Have we entered an era of global cooling?By Tom Harris With all the sound and fury about global warming, an important, and many scientists now assert, more likely scenario is usually ignored—the possibility of far more dangerous global cooling. It is more dangerous because many more people die due to the cold than the heat. A 2015 study in the British Medical journal The Lancet found that:
Indeed, history shows that cold periods are far more hazardous than warm times. That is why geologists call past warm epochs "optimums" and cold times "dark ages." The plot of temperature versus time for Central Greenland below (used with the permission of the originator, petrophysicist Andy May) is a good illustration of the natural climate change we have seen over the past four thousand years and the related societal impacts. Note how cold periods coincided with hardships for humanity while, in most cases, warm periods were beneficial. Yet cities such as Ottawa, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Montreal, municipalities each of which experience cold weather, at times very cold, all essentially ignore the dangerous impacts of cooling in their climate change plans. Ottawa's Climate Change Master Plan is especially misguided. Despite the City's assertion that "Ottawa must be an energy-conscious city where people can live, work and play in all future climate conditions," cooling adaptation is entirely ignored. As I told the City of Ottawa Environment and Climate Change Committee in my April 18, 2023 testimony:
In my articles of past three weeks, I have written about the new theory of cosmoclimatology—how phenomena in space, especially changes in the output of the Sun, affect the climate on Earth. While it is scientifically interesting to learn about what drove climate change in the past, what really matters from a public policy perspective is what this research can tell us about climate change in the future. This then helps us make sensible decisions about where we should focus our efforts to ensure future generations are well-prepared for whatever nature throws at us next. As I explained in previously, Earthly temperature trends apparently follow in accordance with solar cycles. This should seriously concern councillors from all of these cities since leading solar researchers are convinced that we are headed for a Grand Solar Minimum by about the year 2070 when the Sun may be at its weakest in the past 300 years. This could result in significant global cooling, which these municipalities must prepare for. The first time I heard about the coming Grand Solar Minimum was at The Heartland Institute's Fourth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-4) that took place in May 2010 in Chicago. In that important conference, Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, a Russian expert in solar terrestrial physics, head of the Space Research Laboratory of the Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg and, later, the 2013 gold medal winner from the European Scientific-Industrial Chamber, gave a presentation titled, "THE SUN DICTATES THE CLIMATE." Abdussamatov explained that:
Amazingly, Abdussamatov said that the Sun's radius varies by up to 250 km during the familiar 11-year sunspot cycle (we are just starting cycle 25 now) and up to 700 km during the bicentennial, or 200-year cycle. And this greatly influences solar output. Specifically, when the Sun was very weak, every 200 years or so, the Earth went into a Little Ice Age. He explained that such research enables scientists to study how TSI has changed in past centuries and even millennia and determine how it correlates with past climate on Earth and so what the future holds as these cycles continue. Frighteningly, we are nearing a Grand Solar Minimum right now, a time period when many of the cycles of the Sun hit rock bottom. Abdussamatov predicted a deep minimum in TSI about 2042 and "a deep global temperature minimum about 2055 – 2060. The last time the Sun was this weak, the Earth was in a particularly cold phase of the most recent Little Ice Age that lasted from about 1350 – 1850, a period of great misery for people around the world. Abdussamatov gave a similar talk at The Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, which took place in 2014 in Las Vegas. The conference attracted some 650 scientists, economists, policy experts and Abdussamatov's presentation was more assertive this time and was titled "2014- The Beginning of the New Little Ice Age." In that talk, he updated his estimates to the start of the Grand Minimum of TSI being anticipated by about solar cycle 27 around the year 2043 which would be followed by "a phase of deep cooling [similar to] the 19th Little Ice Age … approximately in 2060 ± 11 [years], with possible duration of 45 – 65 years." He also presented the following graph: Abdussamatov concluded his 2014 presentation:
In 2020, Abdussamatov published a block-buster paper, "Energy Imbalance Between the Earth and Space Controls the Climate" in the journal Earth Sciences. Once again, he did not pull his punches and repeated his forecast of a Grand Solar Minimum by about 2043. The Russian scientist slightly updated his prediction of when we could expect the next Little Ice Age to really bite hard,
And
Some people may be tempted to dismiss Dr. Abdussamatov's forecasts, as well as the work of Svensmark, Veizer and Shaviv that I discussed in the past two articles as unique in the scientific community. However in "Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling" in the August 4, 2020 edition of the journal Temperature, Northumbria University professorValentina Zharkova who holds a Ph.D. from the Solar Division of the Main Astronomical Observatory, Kyiv, Ukraine wrote:
And then there is the 2021 paper, "How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate" by 23 scientists from 14 countries, the abstract of which reads, in part:
And I could name many more scientists who also attribute most recent climate change to variations in TSI. Contrary to the claims of climate activists that "the science of climate change is settled," the science is very much unsettled and quickly evolving in directions that will make today's climate scare look like a dangerous and expensive mistake. Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.
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