Guest essay by Eric Worrall
John Holdren, President Obama’s Science Advisor, once tried to reframe the climate debate in terms of his prediction of “global climate disruption”. Holdren stated at the time, that the term “global warming” is “a dangerous misnomer”.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/16/the-morphology-of-global-warming/
The question – does John Holdren believe that “global climate disruption” might actually lead to global cooling? Is this why Holdren is unhappy with the term “global warming”? Is this the advice Holdren is giving to President Obama?
Because there is some very circumstantial evidence that America, and other governments, may already be planning ahead, for the possibility that the world will cool.
Over the last few years, a number of major Australian newspapers have posted stories about the rising issue of large scale foreign buyouts of Australian farmland.
For example:-
The big question is – why? Why would opaque Chinese and American companies, some of are believed to be government backed, be so interested in large scale ownership of Australian farmland, land which the IPCC and Australian CSIRO predict will shortly become worthless desert?
The reason of course is the land will not shortly become worthless. The land may shortly become very valuable indeed.
Back in 2006, the Russian Academy of Science predicted imminent severe global cooling, beginning in 2012-2015, peaking at around 2055.
http://en.ria.ru/russia/20060825/53143686.html
Their prediction is based on the historic correlation between solar cycles and global climate.
Humans have been aware of the 11 year climate cycle since the dawn of history – several good years followed by several bad years is a fact of life. But there are also other, longer, more powerful cycles, which have an even larger impact on global climate.
One of them is the 200 year cycle. Every 200 years or so, solar activity falls to a sustained low. These long periods of low activity, known by the names of the scientists who discovered them – Maunder, Dalton, etc. – coincided historically with periods of extreme cold – plummeting global temperatures, crashing food production, and drastically shorter and less reliable growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere.
At the peak of the cold periods, history records widespread famines and other disasters, such as the Year Without a Summer in 1816, a food production catastrophe triggered by low solar activity during the Dalton Minimum, combining with an unusually severe series of major volcanic eruptions. In the Year without a Summer, over vast areas, crops in the Northern hemisphere were destroyed by snow and frost in mid Summer, which created global famine and social unrest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
If the Russian Academy of Science is correct, the world is on the brink of a new cold period, which will start to bite in the next few years.
We could even see another year without a summer – there are several large volcanoes which are overdue for major eruptions, such as Katla in Iceland and Merapi in Indonesia. When they erupt, they shall add to downward pressure on global temperatures.
Given the risk, what could a nation whose grain belt is vulnerable to global cooling do, to protect its future food supply?
The obviously solution is to buy up farmland in another country.
A country which is warm enough, so that even if global temperatures fall significantly, the land they purchased would remain highly productive. A country with a strong tradition of respect for the rule of law. A country which would continue to respect the rule of law, even in the face of a global catastrophe.
A country like Australia.
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Note: They key word in the title is “very speculative”, but I thought it was an interesting question. It may also simply be part of China’s economic expansion, which we have also witnessed in the USA with them buying up properties. – Anthony
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Ater Holdren’s embarrasingly srtupid remarks about polar vortices, I think it’s safe to assume
anything he says would only be of interest to a clinical psychologist, not a climate scientist.
In foreign relations usa plays poker [bluff], uk plays bridge [contracts], russia plays chess [attrition] and china plays Go [surround].
China plays Go so seeks to capture the board through subtle acquisitions rather than projection of force. So they go round buying up access to natural resources around the world regardless of the regime [see africa]. To defend these acquisitions they are building a fleet.
While others invade to get rich china buys strategic assets and political submission follows e.g this winter cameron sold uk foreign policy and was publicly humiliated in the process in the Chinese press that called the uk economy nothing but a theme park that was ok for tourists. Uk F.O now says nothing on tibet, taiwan, japanese islands
If the Russian Academy of Science is correct, the world is on the brink of a new cold period, which will start to bite in the next few years.
Unfortunately for them [and fortunately for us] there is good evidence that they are not correct: http://www.leif.org/research/Abdussa3.png
TSI has not declined as predicted as the thin blue curve shows (after allowance for the 4.8 W/m2 offset the older dataset had).
The author writes: “the Russian Academy of Science predicted imminent severe global cooling”
But the link goes to a story describing a statement by a single scientist, not by the Academy.
Holdren is a mindless zombie who simply parrots words that political consultants tell him polled well among the hardcore leftist base on the overnight survey. (they don’t think anyone who doesn’t already agree with them is worth talking to or even listening to, so they never try, and just assume everything will work out in November.) If you think there is anything more to what he, or anyone in this administration says or does, you are sadly mistaken.
Bet it has something to do with his mentor, Paul Ehrlich, partnering with the Institute of Technology in Sydney to push the MAHB’s work. http://sustainabilitycentral.wordpress.com/gallery/
MAHB–Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior. Devoted to cultural evolution. Also an area of interest to Holdren, which is why the League of Innovative Schools initiative reports to his office.
Yeah and the Russians have a big program up to 2030 of new ice breakers for the Arctic and the Baltic. Here is one source which seems to suggest that ice will be a bigger problem.
http://www.arctic-lio.com/node/189
I think Holdren observed that global warming is a dangerous misnomer to get around the pause that’s killing the cause.
Governments and their agencies are notoriously bad at forecasting anything with accuracy, including the economy. In fact, their forecasts are the most reliable contrary indicators I know of. One obvious example: Want to know when to sell your gold? Wait for central banks to start buying.
David Friedman says:
April 5, 2014 at 9:19 am
The author writes: “the Russian Academy of Science predicted imminent severe global cooling”
But the link goes to a story describing a statement by a single scientist, not by the Academy.
This is no different from when people here on this blog say that Hathaway’s private solar cycle forecast is that of NASA’s. Appealing to authority is an often used crutch when the argument is otherwise weak.
¡Wow! That lead post is a
bridgespeculation too far. Way, way, way too far.The embarrassing caliber of the lead post speculation is equal to a kooky bizarre speculation that secret interplanetary humanoid civilizations are taking over Australian farmlands for breeding themselves because their home planets are dying.
John
No, It is because global warming is not happening.
lsvalgaard says:
April 5, 2014 at 9:18 am
Regarding your figure, why would the bicentennial component have to be so tightly tied to the 11 year cycle? In other words, why should the teeth line up? What if the decline in TSI is out of phase by 5 years? Then we could still be on track for the cooling prediction.
Let us remember that in the 1980s it was Japan that was purported to be buying up properties and businesses in the US, and with with the Japanese preeminence and labor model, soon we’d all be “turning Japanese, I think I’m turning Japanese. I really think so.” Where is that today? And, despite the perception of that era that it was Japan that was the major purchaser, in reality it was England. I had the misfortune of working for a US based company that was purchased by a Scottish concern.
Moreover, the Art Deco period Chicago Skyway happened to be purchased by Australian investors a few years back. And the majority of those red light camera ticketing machines (that became popular with municipal governments in the US) are owned and operated by an Australian concern. Maybe US purchases of Australian properties is tit-for-tat?
Hoser says:
April 5, 2014 at 9:49 am
Regarding your figure, why would the bicentennial component have to be so tightly tied to the 11 year cycle? In other words, why should the teeth line up? What if the decline in TSI is out of phase by 5 years? Then we could still be on track for the cooling prediction.
Then it is no longer prediction, but just alarmist speculation.
Irritable Climate Syndrome….
I’ve seen Mad Max, you can’t fool me.
The problem with other countries buying land is more warmer climes is that the country that has the land controls the export.
Farmland better investment than Ghost Cities
Chinese may now begin to realize that investing in China’s Ghost Cities will be a major loss with little return.
Consequently, farmland or land that could become farmland will provide greater security.
Its called diversification.
Next the suns effect peak to trough is minor
From the Canadian experience I would suggest: Ginseng farms.
No matter what the climate might be, the United Nations System, through Agenda 21, is determined to create global government. Already in place is a system, seen through UN activities of the International Council of Local Environment Initiatives (ICLEI) that promotes state management and/or ownership of land. Through conservation authorities and other organizations with environmentally friendly sounding names, private land is redefined as heritage land or wild lands or wet lands. And through truly wily means, the agents convince the state either to take the land away or to allow owners to keep the land and keep paying taxes on it. Either way, the state dictates how the land can or cannot be used. When rich agricultural land cannot be used to produce food and wood lots must not be touched, owners lose their livelihoods and consumers lose their source of food. The UN system is well advanced in Australia (as it is in America and Canada) so I wonder how smart it is of the Chinese and Americans to buy up land anywhere.
In a world with a growing population that is also industrializing (and not about to give up fossil-fuels) then to some it might look like a better long term investment than US T-bonds.
There may be other reasons.
“Back in 2006, the Russian Academy of Science predicted imminent severe global cooling, beginning in 2012-2015, peaking at around 2055.”
http://en.ria.ru/russia/20060825/53143686.html
So where is this “prediction” ? That’s just some waffle about 200 year cycles. No data not even any graphics.
There may be something behind it, so if you are going to put if forward for consideration, post a proper link. I’ve seem more than enough unfounded speculative shite about climate. Whether warns of warming of cooling is irrelevant until There’s something to back it up.
As for the land grab , that Chinese are buying everything they can get their hands on, probably trying to get something more solid than US dollars before the currency goes down the tubes and leaves them with nothing to show for all the US debt they’ve been stacking up for the last 20 years.
They simply have too much US currency to sell it without pulling the rug from the market and destroying the value of what remains. Finding some other poor fools, with their economy in ruins, prepared to accept USD in exchange for their national heritage and family silver seems a pretty smart way out.
The thing is, the climate is a highly nonlinear system with self-organized internal metastructure driven by the balance between incoming energy and outgoing energy. Many, many of the responses of the system to warming are to initiate localized structures that are more efficient at cooling than a “passive, ideal” atmosphere. For example, thunderstorms happen when heated land creates local updrafts (local low pressure centers) and inflowing air causes evaporative cooling of the soil and waterways beneath and carries the latent heat aloft, through most of the greenhouse layer. The thunderstorm clouds also have a high albedo and reflect a lot of the incoming sunlight that otherwise would have just heated the surface underneath. These dissipative structures exist on every scale from “dust devils” a few meters across that appear on hot days to the major decadal oscillations, Hadley cells, global circulation patterns of the jet stream. In all cases they are driven by differential heating (temperature differences) and in most cases they are driven to more efficient heat loss by larger temperature gradients or an increase in the driving of the system. Exceptions exist — blocking highs can actually interrupt dissipation for a time, and ENSO has a very odd pattern of heating and cooling (that might still be a part of this general phenomenon).
It isn’t just the atmosphere. The thermohaline circulation, a.k.a. “The Oceanic Conveyor Belt” has an enormously complex structure shaped by the continents themselves, by localized heating and cooling, mixing and segregation of oceanic currents as they move vast amounts of seawater on a centuries-long journey around the globe. This circulation is a dominant factor in global climate. Small changes can isolate the arctic from the delivery of tropical heat, causing the arctic to cool and the tropics to warm. Small changes can divert much of Europe from the delivery of tropical heat, and along the way plunge it into a deep freeze and alter its rainfall patterns catastrophically.
We really have very little idea what the thermohaline circulation is likely to do as the decadal oscillations e.g. change phase, as even small changes in insolation take effect, as feedbacks in the nonlinear system reinforce certain modes of heat redistribution and diminish others. The GCMs do not have the granularity necessary to track the smaller dissipative structures at all, and many of them treat the ocean as a single layer with known behavior, not as a part of a multilayer coupled system. This is all part and parcel with the difficulty in e.g. predicting ENSO events more than a few months ahead of time, more on the basis of observing known precursors as they start to emerge than on our ability to actually integrate any sort of dynamical model accurately into the future.
We do not know what caused the MWP, the LIA, or the post LIA recovery. We can be pretty sure that the MWP was not caused by CO_2, and that the LIA was not caused by aerosols — human activitiy at the time was almost certainly irrelevant to both phenomena. We cannot hindcast those events with an explanatory model that doesn’t simply beg the question of the cause. We cannot even hindcast the actual thermometric surface temperature record with anything like accuracy over its range, not one model at a time, not collectively.
It is, actually, entirely possible that a brief warming spell driven by CO_2 could trigger another descent into glaciation or near-glaciation. There are hypotheses (very, very tentative ones) that can even provide possible mechanisms — Greenland actually DOES start to melt, this dumps lots of cold freshwater into the arctic ocean, which interrupts the thermohaline circulation in the bight that currently carries warm(er), salty, tropical water into the arctic. The arctic promptly refreezes, the Gulf Stream diverts generically a few degrees south, northern Europe and Russia/Siberia and possibly Canada all drop rapidly in temperature and the tropics get warmer as the mode that is currently cooling them is partially interrupted.
This would actually have a mixed effect as far as global averages are concerned. Since radiative losses are proportional to T^4, warming the equatorial 50% of the surface area by 1 degree is more efficient at increasing heat loss than warming the entire globe by 1/2 a degree. However, in the equatorial band, latent heat from the oceans is probably a much more important factor and a small change in equatorial band temperature would probably very rapidly increase water-cycle cooling efficiency to compensate. The Earth might warm, it might actually cool if the new circulation pattern were stable and was more efficient at cooling. None other than Hansen himself talks about this possibility (trying to sell the idea of more violent storms once Greenland starts to melt) and it is quite true that with a marginally warmer arctic and little change in equatorial temperatures in the NH, there may well have been fewer violent storms although all such claims are lost in statistical noise in the data. It is also closely related to a hypothesis for the cause of the Younger Dryas.
We know that the Earth can enter glacial eras with high CO_2. Alterations to oceanic circulation when the gap linking the Atlantic to the Pacific closed and became the isthmus of Panama triggered the Pliestocene ice age, which we are still in. We know that phenomena with mundane, non-geological timescales can have sudden, profound effects on the climate — bursts of global warming and cooling by many degrees C over decades to a century or two are commonplace in the proxy-based climate record. During interglacials, there are clearly evident spikes as temperatures rocket up by 1-2 C for an interval of a century or two, then drop, often subsequently ending the interglacial and plunging the Earth rapidly back into glaciation. We cannot model, predict, or even really understand any of this behavior — at best we can assert unprovable hypotheses. The moral of the story, however, is that the Earth’s climate is at least bistable if not overtly multistable, with entire families of local attractors distributed throughout “warm phase” and “cold phase” regimes.
Metaphorically, a brief fever could indeed make the Earth catch cold. Or, of course, it could rocket up. Or go away.
All things being equal, it is probably wiser to minimize our exposure on this front and continue to work on a long term plan to get off of carbon based fuels (for a variety of reasons, not just this one). In the short run, however, one has to be strongly driven by evidence when trying to formulate a feasible public policy. Carbon trading is pointless and serves only to enrich carbon traders. Placing onerous surcharges, taxes, levies, and so on on carbon based energy only bumps energy prices in an inelastic market while having a nearly irrelevant impact on global CO_2 levels. The people that suffer the most from this are, as always, the poorest people in the world, making amelioration measures an ongoing economic catastrophe right now.
In 20-40 years, a variety of technologies that could replace carbon based energy could — and really should — mature. Fission, both Uranium and Thorium based, should provide a thousand-year base for global energy while we continue to work on things like fusion that are proving very difficult to crack. Solar power is already at “break even” without subsidy in many locations, an economically feasible way to supplement and eke out all other energy resources with an acceptable, if not actually attractive, amortization time on the original investment. Novel technologies are being studied, and a breakthrough in e.g. battery technology could be a game changer for many of the intermittent non-carbon sources.
In the meantime, there is little point in panicking, investing trillions of dollars in measures unlikely to have much impact even if they work as planned, at a time when the actual data suggests that the climate models that predict catastrophe are failing to predict the climate at a level that threatens to undermine the entire rationale for the expenditure of the bulk of the disposable income of an entire civilization for close to a century.
rgb
I like it:
Obama plays a newly-invented game whose rules only he knows. It’s called “Reset”.