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Sunspots, Solar activity, and Arctic Ice

Sampling of scientists and scientific studies predicting global COOLING


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By —— Bio and Archives August 17, 2008

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[Note: Many of the scientists and studies cited below first appeared in the December 2007 U.S. Senate Report of over 400 (now 500 dissenting scientists and growing) (For Full Senate Report) See also U.S. Senate Report released in July 2008: ‘Consensus’ On Man-Made Global Warming Collapses in 2008]

Sampling of scientists and scientific studies predicting global COOLING:

Australian astronomical Society warns of global COOLING as Sun's activity 'significantly diminishes' – June 29, 2008 – (LINK) Excerpt: A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia has a warning to global warming believers not immediately obvious from the summary: Based on our claim that changes in the Sun’s equatorial rotation rate are synchronized with changes in the Sun’s orbital motion about the barycentre, we propose that the mean period for the Sun’s meridional flow is set by a Synodic resonance between the flow period (~22.3 yr), the overall 178.7-yr repetition period for the solar orbital motion, and the 19.86-yr synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn. Or as one of the authors, Ian Wilson, kindly explained to me: It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 - 2 C.

NEW JASON SATELLITE INDICATES 23-YEAR GLOBAL COOLING

- Canada Free Press, 1 May 2008 – By Dennis Avery, Environmental Economist and Global Warming Co-author Excerpt: Now it's not just the sunspots that predict a 23-year global cooling. The new Jason oceanographic satellite shows that 2007 was a "cool" La Nina year-but Jason also says something more important is at work: The much larger and more persistent Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has turned into its cool phase, telling us to expect moderately lower global temperatures until 2030 or so. […]All of this defies the "consensus" that human-emitted carbon dioxide has been responsible for our global warming. But the evidence for man-made warming has never been as strong as its Green advocates maintained. The earth's warming from 1915 to 1940 was just about as strong as the "scary" 1975 to 1998 warming in both scope and duration-and occurred too early to be blamed on human-emitted CO2. The cooling from 1940 to 1975 defied the Greenhouse Theory, occurring during the first big surge of man-made greenhouse emissions. Most recently, the climate has stubbornly refused to warm since 1998, even though human CO2 emissions have continued to rise strongly. […] How many years of declining world temperature would it take now – in the wake of the ten-year nonwarming since 1998 - to break up Al Gore's "climate change consensus"?

National Post: Global Cooling! 'Spotless Sun' prompts scientists to fear 'dramatic turn for the worse'

– May 31, 2008 Excerpt: ith the debate focused on a warming Earth, the icy consequences of a cooler future have not been considered You probably haven’t heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don’t. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. That of your children and their children could fare worse still, say some scientists, because Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of profound long-term change in the climate. As put by geophysicist Philip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and former president of the National Space Society, “It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age.” The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today’s spotlessness — what alarms Dr. Chapman and others — may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn’t – and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not – we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome. […] Several renowned scientists have been predicting for some time that the world could enter a period of cooling right around now, with consequences that could be dire. “The next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do,” believes Dr. Chapman. “There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the U.S. and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.”

We should prepare now for dangerous global cooling

(By Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, professor in the department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa) Excerpt: Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

Global cooling predictions

Geologist Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Emeritus Professor at Western Washington University, who has authored eight books and 150 journal publications, predicts that temperatures should cool between 2065 until 2100, and that global temperatures at the end of the century should be less than 1 degree cooler than at present. This is in contrast to other theories that there will be a warming by as much as 10 degrees by 2100. - Excerpts of sampling of scientists predicting a coming global cooling Geologist Dr. Don Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University who has authored eight books and 150 journal publications, announced earlier this week that he was putting his “reputation on the line” by predicting global cooling. “The average of the four main temperature measuring methods is slightly cooler since 2002 (except for a brief el Niño interruption) and record breaking cooling this winter. The argument that this is too short a time period to be meaningful would be valid were it not for the fact that this cooling exactly fits the pattern of timing of warm/cool cycles over the past 400 years,” Easterbrook wrote on March 1, 2008.

Solar Cycle 24: Implications for the United States

– March 2, 2008 (By Geologist David Archibald of Summa Development Limited in Australia is a Perth-based scientist working in the field of climate research. Archibald wrote a scientific paper titled "Solar Cycles 24 and 25 and Predicted Climate Response" in Energy and Environment in 2006) Excerpt: I will demonstrate that the Sun drives climate, and use that demonstrated relationship to predict the Earth’s climate to 2030. It is a prediction that differs from most in the public domain. It is a prediction of imminent cooling. […] We have 29 years of satellite temperature data. It shows that the temperature of the Southern Hemisphere has been flat, with a slight increase in the Northern Hemisphere. Note the El Nino peak in 1998. Globally, we have had 10 years of temperature decline since that peak in 1998, with a rate of decline of 0.06 degrees per annum. I am expecting the rate of decline to accelerate to 0.2 degrees per annum from the end of this decade. That satellite record is corroborated by the record of Antarctic and Arctic sea ice extent over the same period. There is no long term trend evident. Most recently, there has been a 1 million square kilometre increase over the long term mean. This is a five per cent increase. […] The peak US temperature was in 1936, at much the same time that Total Solar Irradiance peaked. If you have wondered why US temperatures are still lower than what they were 70 years ago, the fact that Total Solar Irradiance is lower than what it was 70 years ago might provide an explanation.

Geologist David Archibald reveals CO2 is ‘tuckered out as a greenhouse gas’

– May 12, 2008 Excerpt: The more carbon dioxide you put into the atmosphere, the more you are helping all plants on the planet to grow, and of course that makes you a better person. Virtue is in direct proportion to your carbon dioxide output. What of the temperature, you ask? Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but the effect is strongly logarithmic. The first 20 ppm achieves 1.5 degrees of heating, but it takes more than another 400 ppm to equal that. By the time we get to the current level of 384 ppm, carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas. From here, every 100 ppm extra may be worth 0.1 of a degree. […] Surely a few more years of cooling will leave only the true believers in their misanthropic ideology, and the truly idiotic. […] Not only will it continue, substantial cooling next decade is in the bag based on current solar behavior. There is a good correlation between solar cycle length and the temperature over the following solar cycle. Long solar cycles cause lower temperatures. Canadian Climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball: “If we are facing [a crisis] at all, I think it is that we are preparing for warming when it is looking like we are cooling. We are preparing for the wrong thing.” (March 2008) (Link) UK Astrophysicist Piers Corbyn: “There is no evidence that CO2 has ever driven or will ever drive world temperatures and climate change. The consequence of that is that worrying about CO2 is irrelevant. Our prediction is world temperatures will continue to decline until 2014 and probably continue to decline after that.” (March 2008) (Link)

Dearth Of Sunspot Activity To Herald New Ice Age?

– August 14, 2008 Excerpt: A top observatory that has been measuring sun cycles for over 200 years predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees over the next two decades as solar activity grinds to a halt and the planet drastically cools down, potentially heralding the onset of a new ice age. While the mass media, Al Gore and politicized bodies like the IPCC scaremonger about the perils of global warming and demand the poor and middle class pay CO2 taxes, both hard scientific data and circumstantial evidence points to a clear cooling trend. Following the end of the Sun’s most active period in over 11,000 years, the last 10 years have displayed a clear cooling trend as temperatures post-1998 leveled out and are now plummeting. […] Long-time man-made global warming advocates NASA assure us that significant sunspot activity will return in 2012, but a recent a paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, predicts that sunspots will all but vanish after 2015. Since the sun, and not carbon dioxide, is the principle driver of climate change, a dearth of sunspot activity would herald a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare and contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age during which Europe and North America were hit by bitterly cold winters and the Thames river in London completely froze.

Livingston and Penn paper: “Sunspots may vanish by 2015″

– June 2, 2008 – By Meteorologist Anthony Watts Excerpt: From the “I hope to God they are flat wrong department”, here is the abstract of a short paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson. It was sent to me by reader Mike Ward.I previously highlighted a news story on this paper on May 21st, but didn’t have the actual paper until now. If anyone has an update to this paper, which uses data up to 2005, please use the comment form to advise. Here is the complete paper, and below are some excerpts: Abstract: We have observed spectroscopic changes in temperature sensitive molecular lines, in the magnetic splitting of an Fe I line, and in the continuum brightness of over 1000 sunspot umbrae from 1990-2005. All three measurements show consistent trends in which the darkest parts of the sunspot umbra have become warmer (45K per year) and their magnetic field strengths have decreased (77 Gauss per year), independently of the normal 11-year sunspot cycle. A linear extrapolation of these trends suggests that few sunspots will be visible after 2015.

More Signs of the Sun Slowing Down - 'We continue to slide into a deeper than normal solar minima, one not seen in decades'

By Meteorologist Anthony Watts – June 15, 2008 Excerpt: It appears we continue to slide into a deeper than normal solar minima, one not seen in decades. Given the signs, I think we are about to embark upon a grand experiment, over which we have no control [...] I had noted that there was a curios step function in 2005, almost as if something had “switched off” [...] As you can see, the Ap Index has continued along at the low level (slightly above zero) that was established during the drop in October 2005. As of June 2008, we now have 32 months of the Ap hovering around a value just slightly above zero, with occasional blips of noise. [...] What is most striking is that since 1932, there have not been ANY years prior to 2007 that have zero data. [...]



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