Met Office Reluctantly Admits the UK is Cooling

Electroverse

The last decade in the UK went down as the ‘second’ hottest of the past 100 years, at least according to the Met Office’s temperature dataset AND this recent article from the BBC.

But taking the Met’s politicized, warm-mongering, UHI-ignoring data as read, for arguments sake, the simple fact remains: the 2010’s have come out cooler than the 2000’s — the agency may be in control of the spin, but it hasn’t been able to fudge the findings.

Dr Mark McCarthy, from the Met Office in Exeter, said it was “a consequence of our warming climate”.

That’s right, Mark — despite this most recent decade coming out cooler than the previous one, the AGW juggernaut must keep-on rolling, your funding depends on it, doesn’t it? And even in the face of such evidence to the contrary, you can’t bring yourself to stop and ask… why, or how… the 2010’s were cooler than the 2000’s?

I was told average temperatures would rise “linearly” –always up and up and up on an endless march to catastrophe if no action was taken– as depicted by Michael Mann’s now infamous Hockey Stick. 

Now, I can buy a year or two falling out of line — local weather patterns and natural ocean current-fluctuations etc. can explain why 2018 was cooler than 2017 and 2016, for example.

But an entire decade dropping by the wayside? (It would make for a funny looking hockey stick).

No, this appears to be evidence that the sun has had its say, that its Grand Solar MAXIMUM has run its course and that its activity is now waning, likely ushering in the onset of earth’s next cooling cycle — perhaps even the next Grand Solar MINIMUM:

Furthermore, the BBC is also trying to paint 2019 as a disastrously hot year.

But the reality, again according to the Met Office’s own warm-mongering data, is that 2019 was merely the 11th warmest on record — hardly signs of an impending fiery doom.

And serving as a further indication of how hard it is for the Met to tell it’s arse from it’s elbow, I’ll leave you with this recent quote from Dr Mark McCarthy: “We are expecting to see an increase in winter rainfall, so wetter winters and drier summers — but we could still experience dry winters and wet summers.”

Bases covered — the AGW juggernaut is safe to roll-on for at least another decade. Or is it…

…natural climate cycles can scupper even the best-laid frauds.

And as the lower-latitudes continue to refreeze, as depicted by the below Total Snow Mass for the Northern Hemisphere chart, a period of GSM-induced global cooling is likely that natural climate cycle.

Prepare according — relocate if need be, and grow your own.

Solar Activity just reached a new Space Age Low

Greenland just set a new all-time Record-Low Temperature

Sorry Global Warming Alarmists, The Earth Is Cooling - Forbes

Peter Ferrara
Contributor, Forbes

Climate change itself is already in the process of definitively rebutting climate alarmists who think human use of fossil fuels is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming.  That is because natural climate cycles have already turned from warming to cooling, global temperatures have already been declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will continue to decline for another two decades or more.

That is one of the most interesting conclusions to come out of the seventh International Climate Change Conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, held last week in Chicago.  I attended, and served as one of the speakers, talking about The Economic Implications of High Cost Energy.

The conference featured serious natural science, contrary to the self-interested political science you hear from government financed global warming alarmists seeking to justify widely expanded regulatory and taxation powers for government bodies, or government body wannabees, such as the United Nations.  See for yourself, as the conference speeches are online.

What you will see are calm, dispassionate presentations by serious, pedigreed scientists discussing and explaining reams of data.  In sharp contrast to these climate realists, the climate alarmists have long admitted that they cannot defend their theory that humans are causing catastrophic global warming in public debate.  With the conference presentations online, let’s see if the alarmists really do have any response.

The Heartland Institute has effectively become the international headquarters of the climate realists, an analog to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  It has achieved that status through these international climate conferences, and the publication of its Climate Change Reconsidered volumes, produced in conjunction with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

Those Climate Change Reconsidered volumes are an equivalently thorough scientific rebuttal to the irregular Assessment Reports of the UN’s IPCC.  You can ask any advocate of human caused catastrophic global warming what their response is to Climate Change Reconsidered.  If they have none, they are not qualified to discuss the issue intelligently.

In 2015, I discussed a 30 year temperature cycle that I had read about in the 1970's. It would appear that this is the cause and confirmation of that cycle.

For example, temperatures dropped steadily from the late 1940s to the late 1960s.  The popular press was even talking about a coming ice age.  Ice ages have cyclically occurred roughly every 10,000 years, with a new one actually due around now.

Central to these natural cycles is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).  Every 25 to 30 years the oceans undergo a natural cycle where the colder water below churns to replace the warmer water at the surface, and that affects global temperatures by the fractions of a degree we have seen.  The PDO was cold from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, and it was warm from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, similar to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).

In 2000, the UN’s IPCC predicted that global temperatures would rise by 1 degree Celsius by 2010.  Was that based on climate science, or political science to scare the public into accepting costly anti-industrial regulations and taxes?

Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus of Geology at Western Washington University, knew the answer.  He publicly predicted in 2000 that global temperatures would decline by 2010.  He made that prediction because he knew the PDO had turned cold in 1999, something the political scientists at the UN’s IPCC did not know or did not think significant.

Well, the results are in, and the winner is….Don Easterbrook.  Easterbrook also spoke at the Heartland conference, with a presentation entitled “Are Forecasts of a 20-Year Cooling Trend Credible?”  Watch that online and you will see how scientists are supposed to talk: cool, rational, logical analysis of the data, and full explanation of it.  All I ever see from the global warming alarmists, by contrast, is political public relations, personal attacks, ad hominem arguments, and name calling, combined with admissions that they can’t defend their views in public debate.

Easterbrook shows that by 2010 the 2000 prediction of the IPCC was wrong by well over a degree, and the gap was widening.  That’s a big miss for a forecast just 10 years away, when the same folks expect us to take seriously their predictions for 100 years in the future.  Howard Hayden, Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Connecticut showed in his presentation at the conference that based on the historical record a doubling of CO2 could be expected to produce a 2 degree C temperature increase.  Such a doubling would take most of this century, and the temperature impact of increased concentrations of CO2 declines logarithmically.  You can see Hayden’s presentation online as well.

Because PDO cycles last 25 to 30 years, Easterbrook expects the cooling trend to continue for another 2 decades or so.  Easterbrook, in fact, documents 40 such alternating periods of warming and cooling over the past 500 years, with similar data going back 15,000 years.  He further expects the flipping of the ADO to add to the current downward trend.

But that is not all.  We are also currently experiencing a surprisingly long period with very low sunspot activity.  That is associated in the earth’s history with even lower, colder temperatures.  The pattern was seen during a period known as the Dalton Minimum from 1790 to 1830, which saw temperature readings decline by 2 degrees in a 20 year period, and the noted Year Without A Summer in 1816 (which may have had other contributing short term causes).

Even worse was the period known as the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715, which saw only about 50 sunspots during one 30 year period within the cycle, compared to a typical 40,000 to 50,000 sunspots during such periods in modern times.  The Maunder Minimum coincided with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, which the earth suffered from about 1350 to 1850.  The Maunder Minimum saw sharply reduced agricultural output, and widespread human suffering, disease and premature death.

Such impacts of the sun on the earth’s climate were discussed at the conference by astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon, Nir J. Shaviv, of the Racah Institute of Physics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Sebastian Luning, co-author with leading German environmentalist Fritz Vahrenholt of The Cold Sun.

Easterbrook suggests that the outstanding question is only how cold this present cold cycle will get.  Will it be modest like the cooling from the late 1940s to late 1970s?  Or will the paucity of sunspots drive us all the way down to the Dalton Minimum, or even the Maunder Minimum?  He says it is impossible to know now.  But based on experience, he will probably know before the UN and its politicized IPCC.

The Other Side of the Solar Activity/Climate Change Debate

At the bottom of this article I present a brief note on the work of a Danish astrophysicist, and a link to his presentation, that I think you might find very interesting, if not a little technical.

The sun is quieter than normal, but don't panic

Some fear that we could be heading to another Little Ice Age, but (some) scientists say that's unlikely

Nicole Mortillaro · CBC News

Our sun's activity waxes and wanes. But it's been quieter than normal, and that can have an effect on us here on Earth. (ESA/NASA)

The sun is quiet … very quiet.

In February, for the first time since August 2008, the sun went an entire month without any sunspots.

Sunspots are cooler regions of the sun. How many appear on the sun's surface depends on what cycle the sun is in. Every 11 years our star goes through a maximum, followed by a minimum (the entire magnetic cycle of the sun, when the poles flip, is 22 years).

Over the past three decades, the sun has been consistently dropping in activity. Maximum has been quieter than is typical; minimum has been particularly quiet. And this has caused some to make the false assumption that, as a result, Earth is going to cool.

This graph shows the decrease in solar activity over the past 33 years. (David Hathaway)

The oscillations here are minor cycles while the overall trend is part of a major cycle.

It all stems from an incident that took place between 1645 and 1715, called the Maunder Minimum, where sunspots all but disappeared. This coincided with the "Little Ice Age" that stretched from 1500 to 1850 in the northern hemisphere. In England, the Thames River froze over; Viking settlers abandoned Greenland.

As a result, there have been strong suggestions that the Maunder Minimum caused the Little Ice Age, but some scientists warn that there were other contributors, such as increased volcanic activity.

This graph illustrates solar activity over the past four centuries. The Maunder Minimum is evident.

On average, the sun produces 180 sunspots a cycle. The greatest ever was 285 in solar cycle 19; for solar cycle 24, so far it's been 116. 

So, with the decrease in solar activity, are we heading into another Maunder Minimum?

"No Maunder Minimum. Certainly no Little Ice Age," said David Hathaway, an astrophysicist who once headed NASA's solar physics branch at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "The next cycle looks like it's going to be very much like this one."

He explains that, while the sun does dim during a minimum, it's only by a tenth of a per cent, which translates into a tenth of a degree Celsius. And with the warming by about 1C  that we've seen due to climate change — and the warming that is to come — it's unlikely that we'll notice.

Different cycles

The sunspot cycle is also called the Schwabe cycle. At the moment we are at the end of cycle 24, heading toward 25. And scientists predict that this quiet trend is going to persist.

"There's been this steady decline," Hathaway said. "I'm fairly confident looking at our own predictions and predictions of others, that cycle 25 is going to be another small cycle."

The sun had no sunspots for the entire month of February, a sign of an approaching period of solar minimum next year,

when the sun's activity will be at the low end of its 11-year cycle. (Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA)

Sunspots dot the sun's surface, or photosphere. The sunspot unleashed a spectacular show on Oct. 28, 2003.

This sunspot released one of the biggest solar flares ever recorded. (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, NASA)

But it's believed that the sun goes through many different cycles. Aside from the Schwabe, there is also one called the Gleissberg Cycle, where solar activity decreases roughly every 90 years.

And Hathaway said data over the past two centuries suggests that what the sun is now going through may be part of this cycle.

"We've now seen three or four of these modulations where we have small cycles, then they get bigger and then they get smaller again," he said. "We're at that bottom phase, where we haven't seen cycles this small in 100 years."

This image shows a tiny sunspot on the surface of the sun on March 7. (Helioviewer/NASA/SDO)

Hathaway said that he's probably seen thousands of satellites drop out of space as a result of solar activity causing drag.

"Skylab really opened up our eyes," Pesnell said.

Since then, there has been an increase in missions to study our star, including the Solar Dynamics Observatory, Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, Hinode and the recently launched Parker Solar Probe.

So, are we in a minimum?

When astrophysicists talk about solar minimum, they're not referring to the quietest time on the sun, but rather to the sun coming out of its quiet time and and starting a new cycle.

Though February went without a sunspot, a tiny one appeared on March 5. However, it wasn't a sunspot that was part of the coming cycle.

Sunspots are magnetic and have both a north and south pole. One sign that a sunspot is part of a new cycle has to do how the magnetic field lines connect and this sunspot connects in the same pattern as the current cycle.

The sun doesn't rotate as a solid sphere. Instead, different parts of it rotate at different speeds. As a result, the magnetic field lines are stretched out. The magnetic field of the next cycle, instead being north-south would become east-west.

As well, there's the location.

"To be a cycle 25 spot, it's apt to appear at about 30 degrees latitude, Hathaway said. "This was at nine [degrees]. So this was definitely old-cycle."

However, both Hathaway and Pesnell believe that solar cycle 25 should begin sometime in 2020.

Some astrophysicists believe that the next cycle, the one beginning about 2031, will be very significant, perhaps approaching the level of the Maunder Minimum.

And when that happens, sunspot activity will increase. And as activity increases, we are almost certain to see more solar flares and coronal mass ejections, eruptions from the sun. While these eruptions are responsible for our beautiful northern lights, they can also cause power outages as was seen in Quebec in March 1989.

While Hathaway is officially retired, he continues to monitor our nearest star, to unravel its mysteries and better understand its effects on Earth.

"I continue to strive to understand this beast," Hathaway said.

For another point of view:

Another astrophysicist stated recently that there is much more research that needs to be done in the area of cosmic rays effect on global warming.  Henrik Svensmark is a physicist and professor in the Division of Solar System Physics at the Danish National Space Institute in Copenhagen. He is known for his theory on the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation as an indirect cause of global warming.

Basically, his theory is that cosmic rays cause ions in the atmosphere which eventually contribute to cloud formation. Sunspot activity acts as an umbrella reducing the cosmic rays that reach the earth, thereby reducing cloud cover, resulting in warming temperatures. Periods of minimum sunspot activity correlate well with reduced cosmic rays and temperatures.

Over the past 10,000 years, temperature fluctuations of up to 2 deg. C have been noted. Over the past several million years, temperature fluctuations of up to 10 deg. C have been determined to be associated with this effect. At least, that's the theory.

Basically, there is a lot more about global warming that we don't know, than that we know.

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Sun’s Activity will Cause Global Cooling – Scientist; Climate Change Mongers Very Upset

It could be 2080 before we see any further

rise in the global temperature

© Dominick Reuter / Reuters

Recent research by scientists has suggested that there could be an imminent 35-year period of low solar activity that could lead to cooler global temperatures.

I like this theory. I posed in a previous article that there were 30 year cycles where the global temperature would alternately rise and then remain steady or even drop a little. In my observations I found that we are in the middle of a period of steady temperatures which will end in the late 2020's. Professor Zharkova predicts the low solar activity will begin around 2020. Those roughly 7 or 8 years of falling temperatures may make up for the excessively warm past two years because of the record strong El Nino. La Nina will also assist with that.

Should cooler temperatures continue through to 2055, as she suggests, then we will completely miss the next 30 year cycle of warming temperatures. Another period of steady temperatures are due to begin in the late 2050s. If this all works out then we won't see any significant rise in the global temperature until the last 20 years of this century.

If new models of the inner workings of the sun published by Professor Valentina Zharkova and her colleagues at Northumbria University on Tuesday are correct, then future variations in solar activity will be able to be predicted more accurately.

The sun is already known to have 11-year cycles of sunspots coming and going on the surface. But models that rely on looking at external features of the stars have only had mixed success in predicting the solar cycles.

Zharkova’s team found that the sun’s magnetic fields come from two components from two different layers of its body, and suggests that looking at the interactions between these two magnetic waves either magnifies or diminishes the sun’s intensity.

Perhaps most startlingly, observations made by the team using this method suggest that we may be entering a period of reduced solar activity, meaning that a period of lower global temperatures could be on the way. These conditions could be similar to those seen during the “Little Ice Age” of the 1600s, the peak of which was called the “Maunder Minimum,” a 70-year period when sunspots became extremely rare.

“In the Northern Hemisphere … the rivers were frozen, there were winters and no summers, and so on,” Zharkova said of the Little Ice Age, adding that she estimated the new predicted sunspot minimum to last for 35 years.

Man-made global warming - a conspiracy?

Whether future cycles actually match the scientists’ predictions will put their model to the test, but some climate scientists were not accepting of the new research, with some even trying to suppress it.

“Some of them were welcoming and discussing. But some of them were quite – I would say – pushy,” she told The Global Warming Policy Forum in an interview. “They were trying to actually silence us. Some of them contacted the Royal Astronomical Society demanding, behind out back, to withdraw our press release.”

This just re-affirms the notion that man-made global warming is a conspiracy and not real science. Real scientists don't suppress counter-information, they use it to improve their work. Those who's work has flimsy, or dishonest scientific support try to suppress dissenting scientific data.

The Little Ice Age is a controversial topic among scientist, with some arguing that low solar activity contributed to cooler temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere and others contending atmospheric effects of volcanic eruptions pushed temperatures lower.