Sep 08
22
Are We Headed For An Ice Age?
People keep talking about global warming… instead they should be talking about climate change.
Some scientists are predicting that we are actually heading for a new mini ice age. The historical data on sun spots appears to suggest that low sun spot activity over a period of time is a precursor to a rapid cooling of the planet.
This article written by Australia's first NASA astronaut, Phil Chapman, raises the possibility.
Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the
average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined
during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the
atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global
temperature is falling precipitously.
All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate
Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote
Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C
in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental
record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature
does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is
over.
There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was
exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in
centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of
Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record
since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.
It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic
trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this
cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.
This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of
somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum
was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start
soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.
It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year
and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished
within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that
there will be many more, and soon.
The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between
variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time
a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially
cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.
Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of
Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at
least partly due to the lack of sunspots.
That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the
failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal
connection but it is cause for concern.