Possibly related?
Bitterly cold weather slid over from Canada and settled into Interior Alaska with forecasters saying temperatures could continue to slide to nearly 50 degrees below zero in coming days.
Over the weekend, the mercury at Fairbanks International Airport dropped to 39 degrees below zero. Areas in the Interior outside the city were even colder; 46 below on the Yukon Flats, 41 below in Fort Yukon and 44 below in Central, according to the weather service.
IBD points to a trend for 2008:
2008 has been a year of records for cold and snowfall and may indeed be the coldest year of the 21st century thus far. In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month of October.
Global thermometers stopped rising after 1998, and have plummeted in the last two years by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. The 2007-2008 temperature drop was not predicted by global climate models. But it was predictable by a decline in sunspot activity since 2000.
When the sun is active, it’s not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop near zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins. But this year, the start of a new cycle, the sun has been eerily quiet.
Meanwhile, Watt’s Up With That defines the issue further, and points towards a possible repetition of the “Dalton Minimum”:
The total number of spotless days this spolar minimum is now at around 510 days since the last maximum. The earliest the minimum of the sunspot cycles can be is July 2008, which would make the cycle length 12 years 3 months, longest since cycle 9 in 1848. If the sun stays quiet for a few more months we will rival the early 1800s, the Dalton Minimum which fits with the 213 year cycle which begin with the solar minimum in the late 1790s.
The Dalton Minimum was the third and final of the three sunspot minimas believed to be responsible for the “Little Ice Age,” starting in the Medieval era and ending in 1850 – 20 years after the Dalton Minimum.
This doesn’t conclusively put paid to the AGW theory (or the opportunity cost of dealing with it), but it certainly does give one the impression that its adherents have spectacularly poor timing.
In the meantime, bundle up.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
– Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene 5.
Damn, now I have to change my whole wardrobe again.
Based on temperatures in the Midwest, global warming seems an inconvenient goof.
But Global Warming is so behind the times. I thought the new mantra was Climate Change … Climate Change…
Now there’s something I can believe in!
This flies in the face of what the politically correct idjits at The Weather Channel have been saying all week. They have this cute lil graphic of “record highs vs. record lows in 2008″ that PROVES we’re getting warmer…
Or so they say. What’s that about “none so blind” again?
I think you may be missing a closing tag after your first block quote. Even with reading glasses…..
(I thought the Navy guranteed their laser surgery?
)
What’s your browser? It’s looking good on Firefox…
Best take I know of is here:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/908/
IE 6.0. Screws at work are too cheap to get something newer.
It looks like it fixed itself.
I’m blaming Bill Gates!
Quote looks good to me too. But, I have Firefox.
There does seem to be some concern over solar activity. While Mr. Hansen whines at one division of NASA, another is publishing real reason for concern.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/23sep_solarwind.htm
I’m not an html type (I’ve caused trouble on other boards in the past so I refrain), so you will have to copy and paste.
Seems the solar wind is losing force, and the heliosphere is shrinking. Added to the fact that the solar magnetic field has decreased in strength by almost one-third, and we get far less shielding from cosmic rays.
From AGW standpoint, this means it’s over. It took many years to recover from the Little Ice Age. Looks like we may be starting into another.
Frankly, I’d rather have warm than cold. Warm usually means good growing conditions. Cold often means famine and we are living on the edge at this point.
…And there sat Sam looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door.”
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm___
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.
Wasn’t the Little Ice Age when they skated on the Thames River? Can’t wait. Glad I live in Florida, can’t afford all those coats and stuff, I’d have to wear a bunch of T shirts.
Michelle,
I prefer Jimmy Buffett’s idea of change, myself.
On a more serious note, I wonder how this may factor in.
Well, there are those who say the sun is dying. I rather agree with those who simply say that the power source is losing a bit of amperage.
Look, I’ll stand up and be happy to admit that I am sold on the theory of an electric universe. That the main force in the universe isn’t gravity, but electricity, with demonstrable and scalable effects. For further reading, I’d recommend this site:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/home.htm
If you accept that the electric currents which power everything can wax and wane, then you can see how stars can flare and shrink, because they are pinches in titanic Birkland currents weaving through all of space and energizing what we see.
Thing is, being a science geek all my life, I always trusted everything the profs told me, never questioned why theories had so many “yeah, but” exceptions, and accepted the nuclear star model. When i first came across the site a few years back I thought it to be another crackpot theory group. Now, I’m convinced. they make a compelling argument, for me at least.
Anyway, if you’ve a bit of time to spend, surf through their articles and take a look at what they offer. If it just makes you think about the nature of things out there, then I’d consider it time well spent. Especially you electrical engineer types around here.
Respects,
One nice thing about the cold weather, there’s less moisture in the air to distort my star-gazing. The Milky Way is visible to the unaided eye, looks like a long, thin cloud passing overhead.
Which, discussing the behavior of old Sol over time always makes me wonder at just how much hubris we have, to think that forces like global climate change can be managed at our whim?
In 1.1 Billion years the sun will become about 10% brighter. Moisture in our atmosphere will dry out.
In 3.5 Billion years the Sun will become 40% brighter as it loses its reserves of hydrogen. Anything our side of Jupiter is toasted, our oceans evaporate.
In 5.4 Billion years the sun runs out of hydrogen and starts to turn into a Red Giant, expanding to about half again its current size. Mercury is engulfed in the Solar corona, Venus loses everything that isn’t rock. Our seas boil off. If we still exist as a species we’re living miles underground.
In about 6.5 Billion years the Sun is a Red Giant, about 170 times larger and over 40 times brighter than today. Forget underground living, Earth is only a chunk of superheated rock. Life as we know it ceases to exist on the planet.
At that time, the only record of there ever being a human race will consist of a flag, a lunar lander base, and a 4wd electric dune buggy on the moon, plus a few craft named Voyager and Pioneer that have exited our solar system. As for the bits on the moon, those made of aluminum have melted.
So, yeah. Hard to get me all that worried about a half-a-degree C seen in the last century. Pfiffle.
Damn! And I was hoping to grow mangoes in the back yard.
All I want for this New Year is a class action lawsuit against Al Gore and his ilk for pushing his Anthropogenic Global Warming idiocy.
I know a distinguished physicist (the head of his own company in a small New England State) who passinately argued the GW cause without data that showed similar effects on all planets in our solar system. Presumably, a physicist would have taken some classes in astronomy andknow that all stars are variables. Ours is a near-steady burning freak of the lot, but it has has cyclic behavior that has been ignored by the Gorebots.
The “consensus” of scientists never was. The same groups seized every opportunity to discredit President Bush were in lockstep on this issue as well.
Political Hogwash it is.
Bruce,
That’s the site I posted the url to. The problem we have is less output from the sun. It seems to be going quiet on us, which it does from time to time.
Byron, you may want to buy a little cold weather gear and get a heat pump for the house. You will feel it if we have another little ice age. FLA ain’t gonna save you bud. Given your thermal pampering, you may want a Patton style bomber jacket for those times it reaches into the low 40s.
Lex – Thanx for editing the url for me.
QM, I live in NORTH Florida. I’ve seen an inch of black ice cover most of the northern part of the state, as well as the two inches of snow on top of that. I also make my living outside on ships. Remember, the coldest place in the world is a ship in drydock, because the evil bastards always align the dock with the prevailing winter wind. I be ready, and if not, well, there is that nice little yard in Brazil
O/T here but … Lex, is that Hornet wearing a lampshade? Expecting a rough night tonight maybe??
Happy New Year, Boss!
We only know some pieces of the great jigsaw puzzle that is our global climate system, and are rather weak on how they fit together. The connectivity of positive and negative feedbacks require much more work. The models are only a first approximation of the system, and the IPCC projections include the assumption of no peak oil.
The devil is in the fact that the science has become a political football.
For those who are interested in climate models, check out the URL
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap3-1/final-report/sap3-1-final-all.pdf
The title is “Climate Models: An Assesment of Strengths and Limitations”
We have only begun the in-depth study of the global climate system, and it is definitely not “settled science”. Anyone who supports that allegation is perilously close to the suppression of scientific inquiry (rather like the Catholic Church vis-a-vis the Aristotelian system, or a current-day major world religion beginning in “I”).
I certainly believe that mankind can perturb the system. But the system has even greater perturbers in action, the sun being a major player and continental drift another. The problem is that we do now know how the system will react and “compensate” or how much it can be perturbed before seeking a new equilibrium.
Warming may be a problem in the future, but we can adapt and survive that. The real killer is ice, and as sure as there is precession of the equinoxes, nutation and Chandler wobble, an ice age is in our future.
We have more pressing reasons for finding alternative energy sources to oil. First is that we are funding those who desire to destroy our civilization. Second is that Hubbert’s Peak is a valid analysis. Third is that the Third World desires to achieve the living standard of the First World and cannot be denied. To do so would provoke a war with CBW weapons that would definitely push us back to early hunter-gatherer times, and the road back would be difficult indeed. Finally, liquid hydrocarbons are a bounty for chemical industry that argues that just burning the stuff is rather wasteful.
We really must expand outward into the solar system. Earth is a living planet, and the last 10,000 years has been exceptionally stable. This has allowed us to achieve our current level of civilization, and the odds are overwhelming that we will not have another 10k years of benign stability. Climate does change (even without our help), super volcanoes do let loose every few 10k years, and there is always that possibility of a 6km diameter rock ruining your day. Our exploration of the solar system has revealed that materials necessary for our survival exist that do not require our dropping down into a deep gravity well to get them. It will be challenging, but no more so than has been faced by the explorers from the Vikings through Magellan.
So, Happy New Year everybody. We must keep running on the treadmill. There is no going back. Life was a lot shorter and more brutal in “the good old days.”
Happy New Year to you too, Michelle!
Skating on the Thames? Skating on the canals of Venice around then, too. And wolves wandering the outskirts of Paris. The four-legged kind.
The site looks fine on Safari, too.
Given that the entire field of Chaotic Systems was discovered doing climate modelling I always find it fascinating that people will ascribe such faith to models projecting out 100 years, especially when the news reports a “surprising new find” in the field of climatology.
Here’s the executive summary: Climate, like all chaotic systems, is highly susceptible to changes in initial conditions (the proverbial butterfly effect). When scientists discover a new factor in climate (cosmic rays, sunspots, inductive heating from B-coupling between earth and sun, etc) every single prediction made by a model that does not include the new effect is suspect. By my count there have been at least 4 such unexpected discoveries since Al Gore made his little ego-trip.
This whole mess is as scientific as those prostate ads that feature the astrophysicist.
SteveH, you may be pleased (?) to hear that wolves have returned to many locations in eastern Germany and Poland because the population has thinned out so much.
As for the rest of you cynics,
Life in the air age, isn’t all the brochures say…
Life in the air age, it’s too dangerous to stay…
Life in the air age, airships crashing every day into the bay…
Life in the air age, it’s all highways in the sky…
Life in the air age, all the oceans have run dry…
Life in the air age, it’s grim enough to make a robot cry…
The AGW scam has been based upon models. Those models when given starting conditions in the past were not able to arrive at decent predictions of what we have now.
Often chaotic systems can be statistically modeled, but weather and climate seem to be out of reach. Some scientists, being arrogant SOBs say that can’t be allowed. I’m sorry, but some things will be out of the reach of science for the foreseeable future, and most likely forever.
OTH, my high school Physics instructor, a graduate Engineer, used to say “let a Physicist say something can’t be done, and some damn fool Engineer will go do it.” He used to work at Sandia among Physicists in weapons research.
Mathematics is the language of Physics. Engineering is dependent upon the mathematical models composed by those Physicists (Physics and Engineering are two sides of the same coin and often Engineers work as Physicists and Physicists as Engineers. The difference is merely function.). Newtonian mechanics boils down into nice neat models. When Faraday started serious investigations into electricity and magnetism, those neat little relationships started breaking down as man began the move from classical to modern Physics. Relativity was one side of that, but the real monkey wrench was Quantum Mechanics which is still reverberating. The computer you read this on is a direct result of that (Solid State Physics is a field of Quantum Mechanics). Quantum Mechanics involves serious statistics beyond anything seen in the cookbook classes taken by people in the so called social sciences. There are many inputs the climate modelers have not included in their models (Dr. Jerry Pournelle’s website has had a number of discussions on this I won’t repeat – go to his site and read as it is worth your time). But the statistics that would be involved in modeling even the inputs are probably beyond any computing power we have today. AND that assumes we even know all the inputs, although the sun seems to be by far the most influential input.
The people dealing with those weather models are so far out of their depth, frankly, it isn’t funny. The people that run their mouths in public, like NASA’s Hansen, should be ashamed to say anything beyond “we have models that don’t work, but we are trying to find out why.”
I joke with people and tell them I can answer any question they ask. When I’m finished they realize that “I don’t know” is a quite legitimate answer (unless you are on the carpet in front of the Captain. Then you might end up in hack).
Quartermaster,
Sorry about that. I guess I just skipped the URL as white noise; so many of them seem to be computer-generated sequences of random characters.
Friends … one of our imperatives for 2009 is to find a truly effective way to muzzle Al Gore. Ridicule hasn’t worked, so far. He just flaps that tired and undeserved Nobel Prize in our faces, and reminders that he shares the honor with such truly awful people as Yasser Arafat and Jimmuh Carter dont seem to disturb him.
I wonder if there is anything he’s ever been ashamed of…
Ohh … and Happy New Year to all you courteous and kindly commenters, both the distaff side and the masculine. My Old Flame [husband] and I had a New Year’s Eve luncheon at a favorite restaurant, including a flute of champagne, and floated serenely through the rest of the day.
We’re cheap dates these days.
Marianne
I still want to see James Hansen take a box walk (you know, the one with all your possessions in it), escorted by security, out of the front door of whatever NASA facility he works at.
Marianne, you refer to your Spousal Unit as “My Old Flame?” I seem to recall a Spike Jones song by that very name.
Tell me that’s an inside joke.
For that matter, tell me that others know of Spike Jones. Seems as I grow older the common past I share with the rest of humanity becomes less and less.
– Max
Max/
Well, ya got company in me, as I’m 64, although Spike was really of my father’s generation. I remember him mainly from the old Ed Sullivan TV variety shows–harder and harder to find people remember seeing those live either….Didn’t Paul Tibbets say not too long before he passed that he couldn’t talk to anyone under 80 anymore?
Quartermaster
Math, Engineering and Physics may be all in the same family, but sometimes they operate in parallel alternate universes. All I know is that my first semester of calc as an undergrad was taught by a math guy, and the 2nd semester by an engineer and it was like two parallel universes as between the different approach/take they brought to the same subject–the one theoretical, as in “devise the equation that would solve this problem”; the other, “plug and chug” to solve the problem. T’was a mild consternation to this simple-minded Poli-Sci major.
Virgil,
For the mathematician, math is a wonderful toy to play with. To the Engineer and Physicist it is a tool and a language. Engineers and Physicists often are at odds because the work they do is different. The Physicist finds, the Engineer uses what the Physicist finds. Engineering students traditionally have trouble in the Physics Departments because the manor in which the courses are taught has a different thrust. The prime difference is rigor in thought and expression. Physics being a basic science (actually THE basic science) is taught with rigor and Engineering courses are not, but with a practical bent. Ways of doing things in Engineering Mechanics will get you crucified in Classical Mechanics (I know I took both courses and was a TA in the Physics Department at Tennessee Tech my last year of Engineering School). This is as it should be and not an abberation.
I can see why a PoliSci major would have problems with Calculus taught in the manor you suffered. The Engineer, however, did not do his math students any favors, however. Math should be taught rigorously as well and for the same reason Physics is.
Max,
Feitlebaum!!!
Oh, and Friday the 13th falls on a Tuesday this month.