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.
===============================================================
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
lsvalgaard
When it gets warm in Canada?
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_z70_nh_f240.gif
HenryP says:
April 5, 2014 at 12:36 pm
I was talking about what is measured at sea level?
do we have some measurement of UV measured at sealevel?
The active part of UV does not reach sea level…
Sparks says:
April 5, 2014 at 12:32 pm
It’s still lower than SC23, are you still counting the top of spikes?
Compare UV and Temperatures http://www.leif.org/research/UV-Flux-and-Temps.png
Then come back with your quantitative physical theory that connects the two.
@lsvalgaard
you did not get it
but, please do explain the reason for the cooling?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1927/to:2015/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2015/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2015/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2002/to:2015/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2015/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2015/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2015/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2015/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1960/to:1990/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1930/to:1960/trend
“lsvalgaard says:
April 5, 2014 at 9:32 am
Appealing to authority is an often used crutch when the argument is otherwise weak.”
WOW… I am totally and utterly amazed to see you write that. That has been the absolute MAIN selling point the warmists have been using on the public over the past two decades trying to convince them that CAGW is real. How many times have we heard “97%” and “ALL the worlds scientific academies blah blah blah…” I Am glad you concede that the CAGW hypothesis is indeed weak.
lsvalgaard says:
April 5, 2014 at 12:42 pm
Here is sc23 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdrV0j75R80
Here is the new counting system http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lit6nNet5MA
lsvalgaard says:
April 5, 2014 at 12:42 pm
“…come back with your quantitative physical theory that connects the two.”
So a politically adjusted global temperature anomaly backs up your position… interesting!
I met Holdren at the NAE Grand Challenges Summit in Chicago in 2010, here are his slides discussing his concept of “climate disruption”:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/jph-chicago-04212010.pdf
His theory is that increasing temperature will cause severe disruption in weather patterns, and that sometimes, this will result in transient cold weather in some regions. However, his overall message is that global temperatures will increase. It is worth reading to see where he is coming from = “weather weirding.”
This article, and the one about state government climate reports, are not of the quality for which WUWT has been rightly respected for many years. I sincerely hope they are exceptions and not the new typical.
These posts make me wonder about the concept of skeptics snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
rgbatduke says:
April 5, 2014 at 10:31 am
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.
An excellent summary, but situation may not be as hopeless as it might appear.
Leohle’s is one of the better reconstructions of the millennial global temperature anomaly, by no means accurate, but still has both the MWP and the LIA that appear to be reasonable.
One proxy (just a conjecture at this time) that agrees well with the Loehle’s reconstruction is the decadal change in the Arctic-far North Atlantic geomagnetic field.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GTproxy.htm
Recently Steinhilber reconstructed temperature change spectrum from the Dongge cave stalagmites, China, and as it happens it also closely matches the geopolar magnetic dipole spectrum at centenary scale (see link above).
Yes, just a conjecture, but the NASA’s JPL scientist Dr. J. Dickey is of the opinion that may be more to it than pure speculation: “One possibility is the movements of Earth’s core (where Earth’s magnetic field originates) might disturb Earth’s magnetic shielding ……etc” see the above link for the NASA’s article.
“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.”
I think you are somewhat wrong about this. Holdren is not the problem. He is just the symptom of a problem. And the problem is a lot of interest, ideologies and etc.. that just don’t fit into today’s World and is desperate to change it to suit their needs?
HenryP says:
April 5, 2014 at 12:51 pm
you did not get it. but, please do explain the reason for the cooling?
You seem to be the expert, so let us hear it.
Sparks says:
April 5, 2014 at 1:06 pm
So a politically adjusted global temperature anomaly backs up your position… interesting!
You mean an anomaly that has been adjusted to show warming at all?
@lief
You did not get it
– – I meant the UV
Hence we are cooling
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.
Well, banks and energy companies in general and solar cells producers and…
Even without subsidy, putting solar PV on my house (even in NC where energy is relatively cheap) is break even to win a bit, amortized over 15 years. The 20 year ROI is roughly equivalent to what one might realize with high efficiency heat/AC, high efficiency low-E windows, and cone head insulation in the roof. Sadly, my house got all of the previous treatments first (out of necessity — replacing the cheap-ass furnaces that were original equipment, the cheap-ass windows ditto, along the way). That dropped my energy bill by a factor of 2 (on a 15-20 year amortization of the cost of all the new hardware). My problem with solar now is marginal gain. I only pay out $160/month (equalized) for electricity, plus a chunk for natural gas. That means that even if I dropped my electrical bill to zero, I realize at most around $2000/year to use to service debt. If I borrow $20,000 to install solar PV, it will be every bit of 15 to 20 years to break even on the cost of the money. If I actually produce more electricity than I use (unlikely) I could knock some years off of that, but it isn’t terribly attractive as things stand.
It’s better for new construction — that simply reduces the cost of owning/buying the home (rolling the cost into the original mortgage but realizing energy savings for 20+ years that more than subsidize the cost of the money).
It is actually better as an investment than as a debt-financed operation. If I had $20,000 lying around, and used it to buy solar PV for my house and thereby reduced my energy cost outflow by $2000/year, that would be a 10% ROI which in today’s market isn’t too shabby. Borrowing the money just means somebody else (the lender) reaps the bulk of the benefit. Government subsidy simply shifts the personally realizable margins around a bit so that I can reduce the borrowed money outlay (or get “free money” to add to a personal investment) and again, knock a few years off the amortization and improve ROI.
So either way I benefit to break even. My power company benefits as they don’t have to build new power plants as fast in order to cover summertime AC-linked brownout in a growing population. The banks/finance companies benefit because they get to loan money and service the loans. Drug dealers seeking to launder money benefit as they put their money into banks to be loaned. Solar energy companies benefit as they make money. Their employees benefit from having jobs. China benefits from selling the solar cells. The world benefits from not burning through irreplaceable fossil fuels that would be worth far more as chemical feedstock in 100 years than they are now as fuel.
The only real problem is that I don’t benefit enough, and I don’t have $20,000 lying around at the moment and would have to borrow it. The cost of solar is generally decreasing, and in five years I’m guessing that it will have dropped to where it is a no-brainer to put solar on the house whether or not I use borrowed money or my own (with the greater return in the latter case). Given efficiencies and economy of scale, a fair number of NC farmers are finding it worthwhile to transform their tobacco or cotton fields into solar farms — buying at that scale already permits one to drop overall cost per watt to where the amortization is completed in less than a decade.
That’s really part of my beef. I’m not contemplating solar on my house to save the world, because I am not convinced it needs saving. I’m contemplating solar on my house because it is a decent investment, just as were my high-efficiency furnaces. My house is easily $2000-3000/year cheaper to run than it was with the old furnaces, cheap windows, etc, and I’ll recover a bunch of the capital investment if/when I sell on top of that as I sell the savings to the next owners. In the next couple of decades, the economics of doing this will be overwhelming — reasonably efficient solar cells are (IMO) likely to go down to less than $0.25/watt within 20 years, and the electronics required to use them efficiently are getting cheaper as well. There isn’t any need for carbon trading to make that happen, and very little that the government does (but fund research into better solar technology) will make it go faster or slower than it already is.
The same thing is true for things like improved batteries — everybody knows there are billions on the table for better batteries. There is fame, fortune, nobel prizes for the inventor of a high-energy density super battery, especially one that can be mass produced cheaply without using e.g. rare earths or exotic, toxic and scarce elements. There is DOE money for people working on them. There is NSF money, NASA money, corporate money, and private money. There are non-battery ideas that might eventually prove to be cost-effective. Carbon trading and panic won’t make the search go any faster, but the day that somebody perfects e.g. a zinc-oxide battery that is rechargeable 1000 times without significant degradation and that can hold energy at anything like the energy density of gasoline, the battery will be put to immediate use in a dozen venues all of which will drop fossil fuel consumption — buffering large scale solar, electric cars, b uffering non solar resources (just as important for keeping the costs of building new plants down) and hey, maybe we can build a laptop that actually runs for days per charge instead of hours per charge…
We have learned nothing from the incredible discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries. People always make predictions as if the technology and economy they had yesterday is the technology that will be dominant in 20 years, and then wonder why catastrophic predictions made on the basis of that technology or economy fail. The population bomb was defused by the green revolution. Widespread stories of “the end of oil” proved premature. The cold war continued right up to the day it more or less abruptly ended. My cell phone would have been classified as an “armament” by the US government a mere twenty years ago, and my laptop would have been worth a billion dollars twenty five years ago — people would have killed to possess it, governments would have fought wars to keep it out of “the wrong hands” with its dual core gigaflop scale CPUs, its terabyte scale storage, its gigabytes of RAM, its uber-fast network.
In twenty years we may have stopped burning energy that is currently being utterly wasted. Smart lights that only turn on when there is somebody there to use the light. AC that knows when you are home and adjusts accordingly. A smart energy grid. LED based light instead of hot filament based light. Cars that store and recover most of their kinetic energy when braking. We don’t really need additional incentive to develop these things — energy is expensive and is the fundamental scarce resource so it is always going to be to our advantage to make it as cheap as possible to enable us to accomplish “anything”. We won’t do it to avoid the spectre of an ill-defined global catastrophe. We’ll do it for the same reason we do many things — to make money, or spend less money, so we have more money to use on the things we want to use money for.
No idea, no technology before its time, to be sure, but understand — the technologies that will be available in twenty years are hardly imaginable today! At least if the future is anything like the present or the past. Not even (most) science fiction authors foresaw the internet. I’ve been a computer geek more or less my whole life, but have had a hard time seeing more than five years into the future of computing along the way (and five years is a lot, in the computing business!).
Here is one lesson I learned, repeatedly, the hard way, from computing. If what you want to do is barely possible, at enormous expense, today, just wait. In a year, two years, ten years, you can do it cheaply. I’ve run code at enormous expense and difficulty on supercomputers or huge distributed parallel compute clusters — back in the 90’s — that my current aging laptop could complete in half the time. Cars that once upon a time were lucky to come with a seat belt now come with seat belts with shoulder harnesses, air bags, antilock brakes and positraction systems, and more. Central air furnaces used to be 30-50% efficient — most of the energy you bought went straight up the flue. My furnaces now are between 90 and 95% efficient — their exhaust is barely warm, and most of the energy I buy to heat my home ends up in my house and stays there for much longer.
I don’t know, precisely, how things will change to defeat CAGW if the hypothesis proves to be true and the climate eventually shows signs of continuing heating at a rate that might be catastrophic. I do, however, have a lot of faith that technologies that we can barely imagine today will render the whole question moot long before we reach any sort of catastrophic point if the hypothesis itself isn’t just plain false. Those technologies will all be sensible things to pursue independent of the possibility of catastrophe and need no further motivation than the enrichment of their developers (including e.g. the US government and people as funded by public money) to happen. I’m all for research. Not so much for subsidy of immature technologies to somebody’s direct enrichment when that somebody is not me.
HenryP says:
April 5, 2014 at 1:53 pm
Hence we are cooling
Not according to the satellite measurements http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/05/no-global-warming-for-17-years-8-months/
So, enough of this.
A lot of people here get very upset when foreigners buy up our property. They do not understand economics. I say welcome to Oz! Bring dollars!
The fact is you will end up selling it back to us at a loss. Ask the Japanese.
And now why would but desert land in Australia? They got the GOBI if they want to use that for food? And the Sahara would be a lot cheaper.and @Samuell re Europe, there would be lot less hurt if the Brits for example restart their Coal industry both for direct heating in homes to producing cheaper power and allow fracking for gas!
Isn’t the latest meme “Global Extreme Weather Change”? Hard to keep track, since they change it so often. In any case, Holdren just wants all bases covered, no matter what happens. Warmists now HATE the phrase “global warming”, which is why we need to keep using it, to rub their noses in the fact that it just isn’t happening, which proves their precious GCMs are pure unadulterated BS.
lsvalgaard says:
April 5, 2014 at 1:43 pm
“You mean an anomaly that has been adjusted to show warming at all?”
Or adjusted to reduce the past, then your current politically driven warming escapade becomes meaningless.
Sparks says:
April 5, 2014 at 2:21 pm
lOr adjusted to reduce the past, then your current politically driven warming escapade becomes meaningless.
Go argue that with the satellite people or with His Lordship
lsvalgaard says:
April 5, 2014 at 2:05 pm
HenryP says:
“Not according to the satellite measurements http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/05/no-global-warming-for-17-years-8-months/
So, enough of this.”
Computer says no..
lsvalgaard says:
April 5, 2014 at 2:26 pm
“Go argue that with the satellite people or with His Lordship”
Did you just make a joke Leif.. lmao
Sparks says:
April 5, 2014 at 2:27 pm
Computer says no..
Computer says no warming and no cooling. So enough of this.
Did you just make a joke Leif.. lmao
I hope you get your a** back, but, no joke: http://www.leif.org/research/UV-Flux-and-Temps.png
If you have nothing else to bring to the table, perhaps try to keep a lower profile…
Fred Berple’s comment about the cycles of F, E, and D layer ioniztion and lsvalgaard’s return comment about the tail of the dog, reminded me of Eistein’s tale of how radio works. When asked, almost 100 years ag, he said (paraphrasing from memory, ” Radio is like a long cat with its tail in New York and its head in LA. When you pull on the tail in New York, it screams in LA…. except there’s no cat.”
Google Proterro — it’s there already–and scaling up.