Global Cooling - a growing business case
Walter Derzko
November 07, 2008

The media is in love with Global Climate change, and by default almost everyone is convinced that the direction will continue  toward  increasing global warming, ranging from the media, to most academics, to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC),  who states categorically that it’s CO2 that driving “global warming”.  Most people can't imagine a sudden reversal into global cooling like the earth witnessed 2-3 centuries ago.

If you search Google News to see if the media is reporting on both sides of the story, you only get 297 hits with stories that include the term “global cooling” , compared 25,757 for global warming – a 2 order of magnitude difference or a 1 to 86.7 ratio.

Just using a plain Google search you get a slightly more balanced ratio; 3,990.000 hits for “global cooling” and 42,700,000 hits for “global warming”  ( 1 to 10.9 ratio)

The Google Trends chart above visually shows you the stark difference in search frequency between global cooling -the flat line in red and global warming the blue line on top see http://www.google.com/trends?q=global+warming%2C+global+cooling

I’m not trying to take one side or another- but I see growing evidence for a near-term global cooling scenario or business case and industry and individual business owners and entrepreneurs need to be thinking about the possibility of both scenarios, planning contingencies for both and tracking early warning signals to tell you which way we are heading.

Here are  three drivers/ indicators for global cooling scenario; 1) getting our model straight, 2) Alaskan glaciers growing, and 3) changing North Atlantic currents

Robert Essenhigh has been making a steady case for pending  global cooling scenario, which can happen as early as the next decade -2012-2015 or onwards. He proposes that it is the temperature that drives CO2 release and not the other way around, as most people are predicting. See here

Essenhigh draws the following conclusions:

What the evidence shows
So what we have on the best current evidence is that

2) After 2 centuries of shrinking, Alaska glaciers got thicker this year ( a story which most of the media missed or ignored)

"Two hundred years of glacial shrinkage in  Alaska, and then came the winter and summer of 2007-2008. Unusually large amounts of winter snow were followed by unusually chill temperatures in June, July and August.

"In mid-June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound," said U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia. "On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface of the Taku Glacier in late July. At Bering Glacier, a landslide I am studying, located at about 1,500 feet elevation, did not become snow free until early August.

 

"In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years."

Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind of snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too.

"It's been a long time on most glaciers where they've actually had positive mass balance," Molnia said. 

Mass balance is the difference between how much snow falls every winter and how much snow fades away each summer. For most  Alaska glaciers, the summer snow loss has for decades exceeded the winter snowfall. " ..that's now changing

http://www.physorg.com/news145187972.html

3) Ecologists Use Oceanographic Data to Predict Future Climate Change

Earth scientists are attempting to predict the future impacts of climate change by reconstructing the past behavior of Arctic climate and ocean circulation. In a November special issue of the journal Ecology, a group of scientists report that if current patterns of change in the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans continue, alterations of ocean circulation could occur on a global scale, with potentially dramatic implications for the world's climate and biosphere.

Charles Greene of  Cornell Universityand his colleagues reconstructed the patterns of climate change in the Arcticfrom the Paleocene epoch to the present. Over these 65 million years, the Earth has undergone several major warming and cooling episodes, which were largely mitigated by the expansion and contraction of sea ice in the Arctic.

“When the Arctic cools and ice sheets and sea ice expand, the increased ice cover increases albedo, or reflectance of the sun’s rays by the ice,” says Greene, the lead author on the paper. “When more of the sun is reflected rather than absorbed, this leads to global cooling.”

Likewise, when ice sheets and sea ice contract and expose the darker-colored land or ocean underneath, heat is absorbed, accelerating climate warming. Currently, the Earth is in the midst of an interglacial period, characterized by retracted ice sheets and warmer temperatures.

“When Arctic climate changes, waters in the Arctic can go from storing large quantities of freshwater to exporting that freshwater to the North Atlantic in large pulses, referred to as great salinity anomalies,” Greene explains. “These GSAs flow southward, disrupting the ocean’s circulation patterns and altering the temperature stratification observed in marine ecosystems.”

A global cooling scenario

Previous interglacial periods have ended when the global ocean’s deep circulation slowed in response to reductions in the formation of North Atlantic Deep Water, or NADW, a large, deep mass of highly saline water in the North Atlantic. At these tipping points in the Earth’s history, NADW formation was disrupted by pulses of freshwater entering the North Atlantic. The slowing of the global ocean’s deep circulation results in less heat being transported to higher latitudes, accelerating ice formation and advancing the Earth into glacial conditions.

Recent modeling studies show that NADW formation will likely be resilient to freshwater pulses from the  Arctic during the 21st century, according to the authors. Continued exposure to such freshwater forcing, however, could disrupt global ocean circulation during the next century and lead to very abrupt changes in climate, similar to those that occurred at the onset of the last ice age.

“If the Earth’s deep ocean circulation were to be shut down, many of the atmospheric, glacial and oceanic processes that have been stable in recent times would change, and the change would likely be abrupt,” says Greene. “While the ecosystem consequences of gradual changes in the ocean are somewhat predictable, all bets are off after such abrupt changes occur.”

UPDATE:

Global Cooling is Here

Evidence for Predicting Global Cooling for the Next Three Decades by Prof. Don J. Easterbrook

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10783

The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling, perhaps much deeper than the global cooling from about 1945 to 1977. Just how much cooler the global climate will be during this cool cycle is uncertain. Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely."   [Read More]