Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
The Earth is presently in an interglacial period—a period between ice ages. Since the end of the last ice age, Earth’s surface temperatures have been above the temperature needed to maintain ice sheets and glaciers, which covered much of the land masses at mid-to-high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. As a result, those ice sheets and glaciers have been melting for tens of thousands of years and sea levels have risen…and will continue to rise until the start of the next ice age.
Many of us are old enough to remember the scare stories from the 1970s, a time when climate scientists were warning that Earth was returning to an ice age.
For fun, imagine the multidecadal uptick in global surface temperatures didn’t happen from the 1970s to present—that global surfaces actually cooled a comparable amount, that sea levels were dropping, that glaciers and ice sheets were gaining mass.
Would mankind still be blamed? What would be different?
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
It would be obvious that the story would be that .. “Despite the fact that CO2 contributes to a slight amount of warming as a minor greenhouse gas it has a yet unexplainable cooling affect that is witnessed repeatedly in the ice core record whereby every time temperature goes up CO2 then also goes up to stop the warming and bring temperatures back down again over thousands of years. The addition of human CO2 is causing this otherwise natural cycle to accelerate and will initiate the next ice age sooner than it would have. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Cooling is real, unequivocal and the debate is over – so now hand us the research money to find out how bad it is and start taxing CO2 to control the population before we all freeze to death anyway.”
http://iceagenow.info/2014/12/6-dead-snow-blankets-wide-areas-japan/
Could be relevant? Michael
This is an excellent question. All the data we have, tells us the Holocene is very benign and uniform, as far as temperature is concerned. We are very lucky to have attained what we have, as far as technology and wealth is concerned, and to be able to look at this question seriously. Here in western Canada we have plenty of lake sediment data, palynology, chironomid midge data to tell us that there was a Holocene Temperature Optimum and that was around 7000 years before present. Since then the Coast Mountains and the Rockies have experienced the Neo-Glacial with the return of glaciers and a cooler and wetter climate.
Where I am in South East British Columbia the lake sediments tell us that, during the Holocene Climate Optimum, we had a spruce pine ecosystem with frequent summer fires, perhaps like interior Washington State or northern Oregon, that has since been replaced by Mountain Hemlock, Western Hemlock, and in the lowlands, Western Red Cedar. All of this indicates a cooling climate for the last 4000 years or so.
Considering the fact that the average annual temperature was perhaps 2C to 4C warmer in the past, and everything seems to have been just fine, we should be studying the effects, and possible causes of colder temperatures. I think it is imperative that we seriously consider potential cooling. and that we leave no stone unturned in looking at possible mechanisms. A dip into the Pleistocene normal temperature pool would be a disaster.
The only difference is the extraordinary level of money being squandered on the folly of CAGW or CAGC if the trough-dwellers do a “bait and switch” amazing world of nutty wastrels we live in..
This CAGW hypothesis gained popular acceptance by the masses simply because global temps just happen to have risen at 0.14C/decade (HADCRUT4) for 18 years between 1980 and 1998.
It now seems plausible that most of the warming between 1980~98 was caused by: 6 El Ninos between 1983~98, the PDO entered its 30-yr warm cycle in 1977, the 2nd & 3rd strongest solar cycles since 1715 took place between 1976~96 and the AMO entered its 30-yr warm cycle in 1994.
Now all these natural phenomenon have reversed and/or are winding down, and global temp trends have been flat/falling/static for the past 18 years (depending on temp database used).
In the late 1970’s, some climatologists hypothesized the Earth was entering a New Ice Age, because global temp trends had been falling between 1943~1977, and they were blaming manmade fossil fuel particulates for the falling global temps… It was actually because the PDO was in its 30-yr cool cycle from 1943~1977 and the AMO entered its 30-yr cool cycle in 1964…
The strategy of the CAGW acolytes is to run out the clock until the PDO reenter its 30-yr warm cycle around 2035. In the interim, they’ll dust off the old hypothesis that fossil fuel particulates are overwhelming CO2 forcing and that global temp trends will eventually start rising again in the future, which they will….
The problem with this strategy is that it has already become impossible for CAGW’s ECS projections to be even remotely possible…
It’s time to call it a day and run this CAGW hypothesis through the shredder. It has become a joke.
All the physics and empirical evidence shows ECS will be between 0.5C~1.0C, which isn’t a problem.
Well you never know, we may get to find out in the next 20-30 years.
Nature has a wry sense of humor, to paraphrase the Bard, “I can Kill, and I can smile as I Kill” and Mother Nature has certainly been grinning from ear to ear over the duration of Human history.
If we do drink the Malthusian Kool Aid, we won’t have the energy or energy infrastructure to survive a seriously dismal epoch, then again I think that’s the intended-unintended consequences of the Green blob.
Just follow the trails left by the planets ultra,ultra, ultra rich. Then camp where-ever they set up their luxury seal and baby yak skin tents, should give us an indicator of where the most Fat, Sugar and debauchery can be found.
P.S. No invite required.
If the solar output was still puffing up our atmospheric gasses, through out the various atmospheric levels we might still be warming.
But the solar outputs are kaput and our thermospheric gasses like Carbon dioxide for instance is contributing “One Trillion Less KiloWatt Hours of Energy in 2013 than 2002”
From page 15 of:
Observations and Consequences of Solar Cycle 24: The Perspective from Earth’s Upper Atmosphere
http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2013/files/2013/12/PressConfMlynczakFinal.pdf
Martin G. Mlynczak, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA
Linda A. Hunt, SSAI, Hampton, VA
James M. Russell III, Hampton Univ., Hampton, VA
Press Conference December 11, 2013
Now I understand that CO2 has natural variablility, but gasses need their heater…
Al Gore’s little froggy is slowly freezing the past couple years.. this might change more quickly than the warming did to warm us……………………………brrrrrr
1) The Green Bay Packers really would be playing on the ‘frozen tundra’ of Lambeau Field, in Green Bay Wisconsin!
2) Minnesotan’s For Global Warming would be the political party controlling Minnesota’s state government… and Al Franken would still be a bad joke!
3) Illegal immigration from Canadians fleeing the advancing glaciers would be a major problem for the norther United States, as they streamed across the frozen Great Lakes on their snowmobiles, eh?
4) Serious consideration would be given to directly and massively igniting the oil sands of Alberta, at the insistence of climate scientists their latest climate models showed the enormous release of heat, CO2, and carbon soot would reverse the global cooling.
Mac , i am laughing # 4 is great !
The solution is always the same. Raise taxes, inhibit growth, more funding for the UN.
The difference… Weather stations would be relocated to leaky air conditioned buildings… Made necessary (supposedly) to keep the electronics cool… Temps would be fudged downward… For all the same reasons they’re fudged upward now…
The call would be from climate scientists that the only way they could think of to mitigate the increasing cold would be to increase CO2 by burning more fossil fuels.
Consequently nuclear would be banned in favour of coal.
Dredging companies and ice breaking owning companies would be the new investment bubbles so as to keep the major ports operating as sea levels started to fall and ice berg and ice sheets extended into more southerly latitudes
Farming land located between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn would become another investment bubble as the great grain growing regions of Canada, the northern states of the USA, northern and central Europe and Central Asia and northern China became to cold and too short seasonally to allow grain crops to grow and mature.
With a colder climate less water would be retained in the atmosphere and a consequent reduction in precipitation in some of the food producing regions would lead to continuous droughts until these food producing regions are abandoned.
[ Got lots of evidence of this type of cold era climate here in western Victoria around the shallow salt lakes and their 30 to 50 metre high Moon Dunes down wind of lakes in the prevailing westerly winds. ]
As food shortages started to bite farmers would once again receive around 50% of the retail price of food just like they did in the early 1950’s instead of the 5% of the retail price they currently receive and can barely exist on.
Large oil and coal resources in the northern hemispheric regions would no longer be accessible countered by the surfacing of new fossil fuel sources such as the immense under sea coal deposits off Norway .Thats if the shipping could dodge the icebergs.
Ocean transport would be severely limited as the various channels and Straits became too shallow for large ships to transverse ie ; the 2.1 km wide shipping channel of the Straits of Malacca and Singapore are transverse by two hundred ships a day or 70,000 ships a year,
The Malacca Strait has a minimum water depth of 27 metres, already too shallow for the very Large bulk carriers to navigate.
Global population would probably fall very significantly.
Probably far less international co-operation or outright war over resources as the drive for resource security of every type by a northern nations in particular with food and energy security became paramount for all nations as the ice sheets advanced.
No matter which way we look at it, cold climatic periods are mostly all bad for our species.
As I grow older I try to learn from the past because there are patterns that repeat:
(1) Leftists will invent another environmental crisis if their global warming “crisis” loses support … just as the prior acid rain, hole in the ozone layer, and many other prior crises stopped scaring people and were replaced by a new boogeyman.
.
The “cure” for any crisis is always the same:” Do what the environmentalists say without question or life on Earth will end as we know it.
.
(2) Earth has had mild warming and cooling trend between the ice ages, so there is no reason to assume it’s different this time. Predicting a global warming catastrophe is climate astrology. Predicting the next ice age is also climate astrology.
.
To be honest with the general public, real scientists should never make climate predictions more than one week into the future … and should never take inaccurate, non-global, too often “adjusted” surface temperature measurements seriously because tiny changes to the average surface temperature in the past century may be smaller than the margin or error in the measurements.
.
If you want to know what the weather is, look out a window, or step outside.
.
If you want to know what the average temperature trend will be in the future, sorry, but no human has the answer to that question … and there are only 45 years of reasonably accurate data (weather satellites) — not enough years to determine a long-term trend.
.
All the surface temperature averages have occurred in what appears to be a naturally rising trend that followed hundreds of years of cooling. That’s like looking at a stock market average ONLY during a bull market and then claiming that proves stock prices ALWAYS go up!
“Fossil fuels are sending smog into the in ever increasing amounts. This is reducing the sunlight reaching earth and is sending us into a new ice age. We must cut fossil fuel emissions or we are doomed. Just look at how cold last winter was. Just look at the smog in Beijing. We aren’t doing enough. We need to act now! Etc, etc”
Sound about right?
The tropics would still be the place to be.
It is reasonably likely that just such a reversal might occur by 2035 .
As a guide to the timing and extent of the likely coming cooling based on the natural 60 and 1000 year periodicities in the temperature data and using the 10Be and neutron monitor data as the most useful proxy for solar “activity” check the series of posts at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
The post at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
is a good place to start.
One of the first things impressed upon me in tutorials as an undergraduate in Geology at Oxford was the importance of considering multiple working hypotheses when dealing with scientific problems. This is really what Bob is suggesting . With regard to climate this would be more than a fun exercise of the imagination but a proper and indeed necessary use of the precautionary principle.The worst scientific error of the climate establishment is their unshakeable faith in their meaningless model outputs and their refusal to estimate the possible impacts of a cooling rather than a warming world and then consider what strategies might best be used in adapting to the eventuality that cooling actually develops.
So. Just to play a “curve-projecting” game – because neither the 60-66-67 year short cycle nor the 900-1000 year long cycle actually have a “physics” cause that has been decided on…yet, let us ask the following: Is the 2000-2010 “hiatus” the top of a the Modern Warming Period “Peak”?
Or will the Modern Warming Period max out 60-70 years later in 2065-2075?
Or yet one more 66 year cycle later, in 2130-2140?
After all, when where the “peaks” of the Medieval Warming Period? 1000? 1066? 1130? 1200?
All of the above?
RACook You are right in identifying the key question in climate forecasting – and the one to which the establishment climate scientists should really turn their attention i e Where is the earth with regard to the natural solar millennial cycle ? Several posts at the http:/climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com site deal with this question. In summary I would make a few observations.
1 The period fluctuates generally between 960 and 1020 years –
2.Look at the ties between solar “activity” and temperature in figures 4,5,6.7,8,9,10,11,12, in e.g. post
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
3 . This post also says
“NOTE!! The connection between solar “activity” and climate is poorly understood and highly controversial. Solar “activity” encompasses changes in solar magnetic field strength, IMF, CRF, TSI, EUV, solar wind density and velocity, CMEs, proton events etc. The idea of using the neutron count and the 10Be record as the most useful proxy for changing solar activity and temperature forecasting is agnostic as to the physical mechanisms involved.
Having said that, however, it is reasonable to suggest that the three main solar activity related climate drivers are:
a) the changing GCR flux – via the changes in cloud cover and natural aerosols (optical depth)
b) the changing EUV radiation – top down effects via the Ozone layer
c) the changing TSI – especially on millennial and centennial scales.
The effect on climate of the combination of these solar drivers will vary non-linearly depending on the particular phases of the eccentricity, obliquity and precession orbital cycles at any particular time.”
4.It is obvious by inspection of Figs 5 and 9 that we are just approaching, right at or just past the millennial temperature peak.
5.We must distinguish between the peak in the solar activity driver which is behind us see Figs 13 and 14 and the temperature peaks which lag the driver peak by variable amounts (maybe 20 +/- 8 years) according to the metric used – i.e..the various measures of land and sea temperatures , OHC and the area measured e.g. NH SH Global or on the various climate plates.
6.My forecasts are included in the posts.
Imagine….
http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-tj5vm1ilS24/VIUfE_-GPqI/AAAAAAAAAjQ/FJcZKiLNOdU/s800/GW_ice_now_02.jpg
Imagine…
http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-PozIFgy31UE/VIUfMAd_dmI/AAAAAAAAAjY/x8-ZTaL3gyg/s800/GW_ice_now_03.jpg
Imagine:
“Antarctic sea ice breaks record, NASA says”
“Fall snow cover in Norther Hemisphere was the most extensive on record.”
That’s all from global “warming” in 2014.
It’s hard to imagine what a period of “cooling” will bring. Less snow and ice? Warmer winters?
It’s Bush’s fault. It’s ALWAYS Bush’s fault.
Of course the oncoming ice age is bushes’ fault.
And trees’ fault.
And grasses’ fault.
And plankton’s’ fault.
And veggies’ fault.
And algeaes’ fault .. (But not algores’ fault, “he” tried to limit CO2 wild growth back when it might have made a difference in limiting the heat wave …)
but Noooooooooooo. All those nasty green thingies just sucked up the CO2, grew faster, and NOW WE HAVE A BLOOMIN’ ICE AGE!
But… but…. Plankton went to college!
So if a return to ice age was to begin would industry be paid to generate CO2 ? .Perhaps more people could be encouraged to start running to add CO2 to the atmosphere .
Some statistician should be able to determine the probability and timing of the next ice age . Then calculate how many days humans could delay the ice age because of our use of fossil fuel ..
Any bets it is less than a year .
Scary global warming from humans is just silly . Let’s hope it warms because the reverse is a very big
problem way above humans pay grade .
Only 20,000 years ago the residents of what is now San Francisco had to go 20 miles west to get to the beach. The Great Barrier Reef did not exist – its location had been above sea level for 100,000 years since the ice age began that ended the Eemian warm period. Malibu beachfront properties had no beach that was not a long walk away – sorry, Barbra.
The polar bears would starve to death
Take a look at this , and you will see a large portion of the Antarctic is below 0 and it is only 8 days from summer. Also look at the north .
http://earth.nullschool.net/……………… click earth and you can add temp, wind , ect.
Future generations can salvage the mirrors from the Ivanpah three ‘ Towers of Power ‘ fiasco and direct sunlight at the advancing glaciers !
“What would be different?”
There would be even more signs like the one I found at a new local Gold LEEDS designed and built elementary school, that’s helps kids learn what sustainability means :
Note that the main entrance used to be called the side entrance.
I put up a few more pictures to get some extra perspectives :
https://garymount.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/cold-at-the-school/
What’s needed here is a vestibule.
I think it makes little difference whether we’re warming or cooling. When nature misbehaves, it means the Gods are angry. Our shamen then tell us what we must sacrifice in order to placate the Gods. Now that we’ve defined misbehavior as “climate change”, the shamen will be doing a bumper business until the population adopts some other religion. The list of required sacrifices changes almost daily, but every item on that list is consistent in that it must result in more central government control, must transfer of wealth from the haves to the have-nots and must cripple the affordable and reliable energy bases on which all industrially advanced nations have relied.
Geology tells us it happens quickly.
-Starvation first as Russia, China, India, Canada and much of the USA’s cereal crops fail.
-Mass immigration southward and war over land.
-Desertification and drought further effecting food supplies.
-Amazon & Congo die off to revert to grassland/Savannah.
This is the inevitable and overdue glacial return, the only sure climate change.
I note that because humanity isn’t at fault, nobody worries, which speaks volumes of the true motivation of AGW alarmists.
Whatever happens, warming or cooling, it will be entirely consistent with the models and though it may not have been predicted in advance (because that’s really tricky even for Climate Superheroes®) it can always be predicted afterwards.