Mini Ice Age to Last Another 20 to 30 Years?

The Ocean Cycle Theory

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.

However, both main British political parties continue to insist that the world is facing imminent disaster without drastic cuts in CO2.

This image of the UK taken from NASA's multi-national Terra satellite on Thursday shows the extent of the freezing weather

Last week, as Britain froze, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer that the science of global warming was ‘settled’.

Among the most prominent of the scientists is Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.

Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.

He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.

Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.

'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.

Source: UK Daily Mail

Related: December 2009: Second Snowiest on Record in the Northern Hemisphere

Related: The Sun Takes an Unprecedented Holiday

Related: Not Such a Silly Question

Related: Arctic freeze and snow wreak havoc across planet

"Global satellite data is analyzed for temperature trends for the period January 1979 through June 2009. Beginning and ending segments show a cooling trend, while the middle segment evinces a warming trend. The past 12 to 13 years show
cooling using both satellite data sets, with lower confidence limits that do not
exclude a negative trend until 16 years. It is shown that several published studies
have predicted cooling in this time frame. One of these models is extrapolated
from its 2000 calibration end date and shows a good match to the satellite data,
with a projection of continued cooling for several more decades."

Source: TREND ANALYSIS OF SATELLITE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE DATA [PDF Download]

Commentary

A cooling ocean cycle combined with a cooling trend from the sun should be a double-whammy to our climate that should continue for the next couple of decades...

It is my opinion that the claims of the 'scientists' supporting Global Warming are based in political need to have a scientific basis to stop us from using fossil fuels for energy production, and I believe that the ClimateGate e-mails should at least prove to anyone with a modicum of common sense that the supporters of Global Warming are acting more like people making up lies to support a superstition than scientists.

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Sea Launch from Seastead? Perhaps the Only Way!

At Samizdata.net blog, they are trying to work out some way around the counter-productive international restrictions on the use of lunar and space resources. One commenter even suggested forming a micro-nation on Earth for purposes of space launch. Such a nation could refuse to sign the space treaties, and carry on unhindered by the idiocratic obstructionist tactics of the UN and the international community.

It is interesting that the Seasteading Institute is holding its annual conference in San Francisco on 28-30 September 2009. Because there is no more logical location for a space launching micro-nation than in the mid-ocean, near the equator. A seastead micro-state engaging in space launch, would be the ideal launching pad for a network of independent lunar and orbiting space colonies.

The UN and other international organisations have become a caricature of human ineptitude. The new US president Obama is receiving the praises of bloody-handed dictators, while being mocked by steadier hands, such as French president Sarkozy. Sarkozy is correct, Obama is making a mockery of responsible leadership. Now that the US president has become the friend of third world dictators, there really is no hope for the UN, the G20, or any other international organisation. It is time for independent persons to begin thinking of genuine independence from the Idiocracy.

Source: Al Fin (please go read the rest of this important post!)

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Science Blogburst

Here are a few science-related things I thought worthy to pass along:


An 8 second exposure I took of the Space Station on June 8, 2008

According to Heavens Above, I will have a chance to view the International Space Station in the morning, that is if the sky is clear.

Still seven years away from its rendezvous with Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft was awoken from hibernation for the second annual checkout of all systems. The spacecraft and its team back on Earth will also undergo three months of operations as the New Horizons will make observations of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. But the first order of business was uploading an upgraded version of the software that runs the spacecraft’s Command and Data Handling system.

Pluto Spacecraft Gets Brain Transplant

After the August 21st sunspot debacle where SIDC reported a spot and initially NOAA didn’t, mostly due to the report from the Catania Observatory in Italy, we have another similar situation. On September 11th, a plage area developed.

This is what passes for a sunspot these days

The Surface Stereo Imager on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander caught this dust devil in action west of the lander at 11:49 a.m. local Mars time on Sol 104, or the 104th Martian day of the mission, Sept. 9, 2008.

Dust devils have not been detected in any Phoenix images from earlier in the mission, but at least six were observed in a dozen images taken on Sol 104.

Dust devils are whirlwinds that often occur when the Sun heats the surface of Mars, or some areas on Earth. The warmed surface heats the layer of atmosphere closest to it, and the warm air rises in a whirling motion, stirring dust up from the surface like a miniature tornado.

Dust Devils on Mars



CERN's LHC -A Video Tour of One of the Most Important Events of the 21st Century

High temperature, oxygen-free gasification turns carbon sources such as coal or biomass mostly into gaseous H2 and CO (syngas). These two gases can be converted via either chemical or biological means into a wide range of fuels--including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, ethanol, methanol, etc etc. These carbon-to-fuel processes can be made very clean, with virtually no toxic byproducts remaining after the conversion process. Brian Westenhaus reports on progress coming directly from the long work of the Gas Technology Institute (GTI) in Illinois.

Gasification: Turning Any Carbon Into Any Fuel

The August anomaly is -0.10 (in terms of a degree Celsius).

HISTORICAL COMPARISON OF THE SINGLE DATA POINT
*It is 0.0547 degrees colder than July 2008
*It is 0.296 degrees colder than August 2007
*It is the coldest August anomaly since 2000
*Warmer anomalies can be found as far back as September 1979 (0.27). The data starts December 1978.

RANK
*19th warmest (12 coldest) August anomaly out of 30 data points since 1979
*223rd warmest (135th coldest) anomaly out of the total 357 monthly observations.

September 2008 Update on Global Temperature - UAH

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The End of Peak Oil

...In Canada, The Horn River basin as 500 trillion cubic feet in place....B.C.'s Horn River Basin, near the Northwest Territories, has generated early estimates upwards of 28 tcf (trillion cubic feet) in potential shale gas reserves. To the south lies the Montney sand, shale and siltstone tight gas play, which the B.C. government pegs at 80 tcf of tight gas in place...

....In the Mackenzie Delta, three natural gas discoveries total 5.8 tcf. Further north in the Arctic islands, 16 gas discoveries amount to a further 17 tcf. Benoit Beauchamp, executive director of the University of Calgary's Arctic Institute of North America and a former Geological Survey of Canada field geologist in the Far North, estimates the remote region's potential at 117 tcf of gas plus nearly four billion barrels of oil.

Canada's oilsands motherlode - Alberta estimates that its buried treasure totals 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen in place......

Source: Al Fin

And this is just what is to be found in Canada. No wonder the democrats in Congress have sought to make that source of fuel off-limits to us...it allows them to continue with the lie that "fossil-fuels" are a vanishing resource...especially since we have not yet begun to explore the earth for this resource.

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The Collapsing Infrastructure of Africa

Over half a century of poor maintenance and neglect, the power grid of the Central African Republic has collapsed. The capital has gone dark. Two nearby hydroelectric power stations, which provide most of the nation's electricity, have failed from years of neglect. The government is calling on foreign aid donors to fly in generators for hospitals and other essential services. Generators that have been brought in previously have not been maintained, and wear out quickly. This is not an exceptional event, for colonial era infrastructure, from roads to power plants, are collapsing from decades of post-independence neglect. This causes more unrest, as factions battle for a dwindling supply of resources.

---snip---

It is said that a high technology infrastructure is impossible to maintain when the average IQ of a population is below 85 (in the absence of a significant market dominant minority). The average IQ of SubSaharan Africa consistently measures close to 70, or 75 at most. IQ is not enough, of course. In China, where corruption is rampant, infrastructure collapse can happen too. In Detroit, where city government corruption is a way of life, maintaining the infrastructure is a daily battle.

But if you have both low IQ and corruption--with no market dominant minority--forget about it. It is not going to happen. Build as much as you want, it will surely crumble without maintenance.

Source: Al Fin (read the whole thing)

To help better understand the scale of the problem, here is a graphic showing average IQ by country. Click on the image for a larger image at Wikipedia, remembering that Green and Yellow (in order) are best, and Orange is bad, and that Red and Dark Red are (in order) worse and worser:

Commentary

This is a disaster that has been in the making for decades. A big part of it is that it is politically suicidal to even identify the problem given the politically motivated rhetoric of the leftists in the West. To them, there can exist no differences among men as a result of their poor choices, and that of their forbearers. There is also the need of the left to have people dependent on the government...and a ready source of people who can be convinced that the evils of the world are the responsibility of those who are successful...and they destroy the very means of their future success.

Sure, we should send aid to Africa. There is something far more powerful that we can give Africa...if they (and the lefty handmaidens of this disaster) will work to accept it.

Al Fin is correct in identifying education as the key to the rebirth of Africa. And not the kind of public education our children receive that is drenched in political rhetoric. Africa needs reading, writing, arithmetic, logic, and the hard sciences.

The world would be a better place with a free and independent Africa, one that is full of bright people. People who know how things work, how to keep them working, and even design and build new things...material and non-material.

That future is blocked by the Cult of The Big Man in Africa, and those lefties who enable them to remain in power...and live as parasites on our goodwill, and the suffering of Africans.

Africa, Education, Corruption,

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Crunching The Numbers On Algal Gasoline

According to the US Energy Information Administration, US gasoline consumption is currently averaging (4-week rolling) 9.027 million barrels of gasoline per day, or about 379 million gallons (42 gallons per barrel). Thus, to completely replace US gasoline consumption, Sapphire Energy would need to “scrub”, at 100% efficiency, just over 83000 cubic kilometers of air per day. Certainly there is plenty of air available - this volume represents less than 0.02% of the volume of air in the first 1 km of atmosphere. Nevertheless, it is an enormous amount to process each day.

Of course, Sapphire Energy’s near-term goals are much more modest. As CEO Jason Pyle told Biomass Magazine, “the company is currently deploying a three-year pilot process with the goal of opening a 153 MMgy (10,000 barrel per day) production facility by 2011 at a site yet to be determined.” Using my fuzzy math above, that equates to a minimum of 92 cubic kilometers of air a day. Still seems like a lot.

So where will all of the CO2 come from?

Source: Watts Up With That? (Be sure and read the whole post over there).

Commentary

This is the one thing enviro-weenies seem to forget when they try to force alternative energy on us...it is usually not scalable the way oil is scalable. They make good supplemental sources of energy, but cannot replace oil completely.

I am very interested to see more research in this direction for producing fuels from biological sources that are not also food sources. Al Fin has a post on a similar effort that boasts 100,000 gallons of oil an acre production, which leaves me to ponder the possibility of lefties and enviro-weenies (often the same creature) will begin to oppose that process should it promise to free us from bondage to the Middle East, and perhaps create true wealth here. If it is successful...count on it as surely as the protests against wind mills and clean coal plants...which they championed a few years ago.

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No Warming For Last Eleven Years

Charts are included at Watts Up With That? that show no global warming for last eleven years, despite a continued increase in CO₂ levels. Hmmm. No wonder lefties have been in a bad mood lately.

Al Fin has reported on the quiet Sun, which may be to blame for the recent slide of global temperatures, and we may be getting colder yet.

And, let me ask, where are the sunspots of Solar Cycle 24? And why are there so very few of them?

**update** 2.05pm

I forgot to add that there is already talk of calling the potential Solar Minimum we are entering the Landscheidt Minimum because he predicted it.

The more politically inclined among us might want to call it the Gore Minimum, or even the Gore-Hansen Minimum to mock those who were so very wrong about Global Warming, and man's impact on global temperatures.

For more reading on Landscheidt, I suggest a series of five articles:

My Random March Through the Insanity of Solar Cycle Research (aka - Explanation of Landsheidt’s first paper, part 1)

Landscheidt Part 2

Landscheidt, Part 3

Landscheidt, Part 4 (Summary of Eddy’s “The Maunder Minimum”)

Landscheidt 5 (Review of Eddy’s “The Case of the Missing Sunspots”)

And most of his papers can be found at Landscheidt Cycles Research.

And, in all my "debates" with lefties one thing is very clear...despite all the evidence you may present them, they will always try to find another way to justify their attacks on Capitalism, Western Civilization, and try to get us to volunteer to change our lives to suit their political agenda.

Don't let them. They are liars, and their ultimate goal is to destroy our way of life. And I will bet you something right now. When it starts to become obvious that the earth's climate is going into a cooling cycle...they will continue their attacks on our way of life, despite being proven so utterly and completely wrong. That is one reason why they have started to refer to "Climate Change" instead of "Global Warming".

I refer you to the excellent Gateway Pundit "Brrrr" series of posts chronicling the cooling earth. The latest one notes the record snowfall in Spokane, Washington!

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Global Warming Update: Spring Snow in Great Bitain

In yet another blow to the climate orthodoxy dogma of "warmer, ever warmer", an arctic freeze is descending over much of England and Scotland for Easter this year.

Arctic winds are forecast to sweep across Britain and bring widespread frosts over the Easter weekend, with snow in eastern regions....Conditions will be worst in Scotland and northern England but below-freezing temperatures and a sprinkling of snow are possible even in the South East – alongside strong winds and driving rain.....Helen Chivers, of the Met Office, said that weather conditions would deteriorate across the country this week. “It looks as though we are going to have a white Easter. We’ve got northerly winds sweeping in from Thursday,” she said. “We will be looking at nighttime temperatures of minus 2C (28F) or minus 3C in quite a lot of rural areas.”

Source: Al Fin

The Ice Age Cometh!

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The Sun is Dimming and Scientists Fight for Funding to Study for Harbingers of New Ice Age

The sun is in a "funk"--unsure of what to do, when to kick into its new cycle: Solar Cycle 24.

The last such solar funk corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. While there were competing causes for the climatic shift—including the Black Death’s depopulation of tree-cutting Europeans and, more substantially, increased volcanic activity spewing ash into the atmosphere—the sun’s lethargy likely had something to do with it.

...The planet’s climate is a messy picture, with all sorts of influences and feedback cycles that need to be taken into account. In order to build more accurate computer models, scientists need to understand both anthropogenic factors and the link between the sun and our planet, Tapping says. To help get at the sun’s influence, he and other researchers connect Earth’s temperature with historic sunspot records of sky watchers from Europe and China, as well as with carbon-14 isotopes­—residue from cosmic rays delivered by the sun’s magnetic field—found in tree rings. To understand our role in climate change,” he says, “we need to understand the natural process.”....

Source: Al Fin, who has more.

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Some Convenient Facts; Sun & Ocean Driving Climate, Not CO2

I am at a public terminal so I will be brief as I have 8 minutes left on my time:



The above video is something you won't hear from the Chicken-Littles in the Global Warming Climate Change fear monger community. Below, is a portion of an excellent article:

Atmospheric CO2 levels have been rising over the past century, and show no sign of slowing down. The apparent association between rising CO2 levels and rising surface temperatures has fueled an apocalyptic media feeding frenzy over the past decade and a half--carrying many politicians and opportunists along with a gullible public. A more sober analysis appears to indicate that other factors may be much more important than the low level CO2 effect.

Source: Al Fin, where there are charts, and links to more information on this most dangerous hoax that is being perpetrated on our civilization.

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Who Needs Oil or Ethanol When You Can Grow Algae?

...PetroSun BioFuels Refining has entered into a joint venture to construct and operate a biodiesel refinery near Coolidge, Arizona. The feedstock for the refinery will be algal oil produced by PetroSun BioFuels at company owned and operated algae farms to be located in Arizona....The refinery will have an annual production capacity of thirty million gallons and will produce 100% renewable biodiesel. PetroSun BioFuels will process the residual algae biomass into ethanol....Petrosun claims that Independent studies have demonstrated that algae is capable of producing in excess of 30 times more oil per acre than corn and soybean crops.

Source: Al Fin

The Free Market will find a way to solve our problems, if only the givernment will get out of the way...

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Peak Oil: Meet Marcellus Black Shale

Al Fin has a post up you should read:

Up to 500 trillion cubic feet-- US$ 1 Trillion -- of unconventional natural gas deposits lie within the north Appalachian Plateau, within the US. New gas drilling technologies--spurred by higher prices for natural gas--make possible an extended era of natural gas in the US.

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Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project

The much whispered about Google Phone is here, except it isn't a phone...it's an open-source code for use on phones that will be built by other people, sort of what Microsoft is for computers. This could revolutionize the cell phone industry beyond recognition by allowing many minds to create whatever they will.

Since I live without TV, I have no idea what kind of buzz this is generating in the Legacy Media, and only heard about it this morning when I got around to reading Al Fin, who has a good overview.

The overview led me to the following video:




which led me to the android developers you tube page and website and the Open Handset Alliance.

And a wiki. Yay!


We live in very exciting times!

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Another Maunder Minimum On The Way ?!?

There is talk about of an extended solar minimum occurring, or perhaps a recurrence of a Dalton or Maunder type minimum. There are signs that the sun’s activity is slowing. The solar wind has been decreasing in speed, and this is yet another indicator of a slowing in the suns magnetic dynamo....One thing is certain, based on past climate history and solar history, if in fact the suns magnetic activity slows, or collapses and we enter a prolonged period of little or no sunspot activity, we’ll see a global cooling trend.

Read more about it at Al Fin.

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