The Ice Age Cometh
Do you ever wonder if the newsmagazines were right back in the 1970s when they were warning us of a coming ice age? Well, an article in an Australian newspaper suggests that we're overdue for a big chill.
THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.
What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.
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.
That article, published today, was obviously written several days ago. Here's an update: there are now two sunspots.
Some pooh-pooh this scaremongering, arguing that the Sun can be relatively quiet for two more years before we have to start worrying about the big chill.
As Al Gore exhorts us, we must do something now. So, I encourage everyone to buy Hummers and put as many global warming gases into the atmosphere (Methane is a greenhouse gas too -- eat burritos) as possible to insulate the Earth from the coming ice age.
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I would like to personally thank you for giving me the ammunition I need to justify my burrito habit and its three states to my wife. I am now officially an environmentalist. 🙂 Thanks for the article and the commentary, you made me laugh quite loud at work, causing a great deal of stares.