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!”.
FYI: Freeman Dyson’s review….
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494
now global warming increses glaciers…
Fresh on the heels of yesterday revelation that Global Warming will cause more kidney stones we learn that it also creates glaciers in California. I’m not sure which claim is more ludicrous. First of all, someone actually (two colleges in……
Bruce Cobb: “It is from a paper by Richard Courtney…There certainly was motive both for her and her UK party to push AGW.”
The Courtney essay makes many comments about Margaret Thatcher and global warming, but the most pointed would be:
“Then, in 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) became Prime Minister of the UK, and she elevated the hypothesis to the status of a major international policy issue.”
Courtney does not explicitly claim that Thatcher campaigned in 1979 on global warming. Instead, he associates the terms “1979” with “Prime Minister” and “hypothesis”. This word association gives the impression that Thatcher began to push AGW in 1979. Courtney uses this technique throughout the essay to further claim that she pushed AGW for both domestic political purposes – to defeat the miners – and to enhance her reputation as an international politician.
However, the evidence is that she only began to make major public statements on AGW in the late 1980s, long after her first election victory and after the defeat of the minors in her second term, 1983-87.
Conservapedia: “In the late 1980’s Thatcher began to be concerned by environmental policy and in 1988 she made a major speech accepting the problems of global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain.”
http://www.conservapedia.com/Margaret_Thatcher
This also suggests she only became convinced of global warming — or at least that she was prepared to publicly back AGW — by the late 1980s.
However, there is a germ of truth in Courtney’s implication that Sir Crispin Tickell, British representative to the UN from 1987, helped place climate and other environmental issued on G7 summit agendas from 1979, and that he was a confidant of Margaret Thatcher from the early 1980s and probably helped persuade her on AGW.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13318134.700-the-green-diplomat-sir-crispin-tickell-has-had-adistinguished-diplomatic-career-he-has-also-helped-to-put-climate-changeatthe-top-of-the-worlds-political-agenda-.html
However, Courtney places a wholly cynical explanation on this relationship:
“But she had yet to gain that reputation [as a great UK politician] when she came to power in 1979…Sir Crispin Tickell, UK Ambassador to the UN, suggested a solution to the problem. He pointed out that almost all international statesmen are scientifically illiterate…”
Beyond that, the evidence fails to support the impression given by Courtney that AGW is a politically motivated movement driven by cynical calculation (and of course political considerations do not negate the theory, any more than the space race of the 1960s negates space science).
Nor does it support your explicit claim that: “…Thatcher used the [AGW] issue to gain political power, beginning in 1979…”
Brendan, I received a nice reply to my email to Richard Courtney regarding his paper on the history of AGW, which I’ll paste below:
” The article is a summary of the analysis I did at the time (early 1980s) for the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM). It also has a few updates I made in the late 1990s.
BACM was concerned at the potential for AGW to become as serious an environmental issue for the coal industry as ‘acid rain’ then was. Subsequently it became a more serious issue than that. My research consisted of interviews with interested parties (including Sir Crispin whom you mention) followed by evaluation of the interacting influences that I summarised as the influence diagrams that are in the article.
Three pertinent points are worth mention.
1.
The diagrams do not include environmental organisations. This is because environmentalists had not yet taken up AGW at the time I did the original analysis. Indeed, Greenpeace was then opposing AGW as being a distraction from true environmental issues.
2.
The science was (and I think still is) an adjunct to the political issue. Remove all reference to science and all the significant feedback loops remain in the influence diagrams. I concluded from this that AGW would displace ‘acid rain’ as the major environmental constraint on coal usage, and it would continue as such a constraint whether or not it was justified by any empirical scientific data. This conclusion was rejected by BACM as being so extreme as to be absurd (but it later proved correct).
3.
I have had no direct contact with Lord Monckton. He was an advisor to Mrs Thatcher at the time when she was starting the AGW scare and I did not interview any official government advisors (any answers they gave me would be restricted to stated government policy). Last year (i.e. 2007) persons other than me interogated Lord Monckton on his view of my article and he was surprisingly forthcoming. He could not breach any confidences from that period of his office, but he did not dispute anything in my article and in writing he confirmed some significant points (e.g. the role of Sir Crispin). I am surprised by the degree of his agreement with my article: people have different observations, perceptions, interpretations and memories of the same events so I would have expected some difference of opinion between us and none seems to exist.
I hope the above is what you wanted. I will not return to my base for at least a week so I am not able to access old files until then. Please let me know if you want more or different.”
He is very aware of Anthony’s excellent blog. I said a guest post on the history would be nice (hint hint).
May God bless us. Go Veg and Go Green.
Peace.
May God bless us. Go Veg and Go Green.
Peace. Yes indeed, thank God (speaking figuratively, but if you believe that’s fine too) for C02, which helps keep our planet warm, and provides the food required for vegetation to grow and thus making our planet Green. C02 is both wonderous and wonderful. May it continue rising in abundance in the atmosphere.
Amen.
Bruce: “Brendan, I received a nice reply to my email to Richard Courtney regarding his paper on the history of AGW, which I’ll paste below…”
Thanks for the information, Bruce. However, I can’t see where Richard Courtney’s points make any difference to my comments about his paper. In essence, he is claiming that AGW was a whole-cloth creation by a claque of politicians.
A brief comment on Courtney’s second point: “Remove all reference to science and all the significant feedback loops remain in the influence diagrams.”
Well, yes. After all, Courtney created the original diagram, which contains exactly two linkages out of twenty-two on the actual science, the remaining twenty for political, economic and social factors. It’s hardly surprising that subtracting two linkages would leave the rest largely intact.
And the linkages themselves are Courtney’s own interpretation of the factors that led to AGW. Some of those linkages are strained. For example, Courtney has decided that Margaret Thatcher’s desire for international credibility should share equal billing with the growth of global warming information. The two are hardly of equal import.
As I say, Courtney’s claim ignores the substantial scientific work that was going on into global warming right through this period, as I listed on the “Alleviate world hunger” thread.
And after all, Tickell spent some months researching the subject back in the 1970s. Unless Courtney is claiming that Tickell gleaned his knowledge from political tracts, there must have been some scientific literature in existence at the time for Tickell to have read.
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At least I didn’t get sucked into all the bullcrap flying around about Global Warming. I am too young to remember the whole “Ice Age” discussion in the 70’s, but I know history well enough to know We The People are easily manipulated into believing some pretty absurd things. Global Warming = Duped Again! Bush’s No Nation Building in 2000 = Duped Again! Obama’s Change for America will = Duped Again by 2010!
Great googly moogly!!!!!! Im going to strip down to my undies and run out side durring the next thunderstorm, and stand in a puddle of water and hold up a six foot pole in my hand in hopes that a bolt of lightning will burn the garbage out of my head that im reading about all this global warming mess! Boy I bett thats the most imature response you have ever heard of! Anyway I support the facts that our planet is cooling down and I cant wait till its in full swing so that I can point and laught out loud at the people that thought they had it all figured out! But I guess everyone is entitled to thier own opinions. Thank you and have a very nice day!
What a crock! The earth has been warming and cooling for millions of years without help from us.
When are people going to recognize that their would-be controllers will use ANYTHING to tax us into submission.
I put some good counter arguments together that run counter to the CO2 induced global warming theory.
http://www.isthereglobalcooling.com
thanks
Geoff
Don’t you just love how all the ads by google are for helping to stop global warming? I think google needs to figure out that people who go on this site realize that global warming is a pile of garbage.