Mike Bromley writes in: BBC has the explanation for the European LIA… it wasn’t really an ice age at all. See this strange quote.
“The Little Ice Age wasn’t really an ice age of any kind – the idea that Europe had a relentless sequence of cold winters is frankly barking” – Dr Mike Lockwood Reading University
No real discussion of the mechanisms that I could understand, referenced some papers your front line team would profitably have a go with. The BBC has solved the whole riddle. this has nothing to do with Global warming and it’s all local variability.
Full story here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15199065
Do they mean this Dr Michael Lockwood of Reading University, http://www.reading.ac.uk/education/about/staff/m-j-lockwood.aspx.
Lectures on modules in English in Education and organiser of the Raymond Wilson Children’s Poetry Competition.
“[…] with little direct change in globally averaged temperature.”
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1282.html
They should understand that due to north-south ocean-continent reflection asymmetry and west-east ocean-continent rotation asymmetry (translation asymmetry in cylindrical coordinates) this is NOT possible.
While it appears (from their attention to the westerlies) that they are starting to understand the seminal paper referenced here [ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/23/confirmation-of-solar-forcing-of-the-semi-annual-variation-of-length-of-day/ ], it’s clear they have NOT yet realized the simple implications for natural multiscale aliasing & aggregation.
If anyone in the academic mainstream needs help: Please just ask.
Sincerely.
Lord Beaverbrook says:
October 11, 2011 at 1:10 am
….It’s all well and good suggesting that there is a future potential threat to populations in hot and arrid countries but who has got our back now?
I don’t even presume to state that the effect of a little ice age now, will have the same devastaing effect as it did on a population without modern conveniences, but where is the risk assessment, where are the predictions on food production due to a decreased growing season and available land in the NH, where is the advice to policy makers on fuel poverty and care of the vulnerable? Have the risk assessments been done, but not publicised, or not even thought of?….
_______________________________________
Oh the risk assessments have been done and the movers and shakers see it as a really good opportunity to grab more power and make money. That is why George Soros, Lord Rothschild, and other investors are buying land and good old Al Gore is busy shoving Africans off their land in a move reminiscent the Highland Clearances” (Only 10% of Africans hold legal title to their land making them a perfect target.)
Investors are not interested at buying at market value or waiting for land to come on the market.
So that was what the World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture (WTO-AoA. 1995) was all about. That is what all the jockeying and maneuvering to force independent farmers off the land during the last couple of decades was all about. Making good farm land available cheap. Simple once you understand the real goal.
All you have to do is read the WTO/UN Guides to Good Farming Practices that is now being made into regulations across the world AND consider that in the USA over 90% of the farmers ALREADY have an outside job because farming will not pay a living wage. Actually according to the latest USDA Ag Census it costs a farmer $15,000 a year to keep farming. Therefore they can not afford the “Improvements” mandated by “Good Farming Practices” Add in a 22% unemployment rate, the housing market slump and we find farmers are between a rock and a hard place, since raising farm prices is not an option. http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2000/00july-aug/lilliston.html“>Since 1984, the real price of a USDA market basket of food has increased 2.8 percent while the farm value of that food has fallen by 35.7 percent.
This is not only happening in the USA. I ……more than 160,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997 (Note the date) The press is trying to say CAGW was the cause, but Inda’s farmers do not agree. That is why a bunch of farmers recently beat the living daylights out of a Monsanto rep.
DR. VANDANA SHIVA said in an interview, “… globalization as it’s shaped right now under the coercive rules of trade under the World Trade Organization, of the World Bank and IMF structure adjustment, basically doesn’t create wealth.
It takes the wealth of the poor and puts them in the hands of global corporations, leaving insecurity behind. In addition, decisions that we made as national systems, whether it was decisions about how we run our intellectual property rights systems. What do we do with our water? How do we do our agriculture? What seeds we plant? What price our crops will sell at?
All those are decisions taken out of the country, put into the hands of the World Trade Organization or put into the hands of global corporations.”
The International Ag Cartel
Professor Connor of Purdue University found that since 1997 some 85% of all fines for price fixing have been imposed on food and agriculture cartels. http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/staff/connor/papers/index.asp
This recent piece on the egg cartel shows how the new Food “Safety?” Modernization Act of 2010 can be used to drive up prices: http://blogs.laweekly.com/squidink/2011/01/price_fixing_lawsuit_egg_cartel_not_giving_consumers_a_break.php
Part of the “plan” was the 1996 farm bill by the same author as the WTO-AoA. It was originally called the Freedom to Farm Act but later became known as the Freedom to Fail Act. href=”http://books.google.com/books?id=N7byI1yLTJgC&pg=PA3712&lpg=PA3712&dq=%22freedom+to+fail%22+farm+prices+percent&source=bl&ots=c67iu3Y2jC&sig=hBp48SYeYeehy6mR9-nP1wu-m5g&hl=en&ei=-SyUTqycJ8-Etget84yJBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22freedom%20to%20fail%22%20farm%20prices%20percent&f=false”>The Congressional Record, V. 146, Pt. 3, March 21, 2000 to April 4, 2000 states the prices paid to farmers fell 38% “…In the past decade and a half, an explosion of mergers, acquisitions and anti-competitive practices has raised concentration in American Agriculture to record levels…. The top four beef packers have expanded their market share from 32 percent to 80 percent the top four millers have expanded their market share from 40 percent to 82 percent the market share for the top four soybean crushers has expanded from 54 percent to 80 percent ….” <a
Food is being "groomed" as the next big economic "bubble" and if we do go into another Little Ice Age the "Investors" are going to be sitting in a position where they can make lots and lots of money out of human misery.
REFERENCES: GOOD FARMING PRACTICES
“What are Good Agricultural Practices?
A multiplicity of Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) codes, standards and regulations have been developed in recent years by the food industry and producers organizations but also governments and NGOs, aiming to codify agricultural practices at farm level for a range of commodities….” http://www.fao.org/prods/gap/ [has links]
Livestock
http://www.oie.int/fileadmin/Home/eng/Food_Safety/docs/pdf/GGFP.pdf
http://www.oie.int/doc/ged/D7201.PDF
Short Report :
OIE WORKING GROUP ON ANIMAL PRODUCTION FOOD SAFETY Report to the 77th General Session of the OIE International Committee – Paris, 24–29 May 2009 http://www.oie.int/fileadmin/Home/eng/Specific_Issues/docs/pdf/Presentation_77SG_En.pdf
The Ville,
I will take my tongue out of my cheek for a moment. I have looked harder. On the Met Office website there are a couple of references to the Little Ice Age in Britain. Two passing and disparaging references in papers by Betts et al and Gray et al both published in 2009 and two links to other websites where the LIA is mentioned. One of these refers to a pre-Copenhagen talk by Prof. Juliet Sligo in which she refers to the LIA as the Middle Ice Age.
I am sorry that The Ville did not appreciate my attempt at humour but the point that I was trying to make was serious. I believe that the Met Office is still trying to propagate the notion that, in so far as there was such a period as the Little Ice Age, it was confined to Britain and to part of Northern Europe and certainly did not extend to the Southern Hemisphere.
J Huntly:
Benny Peiser on the GWPF website merely linked to the Sunday Times story. The Little Ice Age was their idea, not the GWPF.
I see now what you mean — Peiser is summarizing what the article said. My apologies to Peiser, and a heap of crow for me. I
I’ll need to drink more coffee before reading next time.
Patrick,
Further to my previous comment it will also be worth your while reading the following link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_brick_university
Reading University although strictly speaking is not a ‘red brick’ university is largely regarded as one and so has a well established reputation for long standing academic research. However as you’ll see from my previous link it no longer has a open to undergraduates Physics Department thanks to a decision taken back in October 2006 to close its physics department to undergraduate applications. It appears that it no longer has a Physics department but does have a world renowned Meteorology department with close links to the UK Met Office.
Mike Lockwood is a Professor within this department (http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/users/users/1353) along with Brian Hoskins (http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/users/users/128) of Imperial College Grantham Institute and UK Committe on Climate Change (CCC) fame (http://www.theccc.org.uk/about-the-ccc/the-committee).
It (Reading University) therefore forms an academic triumvirate along with UEA and Imperial which continues to maintain the global warming policy advocacy consensus within the UK. As a ‘skeptic’ I’m personally taking this latest Nature Geosciences report with the large pinch of salt that it deserves and I recommend that others here do likewise.
IMO this is just the ‘warming’ establishment’s latest desperate attempt to cover their backsides should the imminent UK winter prove to be yet another harsh one. I’m now praying that the UK Met. Office’s Gore like effect applies and that it turns out to be wet and mild.
After their adject failure with teh MWP and given that they are now also trying to claim that the LIA was also only ‘regional’ and largely restricted to the North Atlantic perhaps it’s time for the Sherwood’s at CO2 Science to do a LIA Project to go along with their very successful MWP Project (http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php)?
Regards
KevinUK
Paul Hull, suggesting my comments are inane is offensive.
Surely accuracy is important?
Don’t you agree?
Have I stated something that was inaccurate?
If you don’t agree that the ‘experiments’ with the computer model are not science, do you completely disregard the results??
Surely that would be a logical thing to do? In which case you should be removing UV radiation as an input effecting climate in your theories. What are you going to do?
There are a huge number of people out there that are saying this proves that global warming isn’t happening, so are you going to tell them that this research is of no use?
Sooo, local variability…
That means that somehow, the sun shone more, or less, ultraviolet radiation on one part of the planet than it did on another. How exactly was that pulled off?
So:
“Sarah Ineson, who performed the experiments, said: “What we’re seeing is UV levels affecting the distribution of air masses around the Atlantic basin. This causes a redistribution of heat – so while Europe and the US may be cooler, Canada and the Mediterranean will be warmer, and there is little direct impact on global temperatures.””
But:
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Vancouver+Western+Canada+facing+record+cold+temperatures+this+winter/5528542/story.html
izen says:
October 11, 2011 at 2:04 am
……Not much sign of this cooling phase of the ‘natural cycles’ that some people claim is happening!
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You forgot the oceans which are one huge heat sink so changes are not going to be instantaneous. The amount of energy dumped into the oceans is dependent not only on the sun but also the cloud cover (albedo). The oceans absorb visible and UV radiation not IR.
You also forgot the following:
SUN
Sami Solanki, Professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich Switzerland, says the Sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years than over the previous 1090 years. http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/Home/Archive/Sunspot_activity_hits_1,000-year_high.html?cid=3990930
(The magnetic activity of the sun effects the Cosmic Rays and Henrik Svensmark have argued this will effect cloud cover)
“” Geophysicists in Finland and Germany have calculated that the Sun is more magnetically active now than it has been for over a 1000 years. Ilya Usoskin and colleagues at the University of Oulu and the Max-Planck Institute for Aeronomy say that their technique – which relies on a radioactive dating technique – is the first direct quantitative reconstruction of solar activity based on physical, rather than statistical, models… (I G Usoskin et al. 2003 Phys. Rev. Lett. 91 211101) http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/18692
(similar to the article under discussion.)
…All stars are variable at some level, and the sun is no exception. We want to compare the sun’s brightness now to its brightness during previous minima and ask: is the sun getting brighter or dimmer?”
The answer seems to be dimmer. Measurements by a variety of spacecraft indicate a 12-year lessening of the sun’s “irradiance” by about 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at EUV wavelengths. These results, which compare the solar minimum of 2008-09 to the previous minimum of 1996, are still very preliminary…http://nasa-information.blogspot.com/2010/01/eve-measuring-suns-hidden-variability.html
Clouds/Albedo
Inter-annual variations in Earth’s reflectance 1999-2007.
“Abstract.
…. Albedo data are also available from the recently released ISCCP FD product. Earthshine and FD analyses show contemporaneous and climatologically significant increases in the Earth’s reflectance from the outset of our earthshine measurements beginning in late 1998 roughly until mid- 2000. After that and to-date, all three show a roughly constant terrestrial albedo, except for the FD data in the most recent years. Using satellite cloud data and Earth reflectance models, we also show that the decadal scale changes in Earth’s reflectance measured by earthshine are reliable, and caused by changes in the properties of clouds rather than any spurious signal, such as changes in the Sun-Earth-Moon geometry.
…They showed from that proxy that the Earth’s albedo decreased by about 6
W/m2 from 1985 to 2000, while direct earthshine observations from 1999-2003 revealed
that the decline had stopped and even reversed to an increasing trend in reflectance….. http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_etal_2008_JGR.pdf
I used to read the BBC science web pages every day until I realised that the biased propaganda put out by Black was giving me high blood pressure. Any story that even hints that global warming may be questionable is either not reported at all, or laced with comments that the earth is still warming at an alarming rate and nothing in the story can change that.
His output is biased and has done much to promote the common knowledge that the BBC has an AGW alarmist agenda. People in the UK object to the compulsary licence fee that funds the BBC, Black’s salary and his relentless propaganda.
When they were blaming CFCs for ozone depletion they assumed UV levels were constant. Now it is convenient to acknowledge UV varies considerably, but that won’t lead to a revision of the entire “ozone hole” false science.
-0.1C / 2.5 years at an average Flux of 100 units. Note: Flux is a great proxy for UV.
Solar minimum 2005: 6 years [2011] ~ -0.2C Earth average. Check it out using the Warmist’s own data.
Heat waves are global, cold snaps are local.
Floods are global, normal rains are local.
Sea-level rise is global, sea-level decline is local.
Droughts are global, normal rains are local.
Hurricanes & tornadoes are global, calm is local.
Bad weather is global, agreeable weather is local.
Get it?
KevinUK says:
October 11, 2011 at 7:04 am
You’ll find an entry for Mike Lockwood on this page:
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/about/work/boards/council/biographies.asp
…. £
dtbronzich says:
October 10, 2011 at 10:19 pm
Funny, I thought the Sun shone on the whole globe………..
There you go again, confusing Solar induced Weather with Solar induced Climate.
The Sun shines on the whole globe only once every 30 years, or so.
I find myself in agreement with you, once again. UV changes in solar outputs has been largely ignored by climate conformists. But then you have to spoil it all by writing:
Since albedo is the largest factor directly connected to climate and cloud cover is a large component of albedo, then GCR’s link to climate drivers are important. How important or significant it is – we are all waiting to find out. Your dismissive attitude only reflects your ideological frustrated desires. Stay on the same page please. GK
No Little Ice Age? Someone forgot to tell the glaciers of the world!! Moraines far downvalley from their present termini occur on virtually all glaciers of the world. In most places, these glaciers advanced over forests that grew in the same place during the predeeding Medieval Warm Period.
Someone also forgot to tell about 2,000 authors of scientific papers demonstrating the extent of the Little Ice Age.
Gail Coombs “Father. He used to skate up the Bronx River to see my Mother.”
Surely Lockwood’s “idea that Europe had a relentless sequence of cold winters is frankly barking”? would imply no increased severely cold weather with the Thames freezing.
Can eye witness evidence counter Lockwood’s authority?
Consider: The history of British winters, Written by D.Fauvell and I.Simpson “this page cover’s many winters from the 17th Century right up to the current day. It includes the ‘little ice age’ period which many people yearn to see again!”
etc. etc.
A bit of anecdotal evidence regarding the little ice age. My family has lived on the same farm on the Susquehanna Flats portion of the Chesapeake Bay since the late 1600’s. The current house was built in 1730. There was an ice house built near by, at about the same time period. The purpose of the ice house was to store the large blocks of ice sawn from the frozen bay during the winter, therefore providing a “refrigerator” during the warm months. A horse drawn sleigh was also used during the winter to go to Havre de Grace over the ice, which was a shorter route than by road. Records show the Susquehanna Flats and Susquehanna River were frequently frozen for long periods of time during the winter in the 1700’s and early 1800’s. So maybe the little ice age was local to northeast Maryland also.
Trust the BBC to wheel in an old faithful to spin it out of perspective, Prof. Mike Lockwood, the Data SORCErer.
” His research interests are in the phenomena that cross the mesopause (a high-level region of the Earth’s atmosphere) and how solar variability has masked the full impact of man’s contribution to climate change.”
They have to deny the Little Ice Age, cause otherwise they have to accept the role of the Sun.
“The history of British winters”
http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=other;type=winthist;sess=
Not every winter but this sequence starts from 1616.
Dr. David Whitehouse on the GWPF website
http://thegwpf.org/the-observatory/4063-the-sun-and-the-winter-of-2011.html
“Fig 1. Click on image to enlarge.
Solar activity is back to what it was in 2004-5, and we didn’t experience severe winters in those years, see here, and here, and here.
So, if anything, the logic behind this particular piece of research points towards the Winter of 2011 being a mild one!”
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“So, on the one hand we have research that suggests that during the last solar minimum, 2008 – 10, low solar UV resulted in cold European winters. On the other hand we have research that suggests that during the same solar minimum enhanced UV may have actually provided a warming effect!”
G. Karst says: (to R. Gates)
“Since albedo is the largest factor directly connected to climate and cloud cover is a large component of albedo, then GCR’s link to climate drivers are important. How important or significant it is – we are all waiting to find out. Your dismissive attitude only reflects your ideological frustrated desires. Stay on the same page please.”
_____
I hardly have a dismissive attitude toward the GCR/Cloud relationship, but currently we don’t have any quantifiable data, i.e. such that we can input it into climate models like they did with the UV data. I would love to see some hard quantifiable GCR/Cloud data, and just about every reputable climate scientist would as well. The Solar UV/Stratosphere/Ozone connection is a big step in the right direction.