Weekly World News » ice age

SCIENTISTS PREDICT COMING ICE AGE!!

Hideaki Tailor — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:13:22 +0000

According to the world’s top scientists the world hasn’t warmed in 15 years and we are headed for a new ice age!

Statistics and data suggest we are headed for a new ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists said that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.

According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.

However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.

Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible – because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide. Although the sun’s output is likely to decrease until 2100, ‘This would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08C.’ Peter Stott, one of the authors, said: ‘Our findings suggest a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.”

These findings are fiercely disputed by other solar experts.

‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’

He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming.

CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.

So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid.

‘The ten-year projection remains groundbreaking science. The period for the original projection is not over yet,’ he said.

Dr Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University in North Carolina, is the author of several papers that argue the Met Office climate models show there should have been ‘steady warming from 2000 until now’.

‘If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories,’ he said.

He believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand.

‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’.

She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

‘They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,’ said Prof Curry. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific cycle ‘flipped’ back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years .

Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997.

The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.

‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’

Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific.

‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’

David Rose

Mail Online

MINI ICE AGE ON THE WAY!

Tap Vann — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 12:14:23 +0000

LONDON - Renowned climate scientist predicts a new ice age is on the way!

Scientists, climatologists and the mayor of London are all in agreement – the cold snap in Europe is going to get worse, much worse. A new ice age is underway.

According to Piers Corbyn, a British scientist who gets the climate right about 85 per cent of the time, were absolutely entering a new ice age. Serious business people – notably in farming – are starting to invest in his forecasts.

Corbyn, an astrophysicist, gets it right again and again.

In November, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. He was correct. He predicted a snowy December for Europe, and he put his own money on a white Christmas for most of the U.S. – something that no one, not even AccuWeather had predicted.

How does he do it?

He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.

He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy.

Corbyn believes that the last three winters are a harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2015, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 500 years. He believes there is also a chance that full-blow ice age is cyclically overdue and might occur by 2020.

What about global warming? Well, anthropogenic global warming ignores the role of the Sun. Corbyn believes that all that matters is the mood of the star that gives life to the world? The Sun is incomparably vaster and more powerful than any work of man. We are forged from a few clods of solar dust. The Sun powers every plant and form of life, and one day the Sun will turn into a red giant and engulf us all.

In the meantime, we are all going to freeze.

ATLANTIC OCEAN REVERSES DIRECTION

Frank Lake — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 04:29:00 +0000

BARCELONA – Scientists were shocked to find that the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean have shifted directions!

Scientists studying the Atlantic Ocean were shocked to discover yesterday that for some unknown reason the deep waters of the ocean have reversed their direction of flow. This hasn’t happened since the beginning of the last ice age!

Instead of heading southward as they usually do, these abyssal waters are now flowing northward a new study suggests.

The change in flow could have accompanied profound changes in climate, researchers explained. It may be evidence of Global Cooling!

In the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream brings warm surface water from the tropics to high latitudes, where it cools, sinks and flows southward in the deep ocean. The way that water flows in the ocean helps redistribute large amounts of heat – and in this way is critical to how the world’s climate works.

Contradictory lines of evidence from during the cold peak of the ice age – the last glacial maximum – make it difficult for scientists to determine whether this ocean circulation was strongly or weakly in any particular direction back then.

But now… the Atlantic Ocean has clearly shifted directions!! What does it mean?

To reach these conclusions, scientists investigated a pillar of sediment roughly 128 feet (39 meters) long, extracted from the seafloor by use of a ship off the coast of the tip of Africa under about 8,000 feet (2,440 m) of water. The upper 15 feet (5 m) or so of this core sample contains material reflecting ocean conditions over the last 50,000 years.

“It is very tricky to take such long cores from such depth without breaking the metal tube in the open ocean, which usually has bad weather conditions,” said researcher Juan Magrita, a paleoceanographer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. However, the staff onboard the vessel, the Juanita Dafania, were very expert, he noted.

Scientists across the globe are scrambling to determine why the Atlantic Ocean is switching direction. “This could have catastrophic implications for people living on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a dangerous global problem, one that the nations of the world have to act together to correct, if we can.” said Professor Jacob Jabolin of Harvard University.

Of course, surfers are rushing to the beaches on both sides of the Atlantic… trying to take advantage of the waves that come from the switch. “No matter which way the ocean flows, surfers are always crazy,” said Jabolin.

BABY MAMMOTH FOUND

Maleeka Spriggs — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:50:09 +0000

ANN ARBOR, MI – The nearly-perfect preserved remains of a baby mammoth are being studied at the University of Michigan.

‘Lyuba’ was a one-month old baby mammoth whose remains were discovered in the Russian Arctic in 2007. It appears she died quite suddenly, about 40,000 years ago. “She was doing great, very healthy,” says paleontologist Dan Fisher of the University of Michigan. “She just had this terrible misfortune.”

Scientists believe she either drowned or suffocated in mud next to a lake. The major significance of Lyuba’s existence, however, is that she is the best-preserved mammoth ever discovered. Many partly-intact mammoth corpses have been discovered in Sibera, but nothing as remarkable as Lyuba. Her skin and internal organs are intact, and the only damage found were bite marks from village dogs.

She is so well preserved that traces of mother’s milk have been found in her stomach, along with fecal residue. This was likely also her mother’s, fed to Lyuba to create a healthy microbial community in her gut, which is necessary for proper digestion. Such behavior has already been seen in modern herbivores.