The prominent German online news magazine FOCUS reports that 2010 may set a new NASA high temperature record. The cause of the recent warmth is El Nino. But FOCUS then throws ice-cold water on any warmist dream of an overheating planet, at least for the next few years, and writes that scientists believe: “Womöglich aber sind die warmen Zeiten für unseren Globus bald vorüber”.
In English:
Quite possibly, the warm times for the planet will soon be over.
The FOCUS report looks at three factors, which I present in 3 parts.
Part 1: La Nina
FOCUS first zeroes in on La Nina, and quotes AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi:
There are wild cards in the climate system that have changed the previous climate events. Now we’ve got a weak solar cycle and the prospect of increased volcanic activity. Together with a La Nina, it all could be a troublesome triple whammy.
FOCUS also quotes Joe D´Aleo of TV Weather Channel:
We’ll have La Nina conditions before the summer is over, and it will intensify further through the fall and winter. Thus we’ll have cooler temperatures for the next couple of years.
Part 2: Solar Activity
The next big factor is the sun, which has worried a number of scientists over the last couple of years. It refuses to start-up with a new cycle. 2008 had 266 spotless days and 2009 had 261.
FOCUS writes:
Now some scientists fear the solar slumber could herald in a new Little Ice Age. This period, which extended from the 15th to the 19th century, was characterised by bitter cold winters and cool, wet summers which left grains and crops rotting in the fields.
FOCUS magazine then acknowledges the Maunder and Dalton Minimums, thus indirectly refuting Mann’s version of climate history. The German media is waking up!
FOCUS then quotes Joe D’Aleo:
If the number of spots does not climb over 40 or 50 during the next maximum, which would mean a low level of solar energy, then we have to reckon with much lower temperatures in the coming years.
Part 3: Volcanoes
Volcanoes in Iceland are coming alive. So far the ash clouds have been too small to have any effects on the climate. The real risk, however, is that it may be a foreboding of something much worse to come – the eruption of the mighty neighbouring Katla volcano. Katla has a far more immense chamber of magma. It erupts on average every 70 years and in tandem with Eyjafjalla. The last Katla eruption was in 1918, thus making an eruption overdue.
According to Joe Bastardi:
Katla could be a game-changer. If it erupts and throws ash and sulfur particles into the stratosphere, then the global temperature will plummet.
The triple whammy of La Nina, low solar activity and increased volcanic activity all acting together would certainly put global warming on the back burner for a while. But some scientists, like Prof. Mojib Latif of the University of Kiel, insist that warming will resume once the cooling factors fade off, and that global temperature increases of 5°C by the end of the century cannot be excluded.
In the meantime, get ready for cooling.
I note they still hold back from acknowledging the true nature of the sun’s influence; it has little to do with “energy output”, as such, just with the presence or absence of a protective solar wind which keeps the skies clear of excessively cooling low cloudiness.
Over the past 2.6 million years, Earth’s Pleistocene Era has exhibited well-defined cyclical glaciations averaging 102,000 years, interspersed with remissions of a median 12,250 years.
Continental glaciers vanished some 12,800 years-before-present (YBP), but Earth’s temperate rebound was set back 1,500 years by an impact-induced “cold Shock” called the Younger Dryas, which ended only about BC 7300 (8,800 YBP). On this basis, our current Holocene Interglacial Epoch should have ended about AD 500, coincident with the Fall of Rome. In reality, our Long Summer was due to terminate about AD 2000 + (12,250 – [8,800+1,500]) = 2000 + (12,250 – 12,300) = AD 1950, sixty years ago.
Geophysical cycles are always imprecise, but in face of a 20-year “dead sun” Dalton if not a 70-year Maunder Minimum, projecting a secondary Little Ice Age seems optimistic. The last 500-year LIA ended only c. 1890, more likely a precursor to an overdue 102,000-year main event.
By c. 2050, if not before, we could be entering on the real thing, a Big Ice Age due to destroy near 70% of Earth’s agricultural capacity. Given enviro-wackos’ and climate hysterics’ decades-long sabotage of global energy economies, the resulting mega-deaths will make childs’ play of 20th Century totalitarians’ democidal ventures.
I hope your scenarios don’t come true. -PG
About darn time someone put two and two together and made it public. Most people just don’t have a good grasp of time scale for these types of events. They tend to think 50 years is a long time; which it is in respect to human life span; but climate and the Earth itself work on an entirely different and longer time scale. -LS
Cold catastophe, warm castastrophe it really doesn’t matter, so long as you have one. After all Schneider of Sanford was worried about the coming ice age back in the 70’s befor he became a warmist so he swings both ways on the cause of calamity. The prophets of doom will feel they have a purpose so long as the end is nigh.
You can blame Gorbachev. People who believed that the end was nigh used to wave placards on CND marches. Then the cold war thawed out. Which led to warming. CND became AGW and the placards were waved again.
The have missed out on the basic cause triggering cooler times, a cold AMO/PDO cycle for approx. the next 30 years.
And they failed to mention the current cold events.
But without any doubt the arguments mentioned under 1-3 are significant and real.
The quick shift from El Ninjo to La Ninja conditions in this short period of time is remarkable.
Our sun has relapsed into incredible quietude during the last six weeks. There is a history of stutters early in a rising cycle, but not quiet like this, as deep as the deepest minimum, see http://www.landscheidt.info
Unprecedented late season snows have fallen in various locations around the northern hemisphere and several regions have been hit by severe rainfall causing unprecedented flooding from Southern China to Siberia, Poland, Bugaria and Germany (Frankurt a/d oder)
The equatorial Pacific has lapsed almost overnight from fading El Nino to a rapidly chilling and spreading La Nina. We are about to see a convulsion in tropical weather everywhere. I fear that means a fusillade of hurricanes in the Atlantic. Indications grow stronger for that, as the Atlantic remains anomalously warm S of 30 N. That energy only awaits a trigger.
Siberian lows continue to drop through the Gulf of Alaska and aim for California. Models continue the run of winter storms well into June. This is unheard of. Winter storms also continue in the North Atlantic. One of them is spinning off Jacksonville tonight.
Western Europe is invaded by cold air from the North causing
strong storms with big hail and in some cases tornado’s.
Temperatures remain below normal and the cold already shortens the growing season.
Although Eyjafjal was a relative insignificant eruption but we see continued seismic and volcanic activity all over the world. See: http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/2010/05/friday_flotsam_pacaya_eyjafjal.php
Too much stuff for this to be just weather. The sun is the driver and something is up with the sun. It may be departing even the precedents from several hundred years ago. “Climate change” may be nearer than anyone thinks. But it is not the change they expect.
And to all those believers supporting to shut down our fossil fuel based economies because they think a warm world poises a risk to human life I would to say this.
All significant civilizations from the Roman Empire to the Aztecs came to their rise during warm periods, much warmer than today.
They all came down and virtually disappeared when cold climate conditions settled.
Cold is a much bigger enemy than warmth.
So please stop the warmist scare mongering and get a life.
FOCUS briefly mentioned the PDO, but seems to play down its importance. It wrote: “Sceptics, who do not believe in manmade global warming, blame the past warm phase of the PDO for the especially profound warming of the last decades of the 20th century.”
(Note how FOCUS doesn’t even know what a sceptic is),
My feeling is that they are underestimating its importance.
If it weren’t for the agenda of the Global Left to leverage created crisis into Ubergubmint, I’d LOVE for the AGW crowd to be right — about the potency of CO2 and our influence on its levels. That would either permit the forcing of a lovely warm period, or give us tools against imminent return of the Ice Sheets.
Unfortunately, they’re blowing hot air and demanding we pay for their exclusive air-conditioning services.
Most likely what will happen is as follows.
Icelandic volcanoes will have no effect on global temperature.
A La Nina will begin shortly but it will be weaker than the 2008 La Nina. After the coming La Nina ends will come another El Nino. Unlike the current El Nino which coincides with a deep solar minimum, the next El Nino will coincide with the solar maxmimum of cycle 24. No volcanic cooling. Another global temperature record.
You heard it here first.
Solar 24 is on track to be a fizzer so dont think it will produce much warming. As each year goes by that it has reduced output is another year the oceans (drivers of our climate) lose their stored heat. The longer this goes on the longer it will take them to catch back up. If this slumbering sun continues too long then an increase in ice and snow will also increase the albido effect where more heat is redirected to space and increase the cooling. Lets hope for all our sakes the sun warms up soon!
Great article.
I like this website.
Thanks
Thanks to you!