An artist
Sir Fred Hoyle Vindicated
(Via Dr. Benny Peiser of the GWPF)
According to new research to be published in Nature Geoscience (embargoed until 1800 GMT/10AM PST, Sunday 8 January 2012), the next ice age could set in any time
this millennium where it not for increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions that are preventing such a global disaster from occurring.
The new research confirms the theory developed by the late Sir Fred Hoyle and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe in the 1990s that without increased levels of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere ‘the drift into new ice-age conditions would be inevitable.’
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe published their controversial idea in CCNet in July 1999:
CCNet-ESSAY: ON THE CAUSE OF ICE-AGES
Sir Fred Hoyle - Image via Wikipedia
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/ce120799.html
By Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe
[…] The problem for the present swollen human species is of a drift back into an ice-age, not away from an ice-age. Manifestly, we need all the greenhouse we can get, even to the extent of the British Isles becoming good for the growing of vines….
The renewal of ice-age conditions would render a large fraction of the world’s major food-growing areas inoperable, and so would inevitably lead to the extinction of most of the present human population. Since bolide impacts cannot be called up to order, we must look to a sustained greenhouse effect to maintain the present advantageous world climate. This implies the ability to inject effective greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the opposite of what environmentalists are erroneously advocating. …
Full paper available here:
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/ce120799.html
Jerker Andersson says:
January 8, 2012 at 10:55 am
“…the extra greenhouse effect from CO2 could delay the next iceage some, indeed. For humans living today it is rather irrellevant since it is a slow drift over several millenia”
Not necessarily, changes into ice age conditions have been known to occur very rapidly according to that the undisputed authority the IPCC. For instance, in their Arctic Impact Assessment Report (2005) they say, in Section 2.7.3.2. “The Eemian ended with abrupt changes …..occurring over a period of less than 400 years”.
[The Eemian is the name of the inter-glacial before this present one which is called the Holocene].
As for speed of climate change they also say, Section 2.7.4.1 , ” very rapid temperature increases at the start of the Bølling-Allerød period (14.5 ky BP; everinghaus and Brook, 1999) or at the end of the Younger Dryas (~11 ky BP) may have occurred at rates as large as 10 ºC per 50 years over substantial areas of the Northern Hemisphere.”
Now that’s what I call climate change! Not your petty fraction of a degree warming over 130 years but 10 degrees in the span of a lifetime. One day you are planting tomatoes in your garden and when they ripen you dare not go and get them because there is a woolly mammoth standing there.
I never thought we were enduring an Ice Age before emitting CO2…
I think we can’t afford to take a risk here. Clearly the effect of C02 is over-rated, so no matter how much fossil fuel we burn it won’t stave off the next ice age. The obvious solution is to build massive numbers of nuclear power plants, and dump the waste heat in the deep oceans. Since we’ll have so much nuclear electric capacity, we can decommission all the coal and oil power plants. This will reduce pollution, reduce C02 (which will make the Carbon Cult happy [maybe]), and send a lot less $$ to dubious regimes in the Middle East. Meanwhile all that extra heat in the deep oceans will stop or at least hold off the next ice age.
This is a win-win-win: we get lots of cheap electricity; The Carbon Cult gets to claim victory on reduced pollution (both real and imagined); and we still get to take beach vacations in places like Florida (unless it disappears due to heat-expanded rising oceans — oh well, more beachfront property for Texas). And we won’t have to disrupt our education system with crash courses on igloo building, so our kids can still learn all those valuable lessons on sustainable development.
I think this is a plan we can all get behind. After all, the alternative is just too terrible to contemplate.
Previous interglacials warmed to a peak and then temperatures declined rapidly. This one is different, the peak was lower then temperatures flatlined.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png
This interglacial’s peak coincides with the advent of agriculture, which indicates to me that anthropogenic climate change goes back several thousand years and has had a net cooling effect. It also indicates there is a warm tipping point into the cold phase, which we have yet to reach.
Which leads to the conclusion, if CO2 does indeed warm the climate as much as the Wamers claim then it will rapidly tip us into the next glacial period of the ice age.
Ice core graphs show that Co2 is much more quickly absorbed once cooling gets under way, so even if co2 has any greenhouse effect it won’t be enough.
Future generations will need something a great deal more potent, and probably man made.
There is a pdf somewhere in which the author thinks the glaciation began in 1999. Not mentioned in the one below. The question is perhaps not so much when as how fast we slide into it. Chances are we don’t have to drop too far in before some of the more Northern countries become uninhabitable, including perhaps the UK. On the one hand the Gulf stream keeps us warm, but on the other hand, that warm moist atmosphere colliding with cold air from the North could bring destructive amounts of snow to the UK.
This forthcoming minimum that we will be entering once we get past solar max in a year or 3 should give us and the next generation a taste and perhaps some clues as to what is to inevitably come. But on previous evidence it’s been a slow drop, so perhaps mankind will adapt without too much bloodshed.
One thing’s for sure, no amount of co2 will save us. If the media get all excited over the forthcoming minimum, or the next glaciation, they will at least be getting excited over something that is actually going to happen sooner or later, rather than getting excited over global warming caused by co2 which isn’t happening and will never happen.
http://solarcycle25.com/attachments/database/ThePastandFutureofClimate5thJune2009Archibald.pdf
The Precautionary Principle demands that we take all possible steps to prevent the next ice age, as it would render most countries outside the tropics uninhabitable. Even if the evidence is not conclusive that CO2 prevents ice ages, we must act now to increase CO2 and thus prevent a catastrophic cooling.
Hats of to the US and lately China that have taken a leadership role and spent hundreds of trillions of dollars in an attempt to bring global CO2 levels back to pre ice-age levels and thus prevent the end of human civilization. This in the face of stiff opposition from groups seeking to significantly reduce the population of “other” humans, and thus preventing them from competing for scarce natural resources.
Whether their actions will be in time is a matter of debate. According to Wikipedia, we are overdue for the next ice age. Based on Paleo records, the next ice age is heralded by a period in increasing climate change. According to the UN IPCC and many leading climate scientists, we are in just such a climatic period.
So the fall back position…….but it would have been colder or earlier……a whole 2/10th of a degree colder
Why not, can’t prove or disprove it….
Yeah, right!
The ironing will be that the deadhead politicians will tax us to warm the planet for another ton of grain. Really, if they are so gullible or so lazy or time poor not to do some research now, how can we expect any decent policies in the future.
Of course, the greens sweat on all 3 of those problems, that is why the IPCC can get away with its outrageous anti-science palaver.
Although the “consensus” view among the WUWT community is that CO2 lacks the power to move the climate to a dangerously warmer state, the other “consensus” community holds a directly opposite view. What Sir Fred has done through an artful bit of argumentation jujitsu is to offer a scenario under which in the long run no matter which viewpoint should eventually prevail, adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will always be more of a benefit than a detriment. If the catastrophists are correct, CO2 will be able to keep the planet from descending into another LIA or worse (BTW although much has been made of the relatively small increase in global temps since the end of the LIA, is there anyone out there who would be willing to argue that a return to those conditions would be a good thing?). If the skeptical position should prevail we will end up at the mercy of the natural cyclical descent into the next round of glacial advancement, but we will at least have the positive photosynthetic benefits and other beneficial effects of higher CO2 levels to mitigate the transition to a colder planet.
Well we ARE in a pickle. Do we even have enough coal and oil to warm the place up to fight off the evil ice follies ?
This is amazing, not only do the experts know that it is for sure that we are accelerating the recovery from the last ice age; but they also are sure that we are holding off the next one.
Should we ban coal burning all together, so that we have some left for the fire when the next deep freeze hits ?
ferd berple says:
January 8, 2012 at 12:01 pm
Good point, ferd, but not surprising. R. is all about models, not science.
Interglacials have higher CO2 levels than ice Ages, that’s what the ice cores tell us..
Tho conclude that CO2 prevents temperatures to go down is just as dumb as the claim they drive temperatures up. CO2 is not a climate driver.
Same old tiresome crowd repacking same old tiresome wine.
Chateaux Migrane, completely tasteless
I maybe wrong but I do vaguely recall higher co2 levels of the past being unable to stop some previous ice ages. Anyway, we would need to chuck out lots more water vapour and methane.
An early paper of Hoyle’s made an interesting use of the anthropic principle. In trying to work out the routes of stellar nucleosynthesis, he observed that one particular nuclear reaction, the triple-alpha process, which generates carbon, would require the carbon nucleus to have a very specific resonance energy for it to work. The large amount of carbon in the universe, which makes it possible for carbon-based life-forms of any kind to exist, demonstrated that this nuclear reaction must work. Based on this notion, he made a prediction of the energy levels in the carbon nucleus that was later borne out by experiment.
‘he made a prediction of the energy levels in the carbon nucleus that was later borne out by experiment.”
“later borne out by experiment.”
Can’t argue with that anyway…..
A major point is that there has never been a period where the planet was unsustainable because of too much warmth.
The planet’s life-sustaining problems have always been because it’s got too cold.
Warmth is GOOD !!
CO2 is GOOD !!
I don’t trust hidden variables no matter which side they’re on. Any time I hear “If not for X, Y would overwhelm us….” I stop listening.
There are some simple mechanical situations where you can make this argument. If I release the parking brake, the “hidden power” of the engine will be able to move the car. Okay, valid.
But in complex systems like the climate, you can’t pit one multi-stage extrapolation against another multi-stage extrapolation without a direct controlled experiment.
The water then thrown high into the stratosphere provided a large temporary greenhouse effect, but sufficient to produce a warming of the world ocean down to a depth of a few hundred metres.
It is this warming that maintains the resulting interglacial period. The interglacial climate possesses only neutral equilibrium however.
It experiences random walk both up and down, until a situation arises in which the number of steps downward become sufficient for the Earth to fall back into the ice-age trap.
Thereafter only a further large bolide impact can produce a departure from the grey, drab iceage conditions.
This will be so in the future unless Man finds an effective way to maintain a suitably large greenhouse effect.
It is very easy to simulate the saw tooth like ice age oscillations for the last Million years using the sun’s density and photon diffusion time with high correlation to a sample in the Antarctica after the suggestion from Prof. R. Ehrlich.
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/solar_fig_4.jpg
This means that the terrestrial temperature steps of ~+8°C in two or three years holding for some 10ky needs a real heat source boost in Watt. Show the oven.
Random is not an observable in physics.
V.
Alan Statham says:
January 8, 2012 at 10:47 am
“You have spent years denying in the face of all the evidence that CO2 has any effect on global temperatures. Suddenly you’ve realised that it can have a major effect. Nice to see you actually might have some capacity for learning!”
Another lame drive-by by Statham. I suggest Alan Statham take notes from R. Gates in the proper way to engage in civilized discourse when your goal is to actually turn others to your point of view.
a jones says:
“But as far as a future ice age goes I too am a fan of using carbon black to block advancing ice sheets”
So am I. We can easily stop advancing ice sheets. Problem solved.
What a pantload.
Whether his language is intentional or just careless, he doesn’t conceal his misanthropic bias.
Fred, the “present human species” (misanthropic self-loathing evident already) is not “swollen.”
“…bolide impacts cannot be called up to order,,,”
Oh, what a shame! If only we could order up an asteroid to smash into the earth and kill off a few hundred million of the “swollen” species.
Science-fiction fantasy of “geoengineering” the climate with CO2 or anything else is mental masturbation of a kind similar to “global warming” scaremongering.
Jimbo says:
January 8, 2012 at 1:22 pm
“I maybe wrong but I do vaguely recall higher co2 levels of the past being unable to stop some previous ice ages. Anyway, we would need to chuck out lots more water vapour and methane.”
No, you are right. At the end of the Ordovician period, about 450 million years ago, the Earth plunged into an ice age when CO2 levels were about ten times higher than they are now. Then when CO2 levels dropped, at the start of the Silurian, the Earth pulled out of its ice age and went back to an average temperature of about 22 deg.C
See graph of CO2 levels vs. temperature for past 800 million years of geological record. http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/2005-08-18/dioxide_files/image002.gif
The Brits should stick to comedy and rock-and-roll. They are good at that.
Gee people – don’t overestimate Ice Ages – there is little evidence the glaciers extended much below 40 degrees N and nothing like 40 S in the southern hemisphere.
Now that may be inconvenient to those who live beyond those latitudes but it is the other effects – primarily food production – which raise issues.
I’m expecting some cooling where I live but remining habitable – and we have no vacancy for migrants – Sorry.
Bomber_the_Cat says:
January 8, 2012 at 12:23 pm
“Now that’s what I call climate change! Not your petty fraction of a degree warming over 130 years but 10 degrees in the span of a lifetime. One day you are planting tomatoes in your garden and when they ripen you dare not go and get them because there is a woolly mammoth standing there.”
I don’t like tomatoes and I don’t like having a mammoth in my garden either(I think).
Even though that was a warming pulse it is amazingly fast and it surely could be possible it happens it in reverse if it is real. Cosidering the frequency if such large changes I am not to worried it will happen during my lifetime. I am very well aware of that we during this interglacial have hade changes up to 3C/100years according to ice cores, much greater than we have had so far but that is oscillations and not permanent step changes.But if such fast and massive temperature changes can happen both ways and they are permanent, we certainly dont want a downward spike, I don’t think 10C up would be an good idea either though. History tells us that the world has gotten a worse place to live on when temperature makes a significant drop even though we probably could handle it better today than 200 or 400 years ago..