Can We Rescind Gore's Nobel Prize?Over the next few decades, we may need all the greenhouse gases we can get

To the extent that global warming is related primarily to sunspot activity, we may well be in for some serious global cooling, not global warming over the next few decades [h/t David Ricardo Palmer]:

“The sun’s surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun’s 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century,” reports one science blog.

Long-time man-made global warming advocates NASA assure us that significant sunspot activity will return in 2012, but a recent a paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, predicts that sunspots will all but vanish after 2015.

Since the sun, and not carbon dioxide, is the principle driver of climate change, a dearth of sunspot activity would herald a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare and contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age during which Europe and North America were hit by bitterly cold winters and the Thames river in London completely froze. ...

“Based on the past Armagh measurements, this suggests that over the next two decades, global temperatures may fall by about 2 degrees C — that is, to a level lower than any we have seen in the last 100 years….“Temperatures have already fallen by about 0.5 degrees C over the past 12 months and, if this is only the start of it, it would be a serious concern,” concludes David Watt.

Such predictions are of course of little interest to a global PR machine that butters its bread on attributing every weather event, be it droughts, floods, volcanoes or earthquakes, to man-made global warming.

No matter that the last ten years have showed no global warming and the next 10 years are predicted to show no global warming, the fact that temperatures are clearly dropping in correlation to the lack of sunspot activity means nothing to people who are already committed to a quasi-religious belief system and governments that have resolved to squeeze the middle class citing fraudulent claims of eco-apocalypse as an excuse, while the real environmental crises - deforestation, GM madness, cell phone tower radiation, genetic splicing and chemtrails go almost completely ignored.

Thank goodness the US refused to ratify Kyoto. Thank goodness Canada (and most other countries) did virtually nothing to honour their Kyoto commitments. Over the next few decades, we may need all the greenhouse gases we can get!

Comments

[Pooh]

One important thing they do not take into account is the impact on the global climate of all the hot air currently being spewed by Barack Obama.

[Maretin Murphy]

A letter to the Belfast Telegraph, published on 2008 August 13th (http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/letters/is-there-a-cold-future-just-lying-in-wait-for-us-13938036.html, has been picked up by other sites who give the impression that it represents the views of the Armagh Observatory. We do not know of any evidence based on Armagh observations (whether solar or meteorological) that predicts an imminent drop in global temperatures of two degrees C, nor do we know the author of the letter to the Belfast Telegraph. Peer-reviewed publications referring to the Observatory's climate data can be found at http://climate.arm.ac.uk/publications/.

C.J. Butler, Emeritis Research Fellow
H.M. Murphy, Computer Manager

Armagh Observatory