Story submitted by Eric Worrall
“WHAT if David Archibald’s book The Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short turns out to be right? What if the past 50 years of peace, cheap energy, abundant food, global economic growth and population explosion have been due to a temporary climate phenomenon?”
This is the first paragraph of Maurice Newman’s latest attack on the world’s infatuation with global warming.
Maurice Newman is the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s most senior economic advisor – one of the first acts of the newly elected Abbott government was to appoint Maurice Newman to the chair of the government Business Advisory Council.
According to the article written by Newman;
“If the world does indeed move into a cooling period, its citizens are ill-prepared. After the 2008 financial crisis, most economies are still struggling to recover. Cheap electricity in a colder climate will be critical, yet distorted price signals caused by renewable energy policies are driving out reliable baseload generators. Attracting fresh investment will be difficult, expensive and slow.
Only time will tell, but it is fanciful to believe that it will be business as usual in a colder global climate. ”
If Newman is right, governments have been preparing for the wrong crisis, squandering resources which could have been used to prepare us for the coming cold. At the depths of the Little Ice Age, grain production in Northern latitudes, regions which are currently regarded as the breadbaskets of the Western World, was severely curtailed, due to shorter growing seasons and greater weather instability. And there is always the risk that a little ice age could become something worse – if the historical record is any guide, we are nearing the end of the current interglacial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
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davefreer says: August 14, 2014 at 3:24 am
“Nick Stokes – just thought I’d ask as you’re so precise on your figures – how many degrees under the each of the IPCC maximum predictions are we right now? What did 1990’s prediction say we’d be at now?”
Well, since you ask, here is the WUWT review of Hansen’s 1988 prediction as at 2012 (a cool year globally). It’s 0.53°C below scenario B, which is probably the closest. That’s after 24 years.
Archibald’s prediction was made six years ago.
Nick Stokes – just WHAT did I ask? (read it again, carefully, and try again without so much slithering. Are you a lawyer?) – you can look it up here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/12/the-temperature-forecasting-track-record-of-the-ipcc/ Then you can add on the amounts for ‘adjustment’ (seeing as no one really knows quite how accurate, with the Zombie stations and other little always convenient adjustments of the past. My point, bluntly, is Archibald is wrong – but so is everybody else – by a substantial margin – when you have a record of popping up here and saying that BEFORE you attack other viewpoints I might take you seriously. Anyway – come back in 23 years from Archibald (who is also probably wrong) with figures that anyone can actually trust and establish as not ‘suitably adjusted’ and we can at least see if he was wrong about direction as well as scale. Right now my personal jury is out, the record seems fairly flat, but the fact that one side seems to be doing a lot of slither and cook (play on words intentional) and has a lot to lose makes me very wary about trusting them. You certainly haven’t helped their cause!
Newman is correct. It is the nature of government to squander the years of plenty and to cry and wail and gnash their teeth (and penalize the ants that are its citizens) during years of hardships, not for anything the ants have done, but because they have grown accustomed to squandering.
They’ve gone into heresy-induced meltdown over at the Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/aug/14/tony-abbott-adviser-warns-of-threat-of-global-cooling
Nick Stokes,
Form the same post you linked to
“Even a “naive” prediction of no change would have been closer to the truth (low by 0.22 ⁰C) than Hansen’s Scenarios A (high by +0.68 ⁰C) and B (high by 0.53 ⁰C)!”
Nick Stokes says:
August 14, 2014 at 12:46 am
“2008 is the tenth anniversary of the recent peak on global temperature in 1998. The world has been cooling at 0.06 degrees per annum since then. My prediction is that this rate of cooling will accelerate to 0.2 degrees per annum following the month of solar minimum sometime in 2009.”
That would put us now about 1.6°C down since 1998″”.
Nick, he probably meant per decade, but nevertheless, he’s closer to right than the IPPC with their 25,000 experts and he did it with the egregiously fiddled temperature record! Most important, he got the sign right. You fellows have talked and calculated yourselves out of a right to criticize such a prediction. It’s particularly bad when the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker are more right than the experts. It is 13 C here as a high today in mid-summer Ottawa, Canada where we are used to 25 – 30C and it has been ~5C or more cooler all spring and summer after a very arctic winter the few years. North America has been blue all year with all time low records (last month an arcticle here on Alabama lows). Weird weather or not, with your science, we should not be experiencing this at all after 30years of inexorable warming – natural variability be damned.
Your a smart guy, Nick. What does it take before question marks appear?
This Newman bloke is good. Hope he is backing up the words with mass sackings of bludging greenie climate change public servants, devious con artist climate change academics and 5th columnist green left government broadcasters.
“Krudd Gillard of the Commondebt of Australia says:
August 14, 2014 at 4:24 am”
Abbott ditched Flannery and the “Climate Comission” but we still have various “funds/banks” setup by the ALP to dismantle including the Renewable Energy Target (RET) AU$10bil fund to redirect to where it is needed.
“Krudd Gillard of the Commondebt of Australia says:
August 14, 2014 at 4:24 am
This Newman bloke is good.”
I strongly disagree. He is an economist and as Garnaut should not have commented on matters of science, that lead to the “price on carbon” under the ALP/Green Govn’t Newman should not have either.
Every single one of these people are cut from the same cloth. They will sell Grandma and throw the baby out with the bath water if they can see $$$ in it! Beware a politician who speaks.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
Some, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, claim we are in for warming or stable climate for millenia to come. I think such is simply wishful thinking. We are much more likely to get cold, though probably not for decades yet. It is still reasonable to suppose Manhattan will be under a layer of ice year-round in some few centuries. BTW, the old theory was that the North Pole would completely melt first (opening up the water for extra precipitation, mostly snow, which would accumulate year after year until the albedo was much higher (whiter), and the ice-growth cycle established year over year. It is possible they cycle has already begun. We could be facing failing crops and poor growing seasons within a decade or two.
Regardless, cold kills. Warmer is better.
Will there be a Nobel prize issued for the discovery that the majority of the warming in the last 50 years was due to solar magnetic cycle changes as opposed to the increase in atmospheric CO2?
Observational evidence for the start of cooling is the sudden increase in Antarctic and Arctic sea ice and the inhibiting of the El Niño events.
There are cycles of warming and cooling in the paleo record that correlate with solar magnetic cycle changes. The sun was at its highest activity level in 3000 years during the last 50 years. Solar cycle 24 is the fastest decline in solar magnetic activity in the entire record.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
How much cooling is required before the scientific community, media, and politicians abandons the warmists’ paradigm? How much cooling is required to cause concern?
Gary Pearse says: August 14, 2014 at 4:17 am
“Nick, he probably meant per decade, but nevertheless, he’s closer to right than the IPPC with their 25,000 experts and he did it with the egregiously fiddled temperature record!”
He’s not using the temperature record. He has a length of solar cycle theory. No, it’s not a confusion of units. He spells it out in the prologue:
“Solar cycles are normally 11 years long. We are currently near the end of Solar Cycle 23, which started in May 1996. It is now just over 12 years long. The previous cycle, 22, was a short one at 9.6 years. The differential is now 2½ years, which equates to a temperature decline of 1.7°. This is in the bag.”
In the bag. That’s where the gov’t advice is now coming from.
The hordes who sold their ocean front properties and fled their island sanctuaries because of massively rising sea levels will soon be seeking “climate justice”.
If we do enter a period of global cooling, it will of course be because the additional heat from the greenhouse effect is hiding in the ocean. This hidden ocean heat will be held over our heads like a boogie man – “It’s gunna come back soon! Boogity BOOGITY!”
Written by Maurice Newman, The Australian on 14 August 2014.
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/we-re-ill-prepared-if-the-iceman-cometh.html
nopaywall
Nick Stokes
The temperature has been rising for the last 300 years, so the likelihood is that despite the hiatus it will head on upwards again at some point and who knows it might eventually reach the level of the MWP.
Whether you believe in CAGW or not, it is surely prudent to have a Plan B -for cooling-to go with the highly elaborate Plan A for warming. This would include mitigating against more extremes that are likely to come our way as the past shows more extremes than the present and our current benign climatic period can not go on for ever
tonyb
He’s not using the temperature record.
============
disingenuous. of course he is using the temperature record. to test his predictions.
surely prudent to have a Plan B -for cooling-to go with the highly elaborate Plan A for warming.
============
governments fight the next war using the tactics of the previous. the plans they have in place for warming will be the plans they use to fight cooling. the civil service will change “warming” to “cooling” in all the documents, but other than that the plans will be the same. after all, warming and cooling are both “climate change”. so the plans for warming will work equally well for cooling, according to the logic of government.
Nick said:
“That would put us now about 1.6°C down since 1998.”
… and as others have already pointed out, CAGW estimates are equally wrong in the other direction, suggesting that the any “AGW signal”, if such exists, is buried deeply in noise.
If there were a compelling proof that man-made CO2 is the sole culprit for current (and future) climate catastrophes, then you should simply present that proof here and be done with it.
But it appears that there is no such proof (except for “what else could it be?”), thus your role here has been reduced to being a punching-bag troll, who occasionally punches back with a sucker punch or two, but who generally succeeds in creating
diversionary confusion and hostility.
Come on Nick, don’t be shy, show us the compelling proof that manmade CO2 is the primary culprit for CAGW. It should be easy for you, since the science is already “settled”, and 97% of all climate scientists already believe in it.
Or perhaps you (and your fellow travelers) already know that H2O and aerosols (natural and manmade) dominate climate change. Aerosols, unlike CO2, absorb incoming sunlight. Aerosols also contribute to albedo and reflect incoming sunlight, so have cooling properties as well as warming. A more complex equation, which current climate models do not adequately address.
http://www.caltech.edu/content/study-aerosols-stands-improve-climate-models
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/28/another-negative-climate-feedback-more-co2-more-plants-more-aerosols-cooling/
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/173/3992/138.long%29 (1971!)
Nick Stokes says, August 14, 2014 at 4:58 am
In the bag. That’s where the gov’t advice is now coming from.
No different to haruspex or Bayes’ bag of balls. Gov’t should stick to repainting park benches once in a while and stop paying statistical bullshitters of all descriptions. Maybe then we’d have something approaching a normal distribution. As always the actual probability is 50:50 🙂
All this reminds me that it is time to go out and find a few newly fallen trees and start cutting wood for this winter and next winter. The question is how many cords?
“..governments have been preparing for the wrong crisis, squandering resources which could have been used to prepare us for the coming cold.”
Absolutely. It has been typical for the coldest period in recent solar minima to occur roughly between the sunspot maxima of the first two weaker solar cycles. Also since 2008, I have been aware that between 2016 and 2024 there will be an sharp increase in cold shots in the mid latitudes, due to the short term planetary ordering of solar activity. Referring to suitable analogues at 179.05 years back on CET, deterministic forecasts can be made for monthly detail, e.g. early 2017 promises to be a very cold winter. But the greater concern is the number of summers through this period with very low temperatures, given how bad summer 2012 was for the UK farming economy, 2016 and 2018-2020 could put many out of business permanently. This period will see greatly increased El Nino and positive Indian Dipole events, and a renewed warm AMO, giving strongly increased drought episodes in Australia, India, and across the US great plains.
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/tcet.dat
Johanus says: August 14, 2014 at 5:44 am
>…thus your role here has been reduced to being a punching-bag troll, …who generally succeeds in creating diversionary confusion and hostility.
Nick is a trololol. You coorectly point out his nature and goals, then continue to play his game. He pokes for a minute, the you spend an hour writing a clever response. Stop feeding the troll and he will go away. Don’t make him important or let him live rent free in your head!
Cheers!
Eric
For forecasts of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling see
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
Reblogged this on The Next Grand Minimum and commented:
If you have not read David Archibald’s book, you should and then take action to prepare your family for the coming crisis.
What if we cook Chicken Little for dinner, and the global temperature remains relatively the same (inbetween 13 and 15 degree C) for the next 15oo years or so, or, until the next glaciation period commences?