Bishop Hill Hudson on the ice
Oct 28, 2013 Climate: solar 
Ice on the HudsonAfficionados of the "ice age now" hypothesis are going to be cock-a-hoop over Paul Hudson's latest blog post. The BBC man has been looking into the idea that the current very low levels of activity in the sun are going to cause us all to freeze and he seems to have found some support in the somewhat unlikely shape of Mike Lockwood:
I’ve been to see Professor Mike Lockwood to take a look at the work he has been conducting into the possible link between solar activity and climate patterns.
According to Professor Lockwood the late 20th century was a period when the sun was unusually active and a so called ‘grand maximum’ occurred around 1985.
Since then the sun has been getting quieter.
By looking back at certain isotopes in ice cores, he has been able to determine how active the sun has been over thousands of years.
Following analysis of the data, Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years.
Reader Comments (56)
"When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do Sir?" Due to become the life raft for the rats escaping from the holed and listing SS "Carbon Dioxide".
Freezing to death is not inconsistent with CAGW!
Just ask the Piltdown Mann!
Not only will you freeze, but you'll be paralyzed with guilt preventing you from doing anything about it. Are we human or are we dancers?
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Massive solar cooling effect will be the get out of jail free card for a lot of the bandwagon-jumping green shirts.
“Well," they will say, “we were absolutely right about CO2 causing uncontrollable global warming. But the effect has been swamped by solar cooling." Then, after a very brief pause they will be back demanding global government and some kind of (as yet to be invented) tax as the only way to save mankind from its freezing fate.
No amount of research will convince a believer to abandon his faith. Let's see who survives this winter & sees the spring?
Stuck-Record, the green eco loonies will probably demand that we do geo engineering on a scale never seen before to combat the global cooling, even though they were clamoring for us not to do any geo engineering because that would harm the planet. Hypocrites? Never!
Well - as discussed many times the temperature record of the last couple of centuries displays a multi-decal oscillation.
The alarmists do the same "ice age" in the 70s, "world frying" in 90s - some of the same people on both bandwagons. How long before the oscillation shifts to the cold phase again??
WUWT posted a 1970's book a couple of years back on the Ice Age is Coming theme (I can't lay my hands on it now). Would you believe that the answer to the coming cold was the same as the answer to the coming warm. World government and curbing carbon. Of course you would.
You couldn't make it up - well of course they did!
This is off topic but should be worthy of your consideration for a post?
The following link to the failure of a wind turbine as reported by the BBC due to high winds.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-24691465
My observation are as follows :
The basic wind speed for the design of structures in this part of the UK is approx 100mph.
This basic wind speed is further increased due to topography, elevation and the nature of the structure, this results in a design wind speed of approx 120mph.
The largest wind speed recorded yesterday was approx 100mph.
All structures and foundations employ features of safety and as an example foundations would be designed for a factor of safety of between 2 and 3.
Thus the foundations should be capable of resisting a wind speed of at least 240mph to prevent overturning.
Therefore the failure of this wind turbine is either due to poor design, poor construction or a combination of both.
As is typical of the BBC they mush the real story behind this failure. How many wind turbines have been poorly designed or poorly constructed?
People have been saying this for years. Why is it all being attributed to Lockwood all of a sudden (except he's a "climate scientistTM and everybody else saying it was a denier)?
Interesting to see Lockwood mentioned, I wonder if he is coming round to changeing his mind.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6290228.stm
Climate change
Climate change has become an increasingly important issue and our research continues to create an ever clearer picture of how it will affect the planet and our lives. This plays a vital role in providing evidence to support climate predictions which show the planet is now locked into at least 2 °C of warming and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are required to ensure this does not rise further for future generations.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us
No ifs, no buts, no examining the science. The verdict is certain and only the evidence that supports the verdict is to be provided.
Last time I ran into Professor Lockwood was at a Conference on the "Science and Economics of Climate Change" held at Downing College, Cambridge, in 2011.
He was explaining the role of water vapour as a positive feedback mechanism in the climate system.
In the following questions I asked him to comment on NOAA measurements of atmospheric water vapour, which had shown either no change, or a slight decrease, during the satellite (1979-present) and how these measurements could possibly support the concept of water vapour driven "positive feedback".
I have never seen such a rapid transformation of urbane presenter to hand-waving blusterer in my life.
And this was a obvious question, for which he should have been prepared.
Maybe he has learned his lesson and is "preparing" his escape from the coming car crash.
Paul has been holding onto this story for a little while now. There is a section that features him on Inside Out 7:30 tonight.
Presentation and timing most important in the meteorological field.
According to "greensand" (see comments on the Hudson article), this was first posted on 16 October. There've been (he says) two changes. First, this has been inserted:
And secondly, the final paragraph has been changed from to Interesting.About time that he jumped off the fence on this matter.
All we need now is for more UK academic physicists to accept that the current IPCC heat generation and transfer physics is juvenile nonsense.
Also, with a little bit of thought, it is easy to prove CO2-AGW is near zero and that the recent AGW, now saturated, was from Asian pollution reducing cloud albedo.
I still can't find the 1970's Ice Age Book, but earlier this year we had this on WUWT -
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/01/global-cooling-compilation/
Interesting reading - if you have a day or two, but just Anthony's opening blurb gives you the flavour (or is that flavor??!)
It would seem that wherever I look to gather information about subjects of interest to me, I find phrases and sentences that have meaning in other disciplines. I was reading about Robinson's Arch and a dispute over its use as an egalitarian prayer site. From Wikipedia comes this gem, which I then paraphrase below, for general information. It's a case of "We've got you, going & returning".
“The Israeli religious establishment are opposed to the services conducted by the Women of the Wall. They claim that even if such a manner of prayer is theoretically permitted by Jewish Law, it is against Jewish custom. Even if support can be found in Jewish legal sources for various activities, the force of custom is equal to absolute law and it is the custom which determines proper conduct.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_of_the_Wall#Religious_establishment.27s_position
“The global warming establishment are opposed to any opposing research presented by those they call deniers. They claim that even if empirical and measurable evidence is theoretically permitted by post-normal science, it is against IPCC diktat & custom. Even if evidence can be acknowledged in AR5 to show that there has been no significant increase in global temperatures for 17 years, the IPCC extended peer community is equal to scientific method and it is their authority which determines proper outcome.”
I'm not one of the 'it's the sun stupid' crowd, but the I find the increase in Antarctic sea ice persuasive that we are in a cooling period that appears to be accelerating. The area where the Antarctic sea ice occurs is where we have the least local to regional scale anthropogenic influences (practically none), and therefore should be where we find the clearest global climate signal.
Whether it is the sun or not, I don't know, but I shall be watching Antarctic sea ice closely.
On a side note.Here in Perth Western Australia, we have been told for decades that global warming will cause our climate to dry. But have had the wettest and coldest late winter and spring for about 50 years.
There are many references to the coming ice age in 1970s literature. See Here
Even the BBC got into the act in its 1974 documentary ‘The Weather Machine’.
What is particularly interesting is that the leading Global Warming disciple, Steven Schnieder, is warning of the coming ice age in this 8min You Tube clip
from 1977.
Energy crises beyond anything we could imagine; Food production would plummet etc.
The motivation for the ice age scare was the same as it is now for global warming, air pollution caused by fossil fuels.
'Following analysis of the data, Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years.'
Heavens above - CO2 is quenching the sun: I can find no other explanation! cAGW will kill us all.
It's good that the BBC still has people of the quality of Hudson, even if they don't appear to realise it.
(Tim Vickery, writing on South American football from Brazil, is another one. He also reads, and replies to some, comments. I can tell he really knows his subject, and that I might learn something interesting from a topic I didn't really think I cared much about. Yet his infrequent articles are rarely given prominence.)
If, within the next 10-15 years, the climate does enter a cooling phase that wipes out all or most of the warming since about 1970, the damage to the scientific establishment in Britain and other countries, will be considerable. I wonder why that thought has never occurred to people like the president of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse, and other prominent scientists who are so willing to defend the prognostications of climate scientists despite (or perhaps because) their own expertise is in other fields?
An ice age - regardless whether it is a mini or maxi one - is a temporary aberration that in no way disproves the CAGW theory (because the CAGW theory is unfalsifiable). And this my dear friends is science.
Paul Hudson, is a scientist at heart - never a screeching alarmist though he's had a moment or two. And he's a Yorkie, thus - pragmatism is hard-wired and innate.
'Bout time you came over Paul, come over to the thinking side and realism.
From the 1975 Science News article Climate Change: Chilling Possibilities. C. C. Wallen, chief of the Special Environmental Applications Division, World Meteorological Organization: "The principal weather change likely to accompany the cooling trend is increased variability -- alternating extremes of temperature and precipitation in any given area -- which would almost certainly lower average crop yields."
When one combines such statements with the claims of increasing extremes due to warming, one can only conclude that Dr Pangloss was correct.
Here's a Google Ngram analysis of the term "coming ice age" between 1965 and 1980. Note the hockey stick shape:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=coming+ice+age&year_start=1965&year_end=1980&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccoming%20ice%20age%3B%2Cc0
Then look references to "climate change" from 1965 to now:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=climate+change&year_start=1965&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cclimate%20change%3B%2Cc0
There is probably a way of superimposing the two on top of each other for the same time period. But it seems clear that both are cyclical, essentially millennarian, and thus more likely to be a sociological phenomenon than a meteorological one.
Roy, even if the climate does enter a cooling phase, the scientific establishment will never admit they are wrong. As FarleyR indicates, people just don’t do that. Instead it will just fade away into folklore like the ozone layer (hole still there), the millennium bug (very costly), acid rain (greatly exaggerated) and all the other nonsense scares in the past.
As Max Plank put it
I think we should be investing the world's resources into producing an enormous solar reflector, made from something very strong and shiny, like a Walker's crisp packet.
This needs to be made into a disk several thousand miles in diameter and positioned in space such that, if the world gets too hot it can shield the earth from solar energy until it's just right, but if it gets too cold, if should be moved round to reflect more energy until it's just right again.
There - fixed it.
there was no modern solar max.
Heh, moshe, there seems to have been a modern temperature max, though.
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I don’t know much about this field, however ice cores must be by there very nature reliant for their link to time on various assumptions. There will, like with most proxies, be some degree of overlap with small samples possibly representing the culmination of thousands of years of actual events. What we have since 1985 is a very small period in which we can measure solar activity, what we measure from ice cores can never be the same; it will be more like a smoothed moving average. I’m not sure many would be happy with comparing the two.
Hmmmm.... who to believe, eh?
Athelstan
Young Paul may be a Yorkie (so was my Dad and I never held against him) but he needs to keep paying the Mortgage.
Just accept that he is trying to put some balance in his posts and be happy with that. He does work for Auntie you know - nuff said??.
Sorry, MikeB, but the millennium bug was not a "nonsense scare". See this.
Athelstan: you say "Paul Hudson is a scientist at heart", and I think you're right. But, if so, who do you think insisted on the amendments to his original text (inserting "long term global warming hasn’t gone away" and "not least because global temperatures may fall enough, albeit temporarily ...") to which I referred in my post at 12:09 PM?
steven mosher and steveta_uk
I guess it might hang on how you measure its output.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/paper-finds-solar-activity-at-end-of.html
After all the models assume no significant change in irradiance but many (and not just sceptics) are coming to realise that it isn't the whole picture by any means.
That Paul Hudson chappie pointed out a couple of years back in one of his posts that when he was in the Met Office if you expressed the opinion that the "current bun" might affect climate, you would have near derision poured upon you. As he pointed out - the times they were a-changing - but not much
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2011/10/met-office-finally-wakes-up-to.shtml
Mosher: "there was no modern solar max"
http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/sorce/data/tsi-data/#plots
Robin Guenier, so true - I was about to post a similar complaint when your extremely detailed rebutal appeared.
As one of the software professionals who spent much of 1998 and 1999 working very hard to ensure that Y2K was a non-event, it can be very disheartening to see how that effort went completely unrecogonised outside of the software world.
The absurd scare stories from the BBC and news papers didn't help - I had trouble convincing friends and family that since the fridge and toaster didn't know what the date was, they were not going to explode at the end of 1999!
Please don't open up Y2K again - Robin gave me a real savaging last time I pointed out that some countries did SFA and didn't appear to go up in smoke.
Having said that as steveta_uk points out much good work was done to avoid UK troubles and I know that many old legacy systems were brought into the 21st century and the world of process documentation. Some of the old stuff had docs written on stone which had been pinched to prop the building up!!
I wonder where some of that is now??!! I would love to go back with my Lead Auditors hat on and wade around having fun.
Only kidding - honest Robin - don't hit me again.
Robin G / Steveta
Would it be fair to say that the Millenium Bug was:
A) A real problem but exagerated by the media (aws with say vCJD/BSE, the various flu strains etc)
B) A good example of using engineering fixes ('adaptation') to resolve an accurately understood problem (so a really poor comparison to cAGW, where the problem is poorly constrained and where the proposed 'solutions' range from ineffective and impractical mitigation to what can only be described as wishful thinking?
As Des reports at 12:02:
Climate change
Climate change has become an increasingly important issue and our research continues to create an ever clearer picture of how it will affect the planet and our lives. This plays a vital role in providing evidence to support climate predictions which show the planet is now locked into at least 2 °C of warming and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are required to ensure this does not rise further for future generations.
Thus speaketh the Met Office in its glorious new incarnation not as a provider of reliable weather forecasts – even 12 hours in advance would help, you know – but as a vital shaper of all our future lives, dispensing its wisdom, frowning on our behalf, chivvying us all toward what it knows will be a future blighted should we fail to heed to its urgent, disinterested warnings.
Is this honestly what a once dispassionate arm of useful science has been reduced to?
I despair.
This is the corruption of a bloated, self-seeking state made hideously real. And the whole, please note, at taxpayers' expense.
Don't worry everyone, I really don't want, or intend, to debate Y2K yet again.
I suggest that anyone who's interested should read my paper (link above) - and, if they really think I've got anything seriously wrong, post a comment. Otherwise, let's forget about it. (And, yes Ian, you've got it about right.)
agouts
The trouble with the Met Office is that so many of its senior staff are so far up the own backside they don't whether it's daylight or a week next Tuesday.
That pitiful and rather embarrassing quote demonstrates the situation perfectly. They are araldited to the mindset of 10 years ago when CO2 was the only thing that mattered, temperature increases were going to be geometric rather than logarithmic,and the mantra of 2C was adopted mindlessly as holy writ, forgetting that like 'five-a-day' and '21 units a week' it was a figure plucked out of the air to appease the politicians who wanted a nice little sound bite because anything more complicated was too much for the sheeple.
(In reality anything more complicated was too much for them, but I promised not to give that secret away.)
They have paid not one iota of attention to the development of science in the interim; they refuse to acknowledge that there is peer-reviewed literature which challenges some or even most or even all of the belief that the (now ceased) global warming of the late 20th century was anthropogenic and whether or not that challenge has validity anyone who considers himself (or herself, Julia, are you listening?) any sort of a scientist ought to be — at least — prepared to consider that the science may have moved on in ways not necessarily in accord with their wishes and not lending their good name to that fatuous piece of drivel.
iceagenow was always one of my favourite sites, now reborn as http://iceagenow.info/
The author had the wonderful prediction that what killed the mammoths was going to do for us too. One day it would just start snowing, and it would fall at the rate of meters per day, and we would all be entombed just like the mammoths.
There was a lot of detailed reasoning why this was going to happen. Interspersed with stores about cold weather all around the world. Global warming was not happening, fact the planet was cooling, but the warming was caused by undersea volcanoes.
I could never figure out whether this was for real or a magnificent surrealistic parody of global warming alarmism. But anyway, very entertaining reading. There are a few books now. Better read them quick before we wake up one morning under a few meters of snow. We will be able to spend our final days before the weight of the snow crushes our roofs reading that at least one ignored prophet warned us well in advance.
Mike:
It's not just group mid-set at its most corrosive. It's infinitely more damaging and destructive. It's government-funded group mind-set at its most corrosive. Deliver a message that a government (prop. G. Brown) wants to hear, and the money floods in. You feel feel not just important but heroic, embarking on a course that it is not merely vital but noble. Said government meanwhile laps up the increased taxes.
All the while, any even accidental overlap between your pronouncements and the science – Ha! Ha! and Ha! again – is instantly seized upon as evidence that of course you are right and that of course you must be heeded.
You have become too important to be criticised. Sligo is the prime example: self-important, sneering, over paid, presumptuous, dismissive, ignorant and idiotic.
A good point Robin Guenier.
So said retireddave.
I would posit that, Mr. Hudson has a difficult line to tiptoe and though he is fully conscious of who pays his heating bills [the Biased British Conglomerate] - ultimately he realizes he's a public servant.
The light shone down and he's had a revelation - we [the British taxpayer] pay his wages actually and though it goes against the grain......to counter the tenets - "global warming is man made blah, blah, blah UNEP-IPCC the green way is sustainability and it turned science to religion" - he must now attempt to relate the real truth. The Damascene road is a long one.
He is coming round, albeit rather tepidly.
Even the BBC got into the act in its 1974 documentary ‘The Weather Machine’
Oct 28, 2013 at 1:34 PM | Unregistered CommenterMikeB
I've got the book. It has a lot of stuff by Lamb and is not a bad read. There is little of the alarmism of today and it does mention CO² global warming suggesting that it could ameliorate the coming ice age. There are some great untampered data as well.
He is coming round, albeit rather tepidly.
Oct 28, 2013 at 6:08 PM | Unregistered CommenterAthelstan.
No, he is looking for the out door. Paul Hudson is still a reasonably convinced warmist BUT he has a greater integrity, IMHO, than Betts.
Lockwood is claiming misrepresentation by the BBC in his hommage to Mann on his Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/MichaelMannScientist/posts/604799366242936
He makes a point of reiterating that the Maunder minimum was regional not global and his references were made for the UK future scenario and not globally.
The BBC video in no way indicates any differently.
The fact that he now has to roll over and wimper before the pack is a true indication of the state of the science.
Maunder minimum as regional or global as a separate issue, surely this risk factor for imminent adverse conditions should now be thrust as a major issue for our environmental and energy governmental departments, more so than decarbonising the economy.
"Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years."
This is anthropogenic, right?
Lord Beaverbrook
Thank you for the link.
In the discussion comments, a guy calling himslef Bru Pearce starts firing off about Lockwood being a disgrace. He later changes his mind then starts calling out Paul Hudson, which has lead to Paul joining the fray, there are now 10 replies to his original post. https://www.facebook.com/MichaelMannScientist/posts/604799366242936