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
BTW, the graph Willis posted from Duke Neukem latest paper is interesting if you look at the grey , unprocessed lines in the background.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/04/duke-neukoms-secret-sauce/
There is a clear century scale repetitive hump in the proxy data and we are at a peak. That would suggest the ruskies may be right about cooling to 2050.
“Reset” has a very simple game console with only one button on it. No one knows quite what it’s for, and, to make things interesting the button is often broken, and you never know when, so it puts everybody on a genuinely egalitarian footing… (?)
This is really out of proportion to fail to distinguish the two hundred year fluctuations from the 1400 year low those minima took place during! Let us not fear monger about cold climate!
lsvalgaard says
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).
Henry says
(quote from wikipedia)
Variations in total solar irradiance were too small to detect with technology available before the satellite era, although the small fraction in ultra-violet light has recently been found to vary significantly more than previously thought over the course of a solar cycle
end quote
if Svalgaard were right, then why have we started to cool globally?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987/to:2014/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2014/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2014/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2002/to:2014/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2013/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2014/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2014/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2002/trend
It is the amount of UV coming through the atmosphere that is getting smaller (in a cooling period) and this has to do with a variation within TSI,
Apparently this variation does not (seemingly) affect TSI much in absolute values,
it is like a tiny re-distribution of the TSI curve….
lsvalgaard
This year’s winter in North America attests to the fact that the circulation can be a problem for agriculture and decrease the intensity of the magnetic field leads to dramatic changes in the circulation. Solar field continues unabated.
“Global climate” is an oxymoron. The earth has many climates, not one.
After the past winter in U.S., it seems obligatory, at some point, to compile a list of “excess mortalities” due to cold. I don’t find current (2014( data at Centers for Disease (National Vital Statistics). Maybe someone else knows where to look, and can link. Googling variations on “2014 deaths from cold” gives some sense of how bad this winter was, and it’s a grim actuarial task to decide what constitutes a mortality from cold weather. But the totals need to reflect ALL the deaths, from accidents on a snow-slick road to alcohol-related exposure. This is the game warmists play, and they have no compunctions about attributing a heart failure in a hot apartment to global warming.
Stephen Richards says: “The problem with other countries buying land is more warmer climes is that the country that has the land controls the export.”
I agree, I also think that if Australia prevented the grain being exported then this would be a good excuse for an invasion, with retaliation by Australia of either scorched earth or sending the army in to harvest it and feed their own people.
This is one of the reasons why I think the whole thing is too speculative, the other being that I think the term “Global Climate Disruption” sounds more apocalyptic than the “Climate Change” which was used when “Global Warming” clearly wasn’t happening.
It is a natural evolution of the Big Lie!
RGB says : Carbon trading is pointless and serves only to enrich carbon traders.
On that’s what all this is about since the Stern report. Before that politicians avoided ‘green’ like the plague, then Stern suggested they could turn it into a new form of consumerism. Then banking crisis hit.
Subsidies for solar PV are nothing to do with “saving the planet” and all about “saving the banks”.
If you have a solar installation you have a 20 year revenue source. If you have revenue source, a bank can lend you money. Money that it does not even have, and then get you to pay it back twice over.
energy gets dearer, everyone takes a hit and the banks get to pay off some of their casino debts.
Bill Parsons: Obama plays a newly-invented game whose rules only he knows. It’s called “Reset”.
No, it was a mistranslation. The button actually reads “overload” except that Clinton goofed it.
Raw land area is one of just two inherently restricted resources, for which expanded reproduction is impossible, even with truly advanced technology.
The other one is span of human attention, which, since the decline of slavery, can’t be owned by others, only rented for a limited time (see employee) or tricked into temporary submission (see ads).
Therefore land is the best long term investment.
Energy, contrary to widespread subterfuge, is abundant. In each ton of ordinary granite rock there is the energy of 50 tons of coal in the form of fissionable radioisotopes. It is only a matter of technology to extract it safely.
Also, there is this huge gravitational fusion plant nearby and we don’t even know how to turn it off. With the proper technology radiative energy from it can be captured cheaply, stored in non toxic, non flammable chemicals like sugar and released on demand. The cycle is already working on a large scale for billions of years using God’s nanotechnology. We ourselves are not quite there yet, but getting close. The only caveat is average flux density on terrestrial surface is low, which brings us back to land area as a precious resource.
With enough cheap energy all raw materials are overabundant, because the thermodynamic limit to free energy required to extract a rare constituent is only proportional to the logarithm of its concentration. Again, it is only a matter of technology to get close to the limit.
So it is not about expectations related to climate, it is pure technological optimism. Land is simply the only resource that can be owned and for which demand is inevitably going to exceed supply in the long run.
Lots of land is purchased by investors in Canada as well, which is not the hottest place on Earth.
Was South America will be warm winter? I’m afraid not.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_z70_sh_f00.gif
lsvalgaard says:
April 5, 2014 at 9:18 am
“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).”
Straw-man Leif strikes again, UV and X-ray have been declining. There is a possibility of the climate cooling and an equal possibility that it will warm.
lsvalgaard says:
April 5, 2014 at 9:32 am
Appealing to authority is an often used crutch when the argument is otherwise weak.
Far be it from me to point out (gently) that you frequently quote your own website, but maybe you may wish to consider whether you consider yourself to be an authority …
For the avoidance of doubt, as a general rule I DO consider you to be pretty good on this science stuff, but humility is no bad thing.
I speak as a retired former railway engineer who is glad to proclaim that he does not write any form of pornography. I’m just this guy, you know …
This theory is right out there in Lewandowsky land. The Chinese don’t need exotic reasons to buy outback land. In case you haven’t noticed, the Chinese are buying pretty much every real asset outside China that they can get their hands on at the moment to try to close the loop on their embarrasingly large trade surplus and stop their currency from inflating. They buy outback farms for the same reason they buy everything else; they are real assets, they are not in China and they are for sale.
Sparks says
Straw-man Leif strikes again, UV and X-ray have been declining. There is a possibility of the climate cooling and an equal possibility that it will warm.
Henry says
Have you got some figures on that decline?
I know global cooling has already started
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/05/an-intriguing-mystery-and-a-very-speculative-theory/#comment-1606416
Chemists know that a lot of incoming radiation is deflected to space by the ozone and the peroxides and nitrous oxides lying at the TOA. These chemicals are manufactured from the E-UV coming from the sun. Luckily we do have measurements on ozone, from stations in both hemispheres. I looked at these results. I found that ozone started going down around 1951 and started going up again in 1995, both on the NH and the SH. Percentage wise the increase in ozone in the SH since 1995 is much more spectacular.
HF Radio propagation relies directly upon ionization of the upper atmosphere by the sun.
So why, if the sun is so stable, is HF radio propagation so unstable year to year, decade to decade?
Could it be that only some measurements of the sun are stable, while others are not?
Thus, when it is suggested that the Sun cannot be affecting climate because it is so stable, could it be that this is a case of selective cherry picking?
HenryP says:
April 5, 2014 at 10:50 am
It is the amount of UV coming through the atmosphere that is getting smaller (in a cooling period) and this has to do with a variation within TSI,
Somebody forgot to tell the Sun. Here is a plot of the Mg II index which measures the UV flux
http://www.leif.org/research/Mg-II-Flux.png
The latest data for 2014 are not on the plot, but with the recent increase in solar activity run as high as in SC23. No downward trend the last 17 years….
HenryP says:
April 5, 2014 at 11:49 am
“Straw-man Leif strikes again, UV and X-ray have been declining.”
Henry says
Have you got some figures on that decline?
I’ll refer your question to Leif he’s the expert on talking big fiery balls. 🙂
ferd berple says:
April 5, 2014 at 11:54 am
HF Radio propagation relies directly upon ionization of the upper atmosphere by the sun.
So why, if the sun is so stable, is HF radio propagation so unstable year to year, decade to decade?
Simply because the ionosphere is like a thin tail on a large dog. As the dog wags its tail, the center of gravity of the dog varies, but, oh, so little.
If it does get cold, Europe is going to be in a world of hurt. They are already having excess deaths in the winter because they have driven the cost of power so high.
Leif,
I’ve compared SC23 with SC24, UV and X-ray are down in comparison!
Sparks says:
April 5, 2014 at 12:13 pm
I’ve compared SC23 with SC24, UV and X-ray are down in comparison!
Not any more than if it followed TSI or the sunspot number:
http://www.leif.org/research/Mg-II-Flux.png
So, the idea that UV varies independently form TSI does not hold water.
lsvalgaard
It’s still lower than SC23, are you still counting the top of spikes?
@LSVALGAARD
I was talking about what is measured at sea level?
do we have some measurement of UV measured at sealevel?