A Place to Stand

The party line is changing fast. Not only are we not facing catastrophic warming we are now half way back to the little ice age according to the BBC

"By recent standards, we have just had what could be called a very cold winter and I wanted to see if this was just another coincidence or statistically robust," said lead author Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading, UK...

The Maunder Minimum occurred in the latter half of the 17th Century - a period when Europe experienced a series of harsh winters, which has been dubbed by some as the Little Ice Age. Following this, there was a gradual increase in solar activity that lasted 300 years.

Professor Lockwood explained that studies of activity on the Sun, which provides data stretching back over 9,000 years, showed that it tended to "ramp up quite slowly over about a 300-year period, then drop quite quickly over about a 100-year period".

He said the present decline started in 1985 and was currently about "half way back to a Maunder Minimum condition"...

The way in which solar activity affects the behaviour of blocking episodes is linked to the amount of ultraviolet (UV) emissions being produced by the Sun.

Solar UV heats the stratosphere (20-50km above the surface), particularly the equatorial stratosphere. This results in a temperature gradient, which leads to the formation of high level winds.

"The change in solar activity undoubtedly changes the stratospheric winds," said Professor Lockwood.

So by 2085 we will be at the deepest point of another Little Ice Age.

Of course the BBC cover themselves by also saying

But they added that the phenomenon only affected a limited region and would not alter the overall global warming trend.

Which is obvious nonsense. If we are going to have another Maunder Minimum in the Sun's cycle it is going to affect everywhere that the Sun shines not just Europe & indeed the Little Ice Age wasn't a merely European phenomenon. This is just the BBC trying to push a cooling scare while not acknowledging they were lying about the warming fraud.

Not them alone. Professor Lockwood has been on the BBC before pushing a climate scare. As Anthony Watts points out "his study was basically a rehash of what many others have done previously over the past few centuries, but he has the BBC’s ear – because in 2007 he prominently claimed just the opposite."

modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun's effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.

Writing in the Royal Society's journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present.

"This should settle the debate," said Mike Lockwood, from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.

This paper re-enforces the fact that the warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity

Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle...

"You can't just ignore bits of data that you don't like," he said.,,

"This paper reinforces the fact that the warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment of climate science.

The IPCC's February summary report concluded that greenhouse gases were about 13 times more responsible than solar changes for rising global temperatures.

That was in July 2007 before Dr Lockwood became a Professor. Clearly somebody who has a good eye for how the political wind is blowing.

Since we have had at least a century & a half of climate scares, alternating between catastrophic warming & a new ice age we may shortly expect the eco-fascist/big government totalitarians/headline seeking journalists to redefine "climate change" as cooling. In the 1970s their cure for the approaching ice age was more government regulation, preventing aircraft flying & an end to modern technology. Though this is exactly the same cure as for catastrophic warming it will doubtless serve again for cooling.

In fact, just as the only practical answer to CO2 release is much more nuclear power, something the eco-fascists & traditional politicians have resolutely prevented us having, so the practical cure to cooling, if it actually happens, is space development since a spacegoing civilisation could, comparatively easily, produce the thousands of square miles of tinfoil requited for orbiting mirrors. The basic answer to almost all political questions is more technological progress & fewer politicians banning things.

Meanwhile watch the politicians, media & their tame "experts" change direction almost as fast as satirised in 1984 when the enemy changed from Eurasia to Eastasia. I think Lockwood owes Martin Durkin, creator of the Great Global warming Swindle programme an apology. I think he won't give it.

Labels: eco-fascism, global warming, space