Global warming – did we get it wrong?

By Ian Wishart
Author, Air Con

The bitter Arctic conditions continuing to hold Europe and North America in a vice-like grip have killed thousands of people so far, with no sign of a let-up, and in the UK at least March is shaping up to be the coldest in 100 years.

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It’s now the fifth winter in a row that’s broken cold records, and scientists are beginning to talk about the elephant in the room: are we actually at a tipping point to get colder, rather than warmer?

In New Zealand, there’s been huge media coverage of one hot summer drought as evidence of climate change in action, yet summers for the previous two years were wet and cool and no-one in the media batted an eyelid. Conversely in the northern hemisphere, with each winter apparently worse than the last, media coverage has studiously avoided the obvious – until now.

“Mentioning the lethal “100-year, record-smashing” spring cold and snow spreading across Europe over the past month has for the most part been avoided like the plague by Germany’s mainstream media. The silence over the record cold and frost, which has killed thousands and cost billions, has been ear-ringing,” writes commentator Pierre Gosselin.

“Yet some leading dailies are breaking ranks, and have begun to examine the phenomenon critically and openly. For example veteran journalist Ulli Kulke at German flagship daily Die Welt today has stunned the rest of the German mainstream media with a piece titled Scientists warn of ice age.”

The essence of the “ice age” warning stems from some Russian research suggesting we are going to get colder. Tie that in with a massive drop in sunspots and solar magnetic activity in what NASA scientists are comparing to the cold spell of the Dalton Minimum, and confirmation by the UN IPCC climate change convenor Rajendra Pachauri (reported in The Briefing) that there has been no significant global warming since the 1990s, and you can see why some are seeing a frigid future.

“As the snow of the coldest March since 1963 continues to fall, we learn that we have barely 48 hours’ worth of stored gas left to keep us warm, and that the head of our second-largest electricity company, SSE, has warned that our generating capacity has fallen so low that we can expect power cuts to begin at any time. It seems the perfect storm is upon us. The grotesque mishandling of Britain’s energy policy by the politicians of all parties, as they chase their childish chimeras of CO2-induced global warming and windmills, has been arguably the greatest act of political irresponsibility in our history,” wrote commentator and author Christopher Booker last weekend.

To get an idea of this half-decade of frozen record breakers, let’s revisit some headlines from years gone by.

January 2010:

The human cost of Britain’s worst winter for 30 years has been laid bare as figures show the first signs of a sharp rise in the death rates, especially among the elderly.

Deaths leapt by up to a fifth amid the longest spell of bitter weather in recent years, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Undertakers have reported the busiest winter for several years, with some even forced to take on extra staff to cope.

It comes in the wake of an outcry over the deaths of an elderly couple from Northampton, whose bodies lay in their freezing home, unnoticed for several days.

Then  in 2011:

An estimated 40,000 more people die between December and March in the UK than would be expected from death rates during other times of the year.

More than half the deaths are due to heart attacks, strokes and circulatory problems and a third from lung disease. When the temperature suddenly plummets, as it has this weekend, the danger is even more acute.

Professor Sian Griffiths, president of the Faculty of Public Health, which sets and maintains professional standards in public health, said: “A high proportion of preventable illness and deaths in the UK is caused by people living in damp and cold housing.

“If we see much more of the cold weather of recent days, it is likely that as many as 50,000 people will die unnecessarily over this winter. This is a tragedy in terms of human life and also creates a huge – and preventable – strain on the NHS.

“The UK remains one of the worst countries in the world at coping with unseasonable low temperatures. Although the Government has shown commitment to tacking the problem, it has not given sufficient priority to such an important public health issue and its approach remains far too uncoordinated.

“All of us must be vigilant at the moment to look out for family, friends and neighbours who may be suffering. Often fatal illnesses develop two or three days after a cold snap has finished.”

It is estimated that there are 8,000 extra deaths for every one degree Celsius the temperature is below the winter average.

Fast forward to this winter, and its extension into the first full month of spring, and the headlines are just as grim:

The extreme cold is thought to have killed thousands of elderly people with a possible total death toll of around 30,000, it emerged yesterday.

Around 2,000 more deaths than normal were recorded in the first two weeks of March and last month 3,057 extra deaths were registered in England and Wales.

All of this frozen ‘global warming’ might be just “the new normal”, as climate change activists call it, except that a recent study of how Earth ended up in the Little Ice Age shows it took only 25 years of colder temperatures to trigger 500 years of frigidity:

“Most glaciers and ice caps reach[ed] their maximum dimensions of the past 8 ka during the Little Ice Age (LIA), prior to widespread recession during the 20th Century [Miller et al., 2010],” noted the study authors.

In plain English, the glaciers we all know and love around the world reached their largest size in the past 8000 years, during the Little Ice Age that ended around 1850. Since then, they’ve been melting, naturally, because the frozen temperatures of the Little Ice Age have gone. Until now.

The warning from the study is that change, when it happens, happens quickly:

“Here we present precisely dated records of ice-cap growth from Arctic Canada and Iceland showing that LIA summer cold and ice growth began abruptly between 1275 and 1300 AD.”

As researchers at Utah’s Geological Survey (UGS) division have noted, Earth has experienced rapid natural climate change:

“One of the more recent intriguing findings is the remarkable speed of these changes. Within the incredibly short time span (by geologic standards) of only a few decades or even a few years, global temperatures have fluctuated by as much as 15°F (8°C) or more.”

The UGS has published graphs showing that modern temperatures have not yet reached their usual natural peak between ice ages (interglacials).

Simplified chart showing when the five major ice ages occurred in the past 2.4 billion years of Earth’s history. Modified from several sources including Dynamical Paleoclimatology: Generalized Theory of Global Climate Change, 2002, by Barry Saltzman
Simplified chart showing when the five major ice ages occurred in the past 2.4 billion years of Earth’s history. Modified from several sources including Dynamical Paleoclimatology: Generalized Theory of Global Climate Change, 2002, by Barry Saltzman
Four fairly regular glacial-interglacial cycles occurred during the past 450,000 years. The shorter interglacial cycles (10,000 to 30,000 years) were about as warm as present and alternated with much longer (70,000 to 90,000 years) glacial cycles substantially colder than present. Notice the longer time with jagged cooling events dropping into the colder glacials followed by the faster abrupt temperature swings to the warmer interglacials. This graph combines several ice-core records from Antarctica and is modified from several sources including Evidence for Warmer Interglacials in East Antarctic Ice Cores, 2009, L.C. Sime and others. Note the shorter time scale of 450,000 years compared to the previous figure, as well as the colder temperatures, which are latitude-specific (e.g., Antartica, Alaska, Greenland) temperature changes inferred from the Antarctic ice cores (and not global averages).
Four fairly regular glacial-interglacial cycles occurred during the past 450,000 years. The shorter interglacial cycles (10,000 to 30,000 years) were about as warm as present and alternated with much longer (70,000 to 90,000 years) glacial cycles substantially colder than present. Notice the longer time with jagged cooling events dropping into the colder glacials followed by the faster abrupt temperature swings to the warmer interglacials. This graph combines several ice-core records from Antarctica and is modified from several sources including Evidence for Warmer Interglacials in East Antarctic Ice Cores, 2009, L.C. Sime and others. Note the shorter time scale of 450,000 years compared to the previous figure, as well as the colder temperatures, which are latitude-specific (e.g., Antartica, Alaska, Greenland) temperature changes inferred from the Antarctic ice cores (and not global averages).

 

In themselves, the graphs show that the rise of modern temperatures  may have far more to do with Earth coming back into balance from the Little Ice Age than CO2 emissions, but the question now is why have the temperature increases stopped? Is it the drop in solar activity? What happens if the cold feeds on itself as it has in the past in just a short space of time and if so, are we about to be plunged back into a new, cold, dark age?

10 Comments

  1. Thank you Ian Wishart for this revealing article. I look forward to the day when James Hansen, Michael Mann, Bill McKibben and the other irresponsible people who claim that record cold weather is really global warming are charged with fraud.

  2. Back in 2000, here’s a prediction from the Climate Scientists at the University of East Anglia, the University at the centre of the Climategate controversy, where they have used the sum of many, many years of thorough and precise research to confidently predict the end of snow in Britain. Because of Man-made Global Warming.

    –QUOTE–
    ..snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

    Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

    According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.

    “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

    –ENDQUOTE

    I made this post a year ago. Seems a cold winter in the UK back then wasn’t a one-off event. The point of the original post was to take on board the predictions, and then check them out 9 years later. Well, that’s what we’ve done. Are we really supposed to take any new predictions from these clowns seriously now, and what come back do we have in 9 years if the revised predictions are also hopelessly wrong? Surely, tarring and feathering isn’t an unreasonable request?

  3. While I agree that it is currently colder in northern Europe & the UK, it could be BECAUSE of climate change – less snow and ice in the Arctic could bring this kind of weather by displacing the jet stream. Recently scientists have started to investigate this phenomenon, and a number of good publications are available.

    If you talk about “global warming” than you need to stay global, and not just focus on small regions of the globe (Europe is small) – looking at reliable records, e.g. from NASA: “2012 was the ninth warmest of any year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. With the exception of 1988, the nine warmest years in the 132-year record all have occurred since 2000, with 2010 and 2005 ranking as the hottest years on record.”

    Global warming – yes & you did get it wrong.

  4. There has been no net warming since 1997 with CO2 up 8+%. The earth entered a cooling trend in 2003 which will last for 30 years and perhaps for hundreds of years beyond that.The IPCC models which predict warming are simply structured incorrectly and are useless for predicting future temperatures.Here is a list of posts on my blog
    http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
    which when read in order provide a convenient and coherent story suggesting that a Global Cooling trend is underway which may cause serious economic dislocation in the decades immediately ahead.

    6/18/10 Thirty Year Climate Forecast
    7/19/12 30 Year Climate Forecast -2 year Update
    10/30/12. Hurricane Sandy-Extreme Events and Global Cooling
    11/18/12 Global Cooling Climate and Weather Forecasting
    1/22/13 Global Cooling Timing and Amount
    2/18/13 Its the Sun Stupid – the Minor Significance of CO2

    As an expat Brit (55 years in the USA) it is sad to see the UK committing economic suicide and killing thousands of its elderly under the mad delusion that CO2 is causing global warming and that controlling CO2 will have some measurable effect on future temperatures.In the UK and Australia the inmates are in charge of the asylum.

  5. “While I agree that it is currently colder in northern Europe & the UK, it could be BECAUSE of climate change – less snow and ice in the Arctic could bring this kind of weather by displacing the jet stream. Recently scientists have started to investigate this phenomenon, and a number of good publications are available.”

    The Problem is though.

    They ‘Claim’ A lack of Ice in the Arctic causes more snow in the NH. Unfortunately that’s rubbish, since the vast majority of the Artic is always frozen over during Winter and early Spring.

    They Were also Claiming ‘Too Much Ice’ in the Arctic was responsible for the cold NH winters in the early to mid 1970s. And from the late 1940s to the early 1970s there even were proposals bandied about in the science community to improve the climate by reducing the Arctic Ice cap. Even by nuking it! There actually was proposals going back to the late 1800s with similar objective in mind to improve the climate by reducing or getting rid of the Arctic Ice cap.

    So in essence most of what they claim re, CO2 AGW/CC is nothing but a load of over exaggerated clutching at straws BS and of nothing but a load of a politicized, propaganda agenda driven claptrap!

    JUNK,, JUNK, JUNK Science of incompetence, follow the leader and fraud at its best!

  6. @P Smith wrote
    While I agree that it is currently colder in northern Europe & the UK, it could be BECAUSE of climate change – less snow and ice in the Arctic could bring this kind of weather by displacing the jet stream.

    Very scientific. …”it could be BECAUSE”…..
    Ice cover in the Arctic ice been decreasing steadily since satellites started making measurements in 1979. Logically winters in the northern hemisphere must have been getting steadily colder since then if your crackpot “could be BECAUSE” theory is correct. They haven’t. In fact from 1979 to around 2007 they got decidely milder. Since 2008 they’ve been getting colder. There isn’t even correlation here, although even if there was it would not necessarily signify causation of course. This is a crackpot idea that can be dismissed out of hand but the simple reasoning applied above. No Phd in particle physics required.
    Furthermore the unmistakeable sign of greenhouse warming is a rapidly warming troposphere above the equator , 10 km up. This region , according to the models and the theory itself, should warm much quicker than at the surface. This is not the case. In fact the surface is warming quicker than the troposphere where there has been no significant warming for a long while. This has been confirmed by satellite measurements and weather balloons. The theory that man-made c02 emissions are driving catastrophich global warming was falsified a long time ago. It just takes a while for the dumb masses to wake up to the facts

  7. One other thing I should also add.

    What about the claims in recent years from the same AGW/CC believing Climate scientists?

    Less ice during Winter in the Arctic= ‘Warmer’ NH Winters.

    Now its supposed to = ‘Colder’ NH Winters!

  8. The ‘consensus’ that ‘scientists believe’ has not come from scientists. They are not in the business of predicting the future. Weathermen have been muzzled because of unkind references to people using exploratory models as crystal balls. The UN funds the IPCC to prove man causes global warming – not to find the truth., which is that science deals with data…not projections. And ‘deniers’ is a term of strawman argument, framing questions as paid propaganda rather than what it really does….which is revealing it. But ignorance is not fashionable and does not appeal to the conceit that we are the lords of creation.
    BTW Check out stories that ocean currents have changed or dissipated, depriving Europe of irs radiator and sending heat to the Arctic.

  9. P Smith, one of the reasons I pointed out that the Climate Scientist back in the year 2000 predicted snow to be a thing of the past is to show very clearly how wrong he would prove himself to be.

    So when you say words to the effect that Global Warming could mean cooling, I hope you don’t then point to the same climate scientists who, finding their predictions of the end of snow to be wrong, switch their logic and their argument. What it essentially means is they have a conclusion (Global Warming) and they spend their time looking to make the “facts” fit. Which is why I am somewhat skeptical.

    Also, your comment about “Global Warming” actually omits a very important word that needs to be kept in the conversation. Anthropogenic. The theory is this is man-made global warming, not just a general warming by the planet or sun. That is therefore the crux of the matter that represents the danger we must face. The dangers are two – if the planet’s weather and temperature patterns are changing, for whatever reason, we must adapt and cope. Fine. However, the impact of man-made activity introduces a second factor – and that is, various people and organisations using the excuse of the weather to mandate (justify) a whole pile of changes that may have less to do with warming, and more to do with power.

    For example, the UN is using this as an opportunity to grow its own powerbase, and is pushing for a tax of up to 1% of GDP from developed nations for it to spend how it thinks best.

    For example, my local council believes strongly in AGW. So they have restricted the rights of property owners on beach front properties (since their homes will soon be under water) and instituted water meters (since they need to tax and privatise water) and yet resisted all calls for a dam to be built for the area to store water (water for the area is drawn from a river, and subject to the flow rate). The money spent avoiding building a dam has now approached the cost of building a dam when it was mooted 10 years ago.

    They are simply using AGW as an excuse to implement their policies. Damn them all.

  10. GLOBAL WARMING MAY NOT BE MAN MADE

    Dr. Larry Vardiman (scientist and physicist) of the Institue for Creation Research says:

    “One possible scenario may be found in a recent series of articles by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Marsh, cosmic ray specialists from Denmark, who have shown an indirect connection between galactic cosmic ray (GCR) intensity and global temperature.7,8,9 They are studying the influence of the Sun on the flow of GCR to Earth. The Sun’s changing sunspot activity influences the magnetosphere surrounding the Earth permitting more GCR to strike the Earth during high periods of activity.

    When the Sun is active, the intensity of GCR striking the Earth is increased, causing more ionization in the atmosphere, creating more carbon-14, and possibly creating more cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). This increase in CCN, in turn, appears to create more low-level clouds which cool the Earth. When the Sun is quiet the GCR intensity striking the Earth is reduced, allowing the Earth to warm. Svensmark and Marsh have shown a striking statistical correlation between sunspot activity and global cooling and warming over the past 1000 years.

    The recent rise in global temperature may partially be due to current low solar activity supplemented by a recent increase in carbon dioxide concentration measured at Mauna Loa. The connection which still needs further study is the production of CCN and clouds by GCR.”

    There is a good deal of science showing that global warming is not mad made. Yes, we still should have pollution controls, as we already do, but not to the extreme because it will unnecessarily hurt business.

    Visit my newest Internet site: THE SCIENCE SUPPORTING CREATION

    Babu G. Ranganathan
    B.A. Bible/Biology

    Author of popular Internet article, TRADITIONAL DOCTRINE OF HELL EVOLVED FROM GREEK ROOTS

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