Sean Maher

I Would Be More Worried About Global Cooling

Yes Deryl, I was referring to the Maunder Mininum period, which most sources place between 1650-1700 or so, I think the key point is to strip out the signal from the background noise, as in the financial markets. There is a lot of natural variability in temperature over time, both in the oceans and atmosphere, and humans are flattering their importance in the big scheme of things to conclude that their role is dominant and that we can fine tune this inevitable variability.


On Dec 03 09:43 PM derryl wrote:

> Sean,
> The Little Ice Age lasted much longer than 50 years, though its actual
> duration is somewhat disputed. In 2000 Brian Fagan published a book
> titled, "The Little Ice Age". Fagan's timeframe is 1300-1850, which
> is the longest I've seen.
>
> You might be referring to the coldest period within these cold centuries
> which was between 1645-1715, which coincides with the Maunder Minimum
> of sunspot activity. According to Wikipedia, between 1610-1681 only
> 50 sunspots were recorded as opposed to the typical 40,000-50,000.
> On the face of it it looks like a less active Sun leaves Earth too
> cold for comfort.
>
> Prior to the little ice age was the Medieval Warm Period, from maybe
> 800-1300. This is the age of the Vikings and their 450 year colonization
> of Greenland (now mostly a frozen glacier), when reduced pack ice
> on northern seas allowed their ships freer range.
>
> Recent climatology is focusing on the relationship between solar
> output and Earth's temperature (duh, turn up the planet's furnace
> and it gets warmer on Earth!) and the relationship between sunspots
> and solar output.
>
> For about 30 years between the 1940s and 1970s planetary temperature
> was dropping which is the reason for the ICE AGE! scare of the 70s.
> From the 1980s to about 2000 the temperature was warming which led
> to the MELTDOWN! scare that global warming alarmists are still shouting
> today, even though the planet stopped warming in about 2001 and actually
> cooled the past couple of years.
>
> The most damning evidence against current global warming alarmism
> is the fact that about 2.5-3 million years ago Earth entered into
> a cycle of ice ages and interglacial periods that we are still in
> today. The most recent Wisconsin era glaciations began about 70,000
> years ago and the most recent interglacial began about 13000 years
> ago. The Laurentide ice sheet extended as far south as Nevada. Utah's
> Great Salt Lake is the remnant of a glacial "puddle" of meltwater.
>
>
> Sea levels declined from preglacial levels as much as 100 meters
> at the trough of the deepest glaciations. You could walk across the
> Bering Strait and England was part of continental Europe, until some
> of the ice melted and raised sea levels closer to 'normal' levels.
>
>
> This geological era is called the Pleistocene. The damning question
> is, why did all those other global warmings occur which ended all
> those other ice ages, when humans didn't have SUVs yet? If humans
> cause global warming, what caused all those OTHER global warmings?
>
>
> For some reason, wishful thinking maybe, the most recent 12000 years
> since the end of the last ice age is called the Holocene era, as
> if the Pleistocene glaciation cycle has ended for some unexplained
> reason and we're into a permanently warmer new era called the Holocene.
>
>
> This planet is about 4.6 billion years old and is continuously evolving.
> The planet is geologically active, and the Sun is geologically active,
> and there has never been any kind of geological "stability" in the
> solar system. The only constant is that things keep changing. <br/>
>
> So anybody who thinks we can stabilize Earth's climate by riding
> bicycles has not done any homework in geological history. The planet
> did not exist in a state of ecological Eden until us sinners started
> driving trucks. Climate stability is a myth and a wish, not reality.
> The climate will keep changing no matter what we do.
>
> About 300-250 million years ago the continents were still joined
> together as Pangaea (plate tectonics is the science of "continental
> drift"). About 55 million years ago the area that is now the Arctic
> was a little further south and enjoyed an average temperature of
> about 70 degrees F, like Florida today. The entire planet was much
> warmer and lusher than it is today.
>
> There is no evidence of permanent polar ice caps until about 13 million
> years ago, then we had the Pleistocene with its deep ice ages beginning
> about 3 million years ago. The long term trend certainly seems to
> be that the planet is cooling, which makes sense.
>
> The planet began as a collection of hot gases and dust about 4.6
> billion years ago. Over the first maybe 500 million years enough
> energy radiated into space to cool the surface so the crust began
> to form. The crust has been thickening ever since, so it's now between
> 20 and 200 miles thick. The core is still molten, but much of that
> heat is now stored in the thick crust rather than radiating out to
> warm the surface. That's my theory of why we're into this geologically
> recent pattern of ice ages, this ongoing reduction in the geothermal
> component of our surface temperatures.
>
> So Sean is right. We should welcome some global warming and fear
> global cooling, since in fact the planet is cooling in the long trend.
>
>
> In 2005 William Ruddiman, former chairman of the U of Virginia enviro
> sciences dep't, published a paper in the Quaternary Research Reviews
> arguing that "human activities may have averted the next ice age".
> By studying ice core data (the same data Gore misused in his movie)
> Ruddiman concluded, "Without any anthropogenic warming earth's climate
> would no longer be in a full interglacial state (warm period) but
> be well on its way toward the colder temperatures typical of glaciations."
> He thinks human economic activity over the past 8000 years, such
> as burning forests to enhance gathering and hunting and later for
> agriculture, irrigation in Eurasia, livestock production, etc., may
> have generated enough greenhouse gases to blanket the planet and
> forestall the next ice age.
>
> So maybe we better hold off on crushing all those obsolete SUVs.
> One cold winter soon we may want to leave them idling 24/7 to try
> to kickstart some global warming.