role of CO2 in climate has been overestimated and its boon to the poor underestimated, and may be about to turn the IPCC around on the issue of carbon encumbering. It is in politicians’ better interests to free carbon if the world is cooling long term, and they will all come to realize it.
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Right, Joe S, T-Bone has been around the Oil Patch long enough to accrue huge interests in natural gas. Also, electrifying where there ain’t any moisture won’t work, and he knows, but hopes you don’t, that transporting electricity is a lot more expensive than transporting natural gas.
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Leon Brozyna:
There was a scientist Patrick Michaels mentioned some years ago (it may have been 2001) that said the warming and cooling effects of human produced aerosols in the troposphere are a wash, because half cause cooling (sulphate) and half cause warming (soot). I have seen a study that says the brown cloud over India and China affects atmospheric circulation and moves precipitation systems to the tropics, cooling them. However, there is another scientist named Stephen Schwartz who says there are major uncertain factors about sulphate aerosols, because he thinks that if enough get into enough clouds and brighten them, there could be significant human induced cooling that is dominant over other human factors, because cloud cover and types of clouds are a crucial, fundamental part of global climate. Of course, Schwartz’s studies are very uncertain because no one has been able to point to a bright cloud and say “Aha! That cloud is bright because of human sulphate aerosols!”
One more thing: aerosols that wildfires send into the atmosphere create a “nuclear winter” on the surface, but ONLY if there are no low-level clouds, or else they would be driven away and cause net warming, especially in the atmosphere. This “nuclear winter” happens in Southern California during Santa Ana season, and produces cooling because there are never low-level clouds during Santa Ana wind events. The cooling can be enough to eliminate air conditioning for a day and prevent record high temperatures during the day, but may trap more heat at night, but the overall effect is probably cooling.
Before y’all put any more money into T. Boone’s pockets, ya might wanna check out what Steven Milloy has to say about his Wind Farm ads:
http://junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20080710.html
Housing prices in Florida are low, no state income tax, no oil fired furnaces, lots of fishing and golf ….. might be time for ya’ll to c’mon down!