Advertisement
Minnesota newspapers report that the 2008 opening of barge traffic on the Upper Mississippi waterway, delayed three weeks, was the latest since the modern waterway opened in 1940. The first tug only recently broke through the ice on Lake Pepin.
Rare snow events struck Buenos Aries, Capetown and Sidney, while China continually battled blizzards. Even Baghdad experienced snowfall, to the delight of Iraqis who threw snowballs at each other.
Farther south, Antarctic pack ice grew enough to exceed what Captain Cook saw on his 18th Century voyage into the Southern Ocean. On the continent itself, miles-thick ice continues to accumulate despite peripheral melting along the Antarctic Peninsula and occasional calving of an ice block. Far to the north, flow ice once again spans the entire Arctic Ocean and by April it had extended into the Bering Strait, fully making up for last summer’s much heralded melt-back.
From January 2007 through the end of January 2008, the average global temperature fell by nearly 1 degree F.
What are we to make of this? A recent climate conference held in New York City, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based Libertarian policy organization, provides some answers.
Hundreds of climatologists in attendance helped dispel notions that the global warming debate is over. Most attendees, who acknowledge the existence of post-Little Ice Age warming, believe man-made emissions are unlikely to cause major climate change, let alone a global catastrophe, and signed a declaration to that effect.
Dr. Bill Gray, dean of hurricane forecasters, explained how changes in slow-moving deep ocean currents result from variations in the salinity of water sinking near the poles that ultimately wells up along the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean.
This accounts for changes in the amount of cold water rising to the surface off the coast of Peru and the comings and goings of the familiar El Nino/La Nina cycles and longer Pacific Decadal Oscillation that affects a larger area of the eastern Pacific.
Solar experts highlighted how sunspots, and associated magnetic storms on the Sun’s surface, affect Earth’s weather and climate. The previous (strong) 11-year sunspot cycle ended in 2007, after peaking in 2002. The new cycle should have already begun, but hasn’t yet. In the absence of sunspots and magnetic storms, solar flares are minimal.
The flares eject massive streams of electrons outward from the sun. A portion of this stream of electrons, called the “solar wind,” reaches Earth and produces the aurora. More importantly the solar wind, interacting with Earth’s magnetic field, protects us by deflecting away most of the harmful cosmic rays that continually bombard the planet.
During periods of weak solar activity — as at present — cosmic rays (high-energy protons originating in interstellar space) penetrate through the troposphere and ionize oxygen and nitrogen molecules. The ions become nucleating sites for water vapor that condenses into clouds. When sunspots are at a minimum, more clouds form and correspondingly more sunlight is reflected back into space. The enhanced reflectance (albedo) cools the Earth. We all have experienced how quickly the air around us cools when the sun ducks behind a puffy white cloud on a warm, dry afternoon.
Past cool periods, identified with the late stages of the “Little Ice Age” and with the Maunder and Dalton climate minima, closely correlate with low sunspot numbers (astronomers have kept close tabs on sunspots since Galileo’s time). Some solar-physicists are now saying if the current cycle doesn’t begin to produce spots soon, we can expect a cool-down like the 19th-Century Dalton minimum — or worse.
Periods of decades-long cooling in the past brought crop failures to Europe from repeated summer frosts and restricted growing seasons.
With grain shortages staring us in the face, we’d better start thinking about ways to deal with a global cool-down instead of remaining fixated on continued warming that may not happen. We might, for example, explore ways to transform fertile semi-desert into arable land and to develop genetically-modified grains with shorter maturing cycles for sub-boreal regions. If cooling begins in earnest, we will quickly forget about today’s hysteria over global warming as we face the brand-new challenges ahead.
William D. Balgord, Ph.D., a consultant and writer, heads Environmental & Resources Technology, Inc. in Middleton.
