Prof Bob Carter warns of unpreparedness for Global Cooling

A quick look at a global temp over time chart makes it anxiously alarming that our current Holocene Epoch may well be overdue to cool into the next, cyclically expected 100,000 year global glacial period. Humans have survived the previous two glacial periods, however, they were not spoiled by great power generation systems that may well fail to continue to provide us with the power we now depend upon for nearly everything we need and want. All the best to us in our future adventures.

So we’re back to the Ice Age predictions of the 1970s. Makes me feel young again.
And doomed, of course.

The cracking heaving glaciers will be breaking windows in Whitehall before the establishment and “climate science” concede it’s a mite cooler. They’ll claim they underestimated the cooling effect of the thousands of windmills they erected on the viagra of subsidies in the name of reducing “carbon”.

The recent slight warming has not harmed us. Nor will a possilbe slight cooling. I am personally a witness to the fact that man could survive in the 1970s, when the world was on the ice-slippery slope towards catastrophic cooling.
When the next ice age arrives, man will have developed giant hair dryers to halt the growth of the glaciers. Polar bears can get their furs dryed too.

Imagine I invented a device that could change the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere to any value and fix it forever. But it could not be tweaked once it was set. Once it was set and activated, it could not later be adjusted to a different value.
Not being a climate scientist, I present my machine to the climate science community and ask them to come up with some kind of consensus about what value of CO2 concentration they think would be best for the world.
My question: Faced with the prospect of having to live with their selection, what kind of value do you think they would select? For added drama, I tell them that (me being a dumb engineer), if they don’t provide me with a consensus recommendation, I will select the default value of 0.0 ppm.

On the subject of frosts damaging crops in NSW – here is the minimum anomaly map for Australian winter 1 June to 31 August – much of the NSW wheat belt averaged a negative anomaly
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/awap/temp/index.jsp?colour=colour&time=latest&step=0&map=minanom&period=3month&area=nat
These daily data show the damage was done in first 2 weeks of August – frost for 14 days straight in some areas – scroll down past the green rain data –
http://www.australianweathernews.com/data/DE0850.HTM
In the met region NSW Central Western Plains – south there is no sign of rain just before this frost event – so I doubt the explanation by Lisa Castleman, Riverina Local Land Services (NSW Government).

The early planting was no doubt caused by warming hubris.

The Ukraine has a major warm water port which one would rather own than rent. It is also has a superlative black soil agricultural belt which is to die for. In fact, many have died for it.
I wonder what the Russians might be thinking about future climate. Remember when they were the ones with all the potty intellectuals clapped along by a groupthink media?

The Green Parties proved to be viable, the rising stars of European Politics winning elections and ruling outright in some countries. They won Senate seats in Australia and became balance of power holders, They won Lower House seats then joined in coalition with the Socialists, won Government and dictated policy on many things other than the environment.
What if some incredibly clever strategist embedded CO2 warming deliberately to bring this new political threat down knowing all along that Solar output waxes and wanes ………it’s not inconceivable.

Annual Contiguous US temperatures have been declining at (-0.36 F/DECADE) since 1998. This is happening in 7 of the 9 climate regions in United States. Only the Northeast and the West both of which receive the moderating effect of the oceans, had slight warming trend of 0.2 and 0.3 F/decade respectively. Theses 16 year annual temperature declines illustrate that despite any summer warming , the cooling during winter , spring and fall offsets any summer warming resulting in the annual temperature declines
These temperature anomaly trend declines are similar to past temperature declines in United States during 1895-1920 and again 1953 -1979. A similar cool period seems to have started during the current decade .
It is clear that there is no global warming in United States or the globe . Why are we even talking about CO2 levels and global warming? If anything we should be concerned about the impact of falling temperatures in United State.
This cooler weather means a potential for more winter crop damage, winter snow and ice storms, more snow, major floods from spring snow melts and significant thunderstorms, wind storms, bigger tornadoes and power outages as the cold and warm fronts meet more often and at bigger amplitudes. The net result is many areas are unprepared for the current and more importantly the upcoming colder weather in terms of emergency planning, snow clearing infrastructure , heating fuel stocks( propane and natural gas) , local winter budgets , transportation needs , need to switch to more winter hardy crops , power outage repair capability and impact on local economy . It is time to get off this global warming only focus and concentrate on the real problems that confront us today. US spent $55 billion dollars to cope with global cooling this past winter alone. The media recently reported that the US overall economy shrank 1% in the 2014 January to March quarter. The contraction in growth was blamed on a number of factors including an unusually harsh winter
Just look how winter temperatures are declining in United States since 1998
WINTER (-1.79 F/DECADE) – DECLINING
DEC -1.22 F/decade (declining)
JAN -1.52 F/ decade (declining)
FEB -2.77 F/decade(declining)

RoHa on September 13, 2014 at 10:55 pm
So we’re back to the Ice Age predictions of the 1970s. Makes me feel young again. And doomed, of course.
– – – – – – – – –
RoHa,
So, I suggest that the following screening is reasonable and necessary for gaining perspective:
First, group all CAGW alarm advocating scientists in one set then make another set by grouping all CIGC (Catastrophic Imminent Glacial Cooling) alarm advocating scientists. Add the two sets together to get the total set of all climate alarm advocates; call this set ‘Warming or Cooling Alarm Climatists List’. NOTE: Ironically, some scientists might irrationally be in both sets.
Next, I suggest we make a set of all climate scientists called ‘Total LIst of Climatists’.
Then, we subtract: (‘Total List of Climatists’) – ( ‘Warming or Cooling Alarm Climatists List’ )
Finally, the result of the subtraction is a list of climate scientists who aren’t alarmist either about warming or cooling. I suggest it is a group of scientist who generally have much less emotive disruption of their scientific premises / processes / communications than the alarmists.
John

Thanks, Eric. I think Professor Carter has been in the right track for years, and paid dearly for it.
Look at this paper:
Bicentennial Decrease of the Total Solar Irradiance Leads to Unbalanced Thermal Budget of the Earth and the Little Ice Age. (Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, 2012, Applied Physics Research)
At http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754
Dr. Abdussamatov writes:
From early 90s we observe bicentennial decrease in both the TSI and the portion of its energy absorbed by the Earth.
The Earth as a planet will henceforward have negative balance in the energy budget which will result in the temperature drop in approximately 2014.
Due to increase of albedo and decrease of the greenhouse gases atmospheric concentration the absorbed portion of solar energy and the influence of the greenhouse effect will additionally decline.
The influence of the consecutive chain of feedback effects which can lead to additional drop of temperature will surpass the influence of the TSI decrease.
The onset of the deep bicentennial minimum of TSI is expected in 2042±11, that of the 19th Little Ice Age in the past 7500 years – in 2055±11.

And where, one wonders, has actual science gone? I’ve posted a whole set of links to William Briggs’ blog where in a series of posts he points out that it is really pretty silly to try to fit linear trends to timeseries data and then use those trends to prognosticate the future. It’s silly to the point of inanity when climate scientists do it to “prove” that global warming is occurring, where a glance at the data suffices to show that (at least between 17th and 18th temperatures and today) without bothering to fit any curve to the data at all or pretending that any such fit curve has the slightest predictive value.
Have we all descended to the level of HenryP, who fits a quadratic to the timeseries he generates from a handful of carefully selected sites, notes that it is negative in curvature, and concludes that he can predict temperatures decades into the future? Because if fitting a linear trend to timeseries is dumb, fitting a higher order polynomial with even more fit parameters is surely dumber…
Look. The world’s best climate model builders, who surely are not all working in any sort of bad faith and who at the very least have some physical basis underlying the models they build, are empirically unable to predict the climate’s time evolution with any particular skill (at least not yet). That’s because it is an insanely difficult problem, one so difficult and being done at such a poor spatiotemporal resolution and relying on so many unvalidated approximations for averaging over finer grained data that it would literally have been and would yet be a MIRACLE if any of models WORKED.
But along comes person after person on both sides of the argument who point to this or that feature, this or that model, this or that isolated fact, related to this horribly complex, nonlinear, multivariate, chaotic open system and state that we are certain to warm, or cool, or dance a jig temperature wise for the next ten, thirty, fifty, or hundred years.
Bullshit.
The linear trend up above is utterly meaningless. The linear trend back to (pick your favorite starting date) is equally meaningless. They are meaningless in the precise sense that we have no good reason in either physics or statistics to imagine that the linear trends back to any particular start date will have the slightest predictive skill for the next 1, 3, 5, 10 decades. Indeed, examining the past the one thing we can be pretty sure of is that almost all possible linear trends we might cook up will not persist to 5 or more decades, because in the past they almost never have.
In the end, if we can’t solve quantitative predictive climate models with any skill trying our very best and with the best of equipment, why is it that people persist in thinking they can do better solving them in their heads?
So I have two major objections to the top article. First of all, we haven’t the slightest reason to “expect” cooling, or neutral, or warming to continue. If anything, we have a small, weak, reason to expect neutral to warming to be favored over cooling, but we’re not talking 10% to 90%, it’s more like 40% to 60% (that’s the “edge” I’d give to direct CO_2 forcing compared to natural variation for the next decade or three, but I’ll freely admit that this estimate is based on a pretty weak argument and could easily prove to be horribly wrong. The error bars on my prognostication, in other words, are so wide as to permit almost anything from runaway warming to rapid cooling to occur without it surprising me much. I haven’t any more of an idea of why the LIA happened or how the world managed to change temperatures by order of 10C (down and up) in at least some locations over one or two decades at various points in the geological record than you do, certainly not enough of an idea to be able to predict a future instance. Claiming otherwise involves putting faith in models with little demonstrable skill (which is silly) or putting faith in human punditry (which is even sillier).
Second, we haven’t any good reason to assert that the world is “unprepared” for global cooling as if that is somehow unique to the times. The world isn’t “prepared” for any climate variation, and hasn’t been back to the time of Joseph. We deal with climate as it happens, and if we are wise we plan for as many bad years as we can manage without claiming to be able to predict how the years will be bad. Too much rain is bad. Too little rain is bad. Too hot is bad. Too cold is bad. Cold at the wrong time is bad. Heat at the wrong time is bad. Only one climate or kind of weather is ever considered, by farmers and people who are vacationing at the beach to be just right and they aren’t even the same kind of weather.
So sure, we are unprepared for a sudden plunge in temperatures, local or global. We are unprepared for drought. We aren’t particularly well prepared for floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, erupting volcanoes, major earthquakes, stock market crashes, accidents that claim the lives of loved ones, losing our jobs, having babies, terrible presidents, greedy countries starting wars, insane muslims committing mass murder/suicide by flying airliners into tall buildings inhabited only by civilians.
But all of these things happen! They always have happened, and never have happened. That’s why they are always a surprise (when they happen to us) but are never surprising (when we read about them happening on the news).
I mean seriously, supposed it “cooled” back to the conditions of the early 80s. We aren’t “prepared” for that? Somehow we managed with the 80’s weather (which to my own recollection was hot, drought laden, and actually far worse for farmers in the US than current weather) back in the 80’s. What if it cooled to weather like the 60’s? Well, I managed to trick or treat in the snow in the 60’s, and I’ll wager that the inhabitants of upstate New York can still manage that should it come to pass.
That isn’t to say that we are “prepared” for crop failures in the event that we have premature warming followed by late frost, or an increase in the number of cold-related droughts. We never are, and get less so over time as world population (and stress on global food supplies) increases. People will probably die. It happens. And yes, people will probably die if the climate warms rapidly. It doesn’t even have to be global warming or cooling. A prolonged drought in North India, or coastal China, or central Africa, could kill millions of people without the GASTA changing a tenth of a degree. Rainfall is a lot more critical to humans than temperature, and the models suck even more at predicting rainfall or “extreme” weather variations than they do at predicting variations in temperature.
We haven’t had a major hurricane in the Atlantic make to the US shores for a really long time now — we’re actually looking at a full decade if we miss the next couple of years, IIRC. We aren’t “prepared” for it if it happens this month, though, any more than we were “prepared” for wussie little category one Sandy, which just happened to be a perfect storm (perfectly bad storm) in lots of ways other than wind speed, where category one-almost-two Arthur was a complete snooze earlier this year because it was a perfectly good storm that failed to do any of the bad things it could have done. Hurricane Floyd was hardly a hurricane at all as it came ashore, but it dumped so much rain into East-Central NC that the resulting floods did far, far more damage than wind might have done. We weren’t “prepared” for that — people had houses built into the floodplain just because floods into the floodplain are rare.
I for one would welcome a cooling trend, in part because it would shut down the debate over climate variation, force a serious reconsideration of our state of knowledge of our climate in the best of ways, and perhaps pave the way for actual unbiased progress to be made. We might even go back — as the figure above does — to earlier HADCRUT products, or to even more improved products that remove a lot of the model-adding warming bias in GASTA, because I’m guessing that a fair bit of the “warming” in GISS and HADCRUT4 is pure artifact as it is. I could be wrong, but until politics is purged from climate science, no one will ever know. Put Lindzen in charge of NASA GISS, give him three or four years to re-assess their GASTA products, and then we’ll see where we stand. I have no confidence at all in Hadley or anyone at NASA who has ever been associated with James Hansen. I’d have more confidence in BEST if it weren’t for the fact that they apparently ignored a lot of Briggs’ criticisms of their methods (which I’m pretty sure I’d agree with, categorically — I certain agree with the ones I’ve read so far). I haven’t got much of an opinion beyond that, except that if we honestly included error estimate in the assessment of any kind of trend, we’d conclude — as Briggs has carefully pointed out — that we really cannot conclude much of anything, even if the underlying model really is linear, or quadratic, or whatever,
rgb

Don’t worry folks, even now top people are conceptualizing methods to enable global rent seekers to extract money and power from global cooling. And if they come up with something, the elites will abandon global warming as quickly as they embraced it.
It’s not the problem that counts, it’s the solution, a vast global pseudogovernment bythe elite with unlimited power over all aspects of life and business and with the power to redistribute wealth with much of the moved money sticking to their fingers.

I am in Houston where the weather has been cooler than usual since last November. I guess the wind turbines blew the heat away.

Hi Peter,
I just read Bob Carter’s letter and you seem to be putting words in his mouth. His point appears to be a lack of breadth in climate reporting in the Australian, in particular under-reporting of the warnings of a possible cooling trend. So he is actually criticizing the Murdock paper. Nowhere does he say that the NSW frosts were the result of such a cooling.
Here in the Sunshine Coast Hinterlands we had a warm May, but once winter started the nights quickly got cold and we had several hard frosts (-3 according to my thermometer) in July. The winter did seem cooler (and drier) than normal, certainly cooler than a decade or two ago, but nothing unprecedented. Even though all we seem to ever hear about is warming, it isn’t just a few Russian scientists who are predicting a cooling trend, so Carter’s point is valid.

Many people predict ….as in the Old Testament, the old prophets…. but necessary are
first class numbers of hard facts and reciprocable calculations for everyone. The
unrefuted climate analysis on the End of Global Warming” in the 21 Cty and thereafter
in the booklet: “Joachim Seifert: Das Ende der globalen Erwarmung” on the German
AMAZON.DE. Easy to follow, clear calculations made, no questions left. The author JS.

Had to share this.
I looked up a survey of Khabibullo Abdusamatov’s “nonconforming opinions” and found that the dissenting opinions are all by individuals, except in two cases, the IPCC and Wikipedia. The IPCC were in the undecided (the “In-Between” camp – 2 opinions, from actual humans), while Wikipedia is in the “Mostly Disagree” ccamp.
http://www.takeonit.com/expert/18.aspx#opinions
Mostly Disagree
Wikipedia
World’s Largest Encyclopedia
25% agreement / 1 opinions
So there it is, Wikipedia apparently rates as a reputable ‘expert’ professional opinion in this survey. But what is it mostly disagreeing with? This:
“By the mid-21st century the planet will face another Little Ice Age, similar to the Maunder Minimum, because the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041.”
Wikipedia’s ‘opinion’ is this:
“There has been no increase of solar brightness over the last 1,000 years. Solar cycles led to a negligible increase in brightness over the last 30 years, but this effect is too small to contribute significantly to global warming. The combined effect of natural climate forcing, solar variation and changes in volcanic activity, probably had a warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 but a cooling effect since. 27 Apr 2009 Source” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
Wikipedia references its own “Global Warming” webpage as excuse for why it has a considered opinion that ‘mostly disagrees’, referring to the same wiki page that says this:
“… but the 20th century instrumental temperature record shows a sudden rise in global temperatures.[66]”
Reference number [66] includes this citation:
Mann, M. E.; Zhang, Z.; Hughes, M. K.; Bradley, R. S.; Miller, S. K.; Rutherford, S.; Ni, F. (2008). “Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (36): 13252–7. doi:10.1073/pnas.0805721105. PMC 2527990. PMID 18765811. edit
Thus Wikipedia’s expert ‘opinion’ is once again rendered indubitably and irretrievably credentialed, honourable and backed by the most awe-inspiring integrity and rigour.
Yes, Abdusamatov’s can be completely wrong, as can any glorified fortune-teller, but I would appreciate it if the combined IPCC, Wikipedia, Mann, clown-employment-agency, would admit to the observable fact that they are no different in that regard, but do have a considerably more shambolic track-record within their chosen fortune-telling ‘profession’.