Scientist: Forget Global Warming, Prepare for New Ice Age
Sunspot activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that — far from warming — the globe is about to return to an Ice Age, says an Australian-American scientist.
Physicist Phil Chapman, the first native-born Australian to become an astronaut with NASA [he became an American citizen to join up, though he never went into space], said pictures from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) showed no spots on the sun.
He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade.
“This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930,” Chapman wrote in The Australian Wednesday. “If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.”
Hmm.
[Critics quickly pointed out that Chapman may have been “cherry-picking” the data. A strong La Nina formation in the Pacific pushed down January temperatures over much of the Northern Hemisphere from where they had been a year earlier, but average global temperatures are still much higher than the 20th-century average, and the NOAA said last week that last month was the warmest March on record.]
Well, yeah, sure they’d say that; it goes against the accepted orthodoxy. My gas bill for March would tend to argue that they’re full of shit. And I was never one to accept orthodoxy; shoot, I’ve been eating leavened bread all week, and I had bacon for breakfast yesterday.
Thing is, he’s not the only scientist who’s been pointing out that we appear to be heading into a solar minimum. But then there are these idiots:
An alternative theory of global warming is that a strong solar magnetic field, when there is plenty of sunspot activity, protects the Earth from cosmic rays, cutting cloud formation, but that when the field is weak — during low sunspot activity — the rays can penetrate into the lower atmosphere and cloud cover increases, cooling the surface.
But scientists from the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Bolder, Colorado published a report in 2006 that showed the sun had a negligible effect on climate change.
The researchers wrote in the journal Nature that the sun’s brightness varied by only 0.07 percent over 11-year sunspot cycles, and that that was far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.
Brightness is not the issue. The solar constant (which isn’t, very) is the issue. The sun appears to be cooling; we have evidence that it’s done that before (ever heard of the Maunder Minimum? The Little Ice Age?), and there’s no reason to pooh-pooh the idea that it might be doing it again.
But the orthodoxy is that it’s warming, and all the grant money is pouring into warming studies…and the real orthodoxy in today’s politicized world of science is found where the money is.
UPDATE: Here’s the original Chapman article.