global cooling

Donny Kendal is without John Nothdurft in episode #160 of the In The Tank Podcast. This week’s episode features work from The Heartland Institute, Truth In Accounting, Illinois Policy Institute, Mercatus Center, Tax Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trusts.

The recurring theme of civilization’s relationship with climate is that the end of each warming period went badly for humanity.

For decades now, global warming scaremongers have been stealing energy from the environment using windmills, solar collectors and biofuels, force-fed by carbon taxes and emission trading schemes.

Sunspots are dwindling to lows not seen in 200 years. In 2008, during the solar minimum of cycle 23, there were 266 days with no sunspots. This is considered a very deep solar minimum.

Global warming has never been a threat to Earth’s inhabitants, even with temperatures several degrees above those of this modern warm era. The real danger to life on Earth is global cooling, and its big brother, Snow-ball Earth.

There are two kinds of ice ages; they are fundamentally different and therefore require different methods of mitigation: (i) Major (Milankovich-style) glaciations occur on a 100,000-year time-scale and are controlled astronomically. (ii) “Little” ice ages were discovered in ice cores; they have been occurring on an approx. 1500-yr cycle and are likely controlled by the Sun. The current cycle’s cooling phase may be imminent and calls for urgent action.

Yesterday, the temperature here at Rosevale in Queensland rose 25 ℃ in just 8 hours – from zero at 6 am to 25 ℃ at 2 pm. It rose at the rate of 3 ℃ per hour, and every degree of warmth felt better.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s most accurate, up-to-date temperature data confirm the United States has been cooling for at least the past decade. The NOAA temperature data are driving a stake through the heart of alarmists claiming accelerating global warming.

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times (“Lessons from the Little Ice Age,” NYT, March 22, 2014), historian Geoffrey Parker—author of Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century—suggests the desperate climate of the years 1600 to 1700 is a template for a collapse of civilization in the twenty-first century. But there’s one massive flaw in his theory: The past cultural collapses have almost all occurred during “little ice ages,” not during our many global warmings.

Climate models help improve our conceptual understandings of climate systems and the forces that drive climate change. However, they are terrible at predicting Earth’s temperature and other components of its climate. They should never be used to set or justify policies, laws or regulations – such as what the Environmental Protection Agency is about to impose on CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants.

As the earth adjusted to the warmth supplied by this natural cycle, the warmth that was occurring, combined with the change of the Atlantic cycle to warmer, lead to a marked decrease in Arctic sea ice. It reached a crescendo in 2007, the year of the death spiral along with forecasts of no summer ice in 2014. Through it all, our side of the AGW argument said this is a natural phenomena, and once the AMO flipped, the summer sea ice, which is the most obvious talking point for those advocating the Arctic death spiral, would come back. As always, the Southern Hemisphere ice, because it was above normal, was ignored.

The United Nations estimates it would cost $30 billion a year to end world hunger. That sounds like a lot, but the world spent more than ten times that amount in 2012 on global warming mitigation, according to a recent Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) study. And the U.N. says the world needs to spend even more on global warming mitigation—much more, in fact.

Craig Idso, the former president and current chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and lead author of the reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) talked with Alex Epstein on his show, Power Hour.