THeBlueCashew

QuoteIf there were a webcam in Hades, I would imagine we could all tune to watch Satan shivering in the eternal lake of fire (which itself would have lost its inferno).



Hell has frozen over.



The BBC has reported it is "more likely than not" that the Earth is entering a period of intense cooling.Why is this so remarkable? Because as much as any news outlet in the world, the British Broadcasting Corporation has been a cheerleader for global warming alarmism for the past 15 years.



No, that's the wrong analogy.



Cheerleaders are largely appealing characters. The BBC has been more like an inquisitor, cruelly enforcing the alleged global warming consensus with a sadistic glee.



The Brit equivalent of our own CBC, the Beeb has, if anything, been even more sneering, smug and condescending than Canada's Mother Corp toward those who dared question the "settled science" about climate change.



The use of the word "deniers" to discredit global-warming skeptics — a word designed to smear doubters as the moral and intellectual equals of Holocaust deniers — appeared early and often at the BBC.



Four years ago, when e-mails leaked from the world's top climate scientists showing them frantically trying to cover up the fact that the Earth had stopped warming in about 1998 (at exactly the same time the UN was imposing the Kyoto accord on the developed world to limit carbon emissions), the BBC jumped into full defence mode.



It lauded the scientists who had been exposed. Rather than vain careerists who were fudging the data and endeavouring to keep their critics from being published in respected scientific journals, the Beeb portrayed them as brave knights attempting to slay the evil dragons of Big Oil and Big Carbon.



They were not serial dissemblers. No, to the BBC these climate scientists were victims of a smear campaign designed to preserve profits and prevent the world's governments from taking much needed action to preserve our planet.



They were treated with nearly as much saintly veneration as the CBC treats David Suzuki. How dare anyone doubt their veracity?



So it was gobsmacking this week to see the BBC report on the work of scientist Mike Lockwood of Reading University in the U.K.



Lockwood (and dozens of other scientists) believes the sun is about to enter a period of low activity unseen in the past 10,000 years. This could, in turn, lead to a prolonged period of global cooling the likes of which the Earth has not experienced in at least two or three centuries — long, brutal, snowy winters coupled with cool, wet, pathetic summers.



In other words, our climate might be in for a Little Ice Age, according to the BBC.



This isn't simply straight-up honest reporting. This amounts to a huge climb-down by the BBC which as recently as a year ago wasn't reporting on alternative theories about climate except to dismiss those theories' proponents as cranks and crackpots.



Nor is the solar-minimum theory something new. While the theory that carbon in the atmosphere causes dangerous global warming has only been believed in earnest for



25 years, scientists have known for centuries the sun goes through predictable peaks and valleys of its strength.



Also, for those who cared to listen (the BBC and most of the rest of the world's consensus media did its best not to listen), we have known that those solar peaks and valleys corresponded very closely to periods of warming and cooling around the world.



With the UN's own climb-down in September from its ironclad belief in the carbon/warming theory, it shouldn't be a surprise that alarmist institutions such as the BBC would also back off.



Still, it's a welcome development.

http://www.edmontonsun.com/2013/11/01/condescending-bbc-cools-on-global-warming

Quote from: "Odinson"Shit.. Gotta move out of this place.

Quote from: "Shen Li"

Quote from: "Odinson"Shit.. Gotta move out of this place.

Just pay higher taxes to your government and global warming/cooling will not be a problem. :roll:

QuoteIn the long run, the world needs to cut carbon dioxide because it causes global warming. But if the main effort to cut emissions is through subsidies for chic renewables like wind and solar power, virtually no good will be achieved—at very high cost. The cost of climate policies just for the European Union—intended to reduce emissions by 2020 to 20% below 1990 levels—are estimated at about $250 billion annually. And the benefits, when estimated using a standard climate model, will reduce temperature only by an immeasurable one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.



Even in 2035, with the most optimistic scenario, the International Energy Agency estimates that just 2.4% of the world's energy will come from wind and only 1% from solar. As is the case today, almost 80% will still come from fossil fuels. As long as green energy is more expensive than fossil fuels, growing consumer markets like those in China and India will continue to use them, despite what well-meaning but broke Westerners try to do.

QuoteSo it was gobsmacking this week to see the BBC report on the work of scientist Mike Lockwood of Reading University in the U.K.

QuoteThe sun's activity is in free fall, according to a leading space physicist. But don't expect a little ice age.



"Solar activity is declining very fast at the moment," Mike Lockwood, a professor of space environmental physics at Britain's Reading University, said, "we estimate faster than at any time in the last 9,300 years."



Lockwood thinks there is now a 25 percent chance of a repetition of the last grand minimum, the late-17th-century Maunder Minimum, when there were no sunspots for 70 years. Two years ago, Lockwood put the chances of this happening at less than 10 percent.



But Lockwood says we should not expect a new grand minimum to bring on a new little ice age. Human-induced global warming, he says, is already a more important force in global temperatures than even major solar cycles. Temperatures have risen by about 1.5 degrees since 1880, with more warming expected, according to the most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.



//http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/sun-activity-is-in-free-fall-but-you-shouldnt-expect-a-new-little-ice-age/2013/11/11/19166b42-4599-11e3-a196-3544a03c2351_story.html?wprss=rss_national

QuoteReal risk of a Maunder Minimum 'Little Ice Age,'" announced the BBC this week, in reporting startling findings by Professor Mike Lockwood of Reading University. "Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years [raising the risk of a new Little Ice Age] from less than 10% just a few years ago to 25-30%," explained Paul Hudson, the BBC's climate correspondent. If Earth is spared a new Little Ice Age, a severe cooling as "occurred in the early 1800s, which also had its fair share of cold winters and poor summers, is, according to him, 'more likely than not' to happen."



During the Little Ice Age, the Sun became eerily quiet, as measured by a near disappearance of the sunspots that are typically present. Solar scientists around the world today see similar conditions, giving impetus to the widespread view that cold times lie ahead. "When we have had periods where the Sun has been quieter than usual we tend to get these much harsher winters" echoed climatologist Dennis Wheeler from Sunderland University, in a Daily Express article entitled "Now get ready for an 'Ice Age' as experts warn of Siberian winter ahead."



Scientists at the Climate and Environmental Physics and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Berne in Switzerland back up theories that support the Sun's importance in determining the climate on Earth. In a paper published this month by the American Meteorological Society, the authors demolish the claims by IPCC scientists that the Sun couldn't be responsible for major shifts in climate. In a post on her website this month, Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, all-but mocked the IPCC assertions that solar variations don't matter. Among the many studies and authorities she cited: the National Research Council's recent report, "The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth's Climate," and NASA, former home of global warming guru James Hansen.



As NASA highlighted in a press release in January of this year, in citing the NRC report on solar variations: "There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate." To bolster the argument that solar activity could explain the Little Ice Age as well as lesser changes, NASA then listed some dozen authorities, including Dan Lubin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose research on other sun-like stars in the Milky Way suggest that "the Sun's influence could be overpowering."



In the last two years, the scientific community's openness to examining the role of the Sun in climate change – as opposed to the role of man – has exploded. Scientists are now rediscovering earlier works by scientists at the Danish National Space Center who as early as the 1990s published peer-reviewed articles demonstrating the Sun's role in climate change. And by scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Pulkovo Observatory, whose predictions in the last decade that global cooling would start in this decade are looking especially prescient.



All will be rediscovering the science of the 1960s and 1970s, which even earlier sounded the alarm on the coming period of global cooling. Those early scientists expected the cooling trend of the 1960s and 1970s to relent for several decades, as it in fact did. "None of us expected uninterrupted continuation of the trend," explained Columbia University's George Kukla in 2007, whose 1972 letter to the president triggered the U.S. government's decision to take immediate action on the threat of global cooling.



Global warming always precedes an ice age, Kukla explained. The warming we saw in the 1980s and 1990s, in other words, was expected all along, much as the calm before the storm.

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/10/31/lawrence-solomon-a-global-cooling-consensus/

Quote from: "Shen Li"That was a distortion of what Lockwood's findings by some biased source.

QuoteSolar Activity and the so-called "Little Ice Age"

by Professor Mike Lockwood



I'm a professor of space environment physics and a director of research at the University of Reading in the UK. My particular topic of research is the sun, how it changes over time and how those changes affect the space environment, the weather and the climate on Earth.



The sun's activity rises and falls on an approximately 11-year cycle, but also varies on century-long timescales. It's this research I talked to BBC weatherman Paul Hudson about in an interview for the BBC's Inside Out programme.



Unfortunately, I now find myself in the position of being cited as predicting that the current rapid decline in solar activity will plunge the world into a "Little Ice Age".



This is very disappointing as it is not at all supported by the science.



There is very little evidence that the lower global mean temperatures between 1400 and 1800 were caused by solar activity - there's more evidence it was associated with volcanic activity and/or internal oscillations in the climate system.



During the Maunder minimum there were an unusually large number of cold winters in Europe. However, there is no evidence that this was a global phenomenon. Indeed, our research strongly suggests it was a regional phenomenon and that the colder winters in Europe would have been accompanied by warmer ones elsewhere, for example Greenland.



Calling this period of more frequent cold European winters a "Little Ice Age" or a "mini Ice Age" is hugely misleading as it implies Europe experienced unremitting cold throughout the Maunder minimum. This is completely wrong.



So what do we think the effect of a return to Maunder minimum conditions on global mean temperatures would be? The answer is very little.



We found the likely reduction in warming by 2100 would be between 0.06 and 0.1 degrees Celsius, a very small fraction of the warming we're due to experience as a result of human activity.



//http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/11/solar-activity-and-the-so-called-%E2%80%9Clittle-ice-age%E2%80%9D/

QuoteWe found the likely reduction in warming by 2100 would be between 0.06 and 0.1 degrees Celsius, a very small fraction of the warming we're due to experience as a result of human activity.

Quote....And the benefits, when estimated using a standard climate model, will reduce temperature only by an immeasurable one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.



Even in 2035, with the most optimistic scenario, the International Energy Agency estimates that just 2.4% of the world's energy will come from wind and only 1% from solar. As is the case today, almost 80% will still come from fossil fuels. As long as green energy is more expensive than fossil fuels, growing consumer markets like those in China and India will continue to use them, despite what well-meaning but broke Westerners try to do.