Hot, hotter....cold, colder

[Blackmask]

'Forget global warming, prepare for Ice Age'
By Brendan O'Keefe

SUNSPOT activity has not resumed up after hitting an 11-year low in March last year, raising fears that - far from warming - the globe is about to return to an Ice Age.

Astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory showed no spots on the sun.

He said the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Dr Chapman writes in The Australian today.

"If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over."

The Bureau of Meteorology says temperatures in Australia have been warmer than the 1960-90 average since the late 1970s, barring a couple of cooler years, and are now 0.3C higher than the long-term average.

A sunspot is a region on the sun that is cooler than the rest and appears dark.

Some scientists believe a strong solar magnetic field, when there is plenty of sunspot activity, protects the earth from cosmic rays, cutting cloud formation, but that when the field is weak - during low sunspot activity - the rays can penetrate into the lower atmosphere and cloud cover increases, cooling the surface.

But scientists from the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Bolder, Colorado published a report in 2006 that showed the sun had a negligible effect on climate change.

The researchers wrote in the journal Nature that the sun's brightness varied by only 0.07per cent over 11-year sunspot cycles, and that that was far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.

Dr Chapman proposes preventive, or delaying, moves to slow the cooling, such as bulldozing Siberian and Canadian snow to make it dirty and less reflective. "

My guess is that the odds are now at least 50:50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades," he writes.

Source

Can we vote on this? Warming....Colding.....decisions decisions.

[Jocasta]

Isn't this pretty much what Bill and I (and maybe others) were talking about a year ago?

[edawg99]

It's just one big cycle the earth goes though. In the past the whole earth was tropical and then the ice age set in, now the earth is starting to heat up again so now there could be possibly another ice age.

[Val]

Originally Posted by Jocasta

Isn't this pretty much what Bill and I (and maybe others) were talking about a year ago?

Yes, it is. I remember this thread.
This looks like the movie "The Day After Tomorrow"

brrrrrrrrr ... creeps!

[Blackmask]

It's just one big cycle the earth goes though. In the past the whole earth was tropical and then the ice age set in, now the earth is starting to heat up again so now there could be possibly another ice age.

The difference this cycle is that the levels of CO2 and the speed at which it increased is unprecedented. If the pattern is followed then an ice age is likely, but given there's never been changes like being recorded before, there's an element of unknown.

Dr Chapman proposes preventive, or delaying, moves to slow the cooling, such as bulldozing Siberian and Canadian snow to make it dirty and less reflective. "

hmmm....it's good to have preventative plans but wouldn't this require a lot of bulldozing? Maybe it'd be more practical to just paint the snow green with a crop duster.

[CaseyM]

Originally Posted by Blackmask

Maybe it'd be more practical to just paint the snow green with a crop duster.

That might summon all the leprechauns out of hiding. We wouldn't want that.

[MSFixR]

It is a Q particle that has become lodged in the center of the sun and we need to build a space ship to send Cillian Murphy and Rose Byrne to it with a very large nuclear bomb to reignite it. They have already made a movie about it: IMDb.

[Jocasta]

It's always essential that it's the beautiful people who save us.

[Captain Beefheart]

I think it's just better to step aside and let the cards be shuffled by themselves. Looking at things globally, we're in a cycle where the growth of our population is outstripping the ability of our environment to sustain us. Peak oil, peak water, and global warming are all are new instances of that problem.

Cycles like this have only ever ended in one of two ways: famine or innovation. A huge amount of human history can be reduced to a discussion of those two concepts.

The cynical in me would probably pray for the increasing scarcity of natural resources leading us toward a systemic collapse, then again maybe not.

[Jim Halpert]

Originally Posted by Captain Beefheart

Cycles like this have only ever ended in one of two ways: famine or innovation.

More workload's never a good thing. But then again, we can always look forward to a collapse in human civilization. Here's hoping.

[Plastic Flute]

I hope Rose Byrne burts into flames anyway. She really hurt Matthew, So she must die.
Sic her Death !