Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade | Hacker News Reader

Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

theregister.co.uk

318 pointsJach167 comments

This is exactly why I think the debate should be less about "how can we as humans stop affecting Earth's natual climate" and "how can we as humans gain control over Earth's natural climate".

Climate change happens with us or without us. If we're going to protect our huge investments in climate-dependent infrastructure (i.e. cities) then we're gonna want (say) giant space mirrors to compensate for any zany things that nature might throw at us.

The political problem of who gets to control the Earth's thermostat is, of course, a tricky one.

"The political problem of who gets to control the Earth's thermostat is, of course, a tricky one."

Understatement of the year. Can you imagine?

Might test the BRIC alliances. Russia and Brazil probably won't agree on this one.

What BRIC alliances?

BRIC countries are just clumped together for being developing economies that are going through similar experiences, but it is far from being a political-economic group.

Quite the opposite, actually.

There has been an annual BRICS summit attended by the leaders on the 5 nations since 2009. Clearly it's a bit more than a clever media acronym.

Correct, but I wouldn't say this can be called an "Alliance". Even the members of this group are hard to precise. Some would put Korea, some would put Nigeria, some would put Indonesia, etc.

"BRIC" is no NATO, or anything that resembles some formal structure. The "BRIC" countries are getting into multi-lateral agreements, yes, but there is no "BRIC" organization. While the summit is used to conduct agreements between Russia and China, or Brazil/China/India, there is no "BRIC alliance".

I could imagine it, as always, being the guys that paid for it.

For instance Canada may want the earth warmer, whereas Indian would want it cooler. (Since it benefits their respective latitudes.)

Well, I think this would be the simplest: the temperature at any given latitude will be the average of the last n years. Period. But maybe I'm too naive.

Who gets to define n?

Whoever has the most firepower.

I don't know actual statistics, but I think that in every place there is something like a "normal temperature" each season.

no one. we do not have the technology to rapidly alter the climate. our current climate change is the result of thousands of years of population growth and industrialization. concepts for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere in short course are just that, concepts

mother nature is still in charge, and needs only shrug slightly with a temperature change of 10 degrees on average in either direction to eliminate humans and our society

Somehow I doubt a 10 degree shift (F) would eliminate humans altogether, since humans have likely gone through a population bottleneck of 1,000-10,000 breeding pairs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

Simplest, but not optimal. Ideally you'd want to settle on a mean that:

a) Maximizes arable land, b) Minimizes climate-based natural disasters such as hurricanes, and c) Is as near to self-sustaining as possible. That is, the global mean should not lead to significant growing or shrinking of ice caps and glaciers, nor significantly alter carbon uptake by the oceans. While some degree of human control could make up for heterostatic forces, a swing too far in either direction would quickly exceed our ability to compensate.

> While some degree of human control could make up for heterostatic forces, a swing too far in either direction would quickly exceed our ability to compensate.

Exactly. That's why I'm suggesting that the "not worse" solution could be to artificially heat up the earth to the actual temperature for every latitude. Politics aside, a different temperature would probably disturb the current equilibrium and potentially cause some side-effects worse than the suspected mini ice-age.

do people really believe that rapid climate change will reveal some new mass of desirable farm land? maybe in 5000 years as the soils adapt to new climates, but not fast enough to feed a hungry planet.

there are some lands on the periphery of existing arable zones that might become desirable in the short term, but certainly there will be a net loss worldwide...local economies have grown around existing arable zones, you have to transplant all that too

That's what I was getting at. Too big a swing could, for example, hasten the expansion of the Gobi Desert, destroying millions of acres of arable land and endangering the food supply for a billion people.

why do people throw these arguments around? i don't know of any nation whose scientists find any rapid climate change desirable. who are they? the notion of a polar thaw is tossed around as being desirable for canada as a shipping route....BUT this would decimate the living biosphere of 90% of canadians who live within 100 miles of the US border. i've never heard a serious canadian climate science talk about rapid climate change as desirable...nor any other

I've seen studies pointing out more land access for Canadians [0] but hardly anything about affecting the 'living biosphere of 90% of Canadians within 100 miles of US border'. What's the source?

[0] https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=farm+climate...

you don't need a study. most of the population of canada is situated far further south than most americans understand. the lowest point of ontario, for example, is south of the most northern point of california.

most of the inhabited areas of canada already have very hot summers. in southern ontario you can expect weather like washington DC in july

if most of the united states is set to be victimized by climate change (which everyone accepts) then it is a trivial deduction that most of the population of canada will also be

Southern Ontario dips down to just north of PA/Ohio and next to Detroit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Canada#Extreme_poi...

I'm nitpicking, but unless I'm misunderstanding you, what you're saying about Southern Ontario having weather like DC in July is a little off. Average high July DC is 88F. Average high July Detroit (close to S Ont) is 83F. It's similar, but 5F is definitely a difference. Sharing the facts because I find this stuff interesting!

Opinion: DC often feels hotter than it actually is due to the high humidity, which gets worse the farther down the east coast you go. I've never been to Southern Ontario in July though.

DC: http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/monthly/graph/U...

Detroit: http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/monthly/graph/U...

You'd think but as a Canadian who hates the cold but lives on a flat (400ft is the highest spot) island I won't be living here if the sea rises even a bit more.

Attempting to exercise control over such a chaotic system with simplistic solutions like giant space mirrors strikes me as a very bad idea indeed. Until we have a complete understanding of how the climate is regulated naturally I really don't see how we can do any good at all.

Not to mention that, as you say, the politics are beyond us at the moment anyway (global consensus? yeah, right...)

You're not following Lean Climate Control practices.

Failing Fast seems suboptimal, here.

The morning weather forecast will promise that "some weather" will be delivered but they don't know what form it will take or how much of it there will be. They will go on to say that if you're not happy with the weather that is delivered then you shouldn't worry because they can guarantee that some more weather will be delivered the following day.

That's assuming that there is any kind of natural 'regulation' of the earth's climate. It appears to veer erratically from mini-ice age to heatwave. However it's true we do need to vary carefully consider the downsides of any potential interventions and be flexible about it. There's far too much dogma and polarisation of debate in climate science at the moment.

That is indeed an assumption on my part, although there is evidence of such regulation that I, at least, find compelling; for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_420ky_4curves_insol...

and it's worth pointing out that long term regulation and the shorter term variations that you mentioned aren't necessarily incompatible.

IANA Climate Scientist though!

The nice thing about space mirrors is that of all the climate mitigation methods I've heard, they are by far the most controllable. Solutions like "let's stuff the oceans full of iron to grow plankton to absorb CO2", even assuming they work as intended, have the problem that they are irreversible. Space mirrors can put heat where we want it, and remove it from where we want it, and can do so on hours of notice. It's actually the least simplistic solution. It also actually allows some reasonable engineering experimentation with commensurate levels of commitment.

Unfortunately, it is also the easiest to turn into one hell of a weapon.

Then, following that logic, climate control in general is one hell of a weapon. If anybody actually can control the climate, can we allow them that power? Things like "turn it over to the UN" aren't a magical answer to that problem because "the UN" is ultimately just another group of people, not particularly imbued with magical resistance to the temptations of power. (Arguably, quite the opposite.)

But assuming the massive political problems can be solved, problems which all climate control schemes have equally, space mirrors are actually the one I favor most. Too many of the other ones have a failure case of "triggering an ice age", and for all the words spent on explaining how bad global warming is, ice ages are several orders of magnitude worse than the worst global warming story I've heard. A true ice age is the end of civilization.

What makes it simplistic for me is really the idea that we can make the climate better by tinkering with a single variable (temperature in this case) - I'm not convinced we even know what 'better' is, let alone have enough understanding to predict what the side effects would be. What if we cause some imbalance that doesn't immediately manifest any problems but has a detrimental longer term effect?

I do take your point about space mirrors and the ability to experiment, though - certainly more appealing than man-made plankton blooms shudder - and I think you hit the nail on the head with respect to the political issues!

IIRC, plankton blooms were debunked. They tried it and the number of predators just a level removed from the plankton increased to offset the bloom.

They were; I just picked that as a convenient example of a non-reversible idea. Once you dump the iron in, you're committed. It turns out that in a dynamic system (ahem) that just smashing one of the inputs doesn't guarantee a linear response, but regardless, you're committed once you've done it.

(It turns out that in this case the system tends towards stability. There are good reasons to believe that most changes we can make will also be neutralized. But there's no a priori reason that the same experiment couldn't have experienced a wildly disproportionally large response instead.)

Temperature as a single variable doesn't deal with /known/ problems.

Besides the well-known effect on temperature, CO2 also causes ocean acidification, which among other things kills coral. In its own way, ocean acidification is far scarier than global warming, because there is absolutely no question that it is taking place. While you need a PhD to analyze climate data, you only need high school chemistry to demonstrate ocean acidification. Moreover, you have to deal with the carbon dioxide directly to solve this problem; you can't just try changing the albedo of the Earth, through mirrors or surface reflectors or particulates in the upper atmosphere. And worse: simply stopping where we are may not an option. The current levels may already be long-term undesirable.

Honestly, by analyzing fossil records of CO2 in past times, like the Jurassic period, I believe that somewhere in the ocean there are creatures with genomes adapted or rapidly adaptable to an increased acidic ocean.

The geological average of CO2 in the atmosphere seems to be about 20 times the current amount.

Not necessarily corals are the optimum staple life form of the oceans.

I do not claim to know anything about what would the optimum staple life form in the ocean, I'm simply open to the possibility that an increase in CO2 could lead to a improvement in photosynthesis ability for algae and therefore an increase in ocean life.

Ah, but with space mirrors we don't get "temperature", we get temperature in locations. You don't just point the mirrors "at Earth", you point them "at Utah" or, well, engineering-wise there's nothing really stopping us from getting it down to a few hundred square meters or even tighter, which is why this can be such a weapon. But it's also why they really are the best solution, they have fine-grained control over many things and can even be used to do things like significantly increase evaporation in oceans or something, not just control temperature directly.

It's probably easier to just colonize other planets than it is to go farting around with something as delicate as Earth's climate.

Wouldn't this then require us to "fart around" with the climate of the planets we colonize to make them more like Earth's?

Yes. But when Haliburton claims a planet, I don't really care if they fart around with its climate, because I'll never be allowed to go there anyway.

I've seen that movie - Avatar I think.

The difference being that there is nobody living on a planet like say, Mars.

Last I checked, there are a whole bunch of people with nowhere else to go on Earth as it stands.

nowhere to go? really? last time i checked most of the earth's surface was uninhabited. why do people want to go to mars when the land can be had in the mojave desert for practically no cost? its just as dry but has an oxygen atmosphere, and there is virtually no demand for the land

or forget about the mojave. northern canada has a population per square km that is effectively zero. pretty mars-like, but you can hunt for dinner if you're smart. and once again, the land is basically free.

oh i'm not even mentioning a half dozen inhospitable places that no one occupies....why on earth would these people need to go to mars again??

A) Because every dollar invested in the US space program since inception has created about $7 of economic benefit to the consumer economy.

B) (Related to A but worth mentioning separately:) Because the space program has led to major advances in medicine that have improved length and quality of life on Earth. [1]

C) To gain access to essentially limitless energy resources via space-based solar.

D) To gain access to material resources (e.g. minerals) that are scare or absent on Earth. [2]

E) To create an off-Earth breeding population of humans so that one asteroid / plague / nuclear war / whatever cannot wipe out the entire species.

[1] Here's a simple example: When the Hubble telescope was initially launched, it had a small lens defect that blurred the pictures slightly (the pictures were still better than any Earth-based 'scope, though). Image processing software was developed to clean up the pictures until a replacement lens could be deployed. That software then migrated over to MRI machines where it is now used to detect tumors much earlier than used to be possible.

[2] These resources are better accessed from the asteroids than Mars, but going to the latter gives you access to the former.

> A) Because every dollar invested in the US space program since inception has created about $7 of economic benefit to the consumer economy.

This is intriguing. Do you have a reference and/or can you provide an explanation for this?

There were myriad new materials and other technologies developed to defeat the challenges of getting into and surviving in space, many of which launched companies and industries.

Some commonly cited examples: memory foam (TempurPedic Mattresses), better water filters, freeze-dried food, cordless power tools, various plastics, useful solar cells, carbon fiber epoxy.

On top of that, there are all of the benefits of having satellites (telecommunications, GPS, satellite TV, etc).

you raise a bunch of economic issues, but the poster to which i replied simply stated that there was "no where else to go", which is absurd

the rest of your points are dubious. your point B) has been proven false since the launch of the space station...this was one of its apparently initial goals, zero-g bioresearch...except that ended up being replaced with simulating everything in computers with bioinformatics on earth much more easily

C) also has no meaning as we could provide 100% of our solar needs by simply covering a part of any of our major deserts with solar thermal.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/surface-area-requ...

D) maybe, but, for a contrived example, if gold is $5000 an ounce, you have to bring it back from mars for less than $5000 an ounce or its a wash

E) completely bogus, no humans could survive long term with constant support from earth, this has been beaten to death

I second wunderfool's comment. Having driven from Richmond, Virginia, to Anchorage, Alaska, a couple of times, I can attest first-hand that most of North America is unoccupied, empty wildlands. And, don't tell me that I was confused by giant farms in Saskatchewan or something like that. I'm not counting them. Most of the land is simply empty and devoid of humans. (This fact got a little worrisome when it was night, I was low on gasoline, it was snowing, and I was still a good distance from the next "town" on the map.)

> The difference being that there is nobody living on a planet like say, Mars.

Stop right there. You don't know that there isn't anyone living there. We've sent a couple rovers, dug down a few inches, and looked at it from telescopes. There are millions of dollars poured into the search for life on Mars every year, as there should be. But we don't know very much yet!

I am totally in favour of terraforming and colonizing Mars if we can (reasonably) prove that nothing is alive there. But we aren't anywhere near that point. The greatest crime the human race could ever commit would be the annihilation of the (perhaps only?) living ETs found, even if by "accident" as we moved in there.

Don't think that Mars is your dead playground for you to do as you wish. Treat it and its unknown past with deep respect. There's a small chance that something, somewhere, is living there, perhaps under the surface, perhaps in caves.

Don't assume we know everything about other planets just 'cause we can see them with our telescopes.

I am in favor of doing with Mars as we wish. When Western Civilization had "first contact" with various "alien"[1] native societies around the world, most of the impact flowed from civilization to the "aliens". Civilization continued on and most of the alien societies became footnotes in history. Might makes right, and unless the Martian bacteria are crafting starships in their caves, I think we should take samples for scientific study and then open Mars to homesteaders. The Martian lifeforms have had just as long to do something productive with Mars as we have had with Earth. It is not our fault if they are still just bacteria.

[1] Meaning literally foreign.

This is our legacy. It's sad in a way, but that lament is the luxury of the victorious.

I don't think it's that big of a deal. Considering the issue of wiping out a species, we do that all the time here on Earth (no that doesn't make it okay, but we do it all the time nevertheless, I don't think it's humanity's greatest crime). Considering the issue of wiping out an ET species, that makes me more worried for Great Filter concerns than about how we'll look back at ourselves in history. If there's life on Mars, or if there was life on Mars, either case is bad news for us.

See last week's submission, "Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456

It's obviously easier to "fart around with" the Earth's climate considering we're doing it now to some extent.

Assuming you meant the much higher bar of improving the Earth's climate (sidestepping the obvious question of what we mean by improve), I'm still not convinced colonizing another planet is easier. There's a number of theoretical plans for reducing CO2, or decreasing surface temperature by reflecting some of the sun's light. These plans are much less sci-fi fanciful than building a viable colony (especially if you mean largely self-supporting) on other planets.

Point being that making a mess on another planet is more preferable than making a mess of the only one we have - and I have much more faith in our ability to make a mess of things than I do in our ability to "improve" the Earth's climate.

That's odd since the evidence we have so far points to humanity adapting our environment and improving our living conditions with breathtaking success.

Well yes and no - great short term success (of the order of decades or centuries), but we still don't know what the longer term impact of our activities will be; that's one of the big questions of climate science.

Um, we wouldn't be discussing climate change if that were the case.

"sidestepping the obvious question of what we mean by improve"

This, by the way, is rather a massive problem with current discourse. Anyone who wants to talk about "damage" to Earth's environment ought to be required to specify their definition of "optimal". It turns out to be rather tricky, but without it a lot of this debate is politics, not science or engineering.

I don't know if the Earth's climate is as delicate as we fear. Our infrastructure is far more delicate when it comes to the Earth climate. The Earth is able to function within a homeostatic range (say, established over the past billion years) far more effectively than our infrastructure (established over the past few hundred years). The biosphere may also be involved with this, which has been raised in the Gaia theory line of argumentation.

Which "other planets" do you have in mind that are within easy reach of Earth?

This is like using a tool. It may crash while you are using it for no reason, or may be someone else steal it. But this is not a reason not to be careful of your tool and don't abuse it. Especially when you don't have another one.

This sounds like a horrible idea; you can't backup the planet and revert if shit hits the fan (and it does, it always finds a way).

Minor changes in the suns output have a tiny impact on earths climate. The vastly simplified reason is black body radiation increases as the 4th power of temperature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law). And the sun is vary stable when you average over a day sitting at +/- .05% since we have been able to detect it. And unlike earths climate astronomers have plenty of other vary similar stars to directly compare the sun to and they are also vary stable.

PS: Now a gigantic increase in the suns output relative to the norm of say 0.11% = an increase of 1.0011(288K)^4 = (288K+x)^4 = ~0.08 degrees C.

Your sentence should read: Minor changes in the suns output THEORETICALLY have a tiny impact on earths climate.

Real empirical data refutes your conclusion based on one equation.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627640.800-whats-wro...

I worry that you underestimate the complexity of the problem.

Drastically reducing CO2 in the atmosphere by reducing fossil fuel usage AND increasing sequestration by natural systems is by far the easiest and most predictable approach to strive for.

However, even that is proving beyond the abilities of our struggling political leaders.

A nice idea but I don't think it's really practical. Humanity itself doesn't really have the capability to bring that level of energy output and control to bare on a planetary scale.

Moreover, I don't think it's really a very interesting problem. To use an analogy, your idea is similar to the approach used in AI in the 70s or 80s -- computer scientists trying to build a complete artificial intelligence from scraps. In the past 30 years we've learned that this isn't the right approach to a massive problem that we don't truly understand. Instead, we should focus on building small advances -- pieces which get us toward our overall goal. Instead of attempting to control the weather, we need to focus on smaller goals like practical fusion power, a highly advanced national electrical grid, or advanced solar power.

The Maunder minimum argument has been around awhile. A useful counterbalance from NASA 2008:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/

--------------------------

"Solar irradiance: The solar output remains low (Fig. 4), at the lowest level in the period since satellite measurements began in the late 1970s, and the time since the prior solar minimum is already 12 years, two years longer than the prior two cycles. This has led some people to speculate that we may be entering a "Maunder Minimum" situation, a period of reduced irradiance that could last for decades. Most solar physicists expect the irradiance to begin to pick up in the next several months — there are indications, from the polarity of the few recent sunspots, that the new cycle is beginning.

However, let's assume that the solar irradiance does not recover. In that case, the negative forcing, relative to the mean solar irradiance is equivalent to seven years of CO2 increase at current growth rates. So do not look for a new "Little Ice Age" in any case. Assuming that the solar irradiance begins to recover this year, as expected, there is still some effect on the likelihood of a near-term global temperature record due to the unusually prolonged solar minimum. Because of the large thermal inertia of the ocean, the surface temperature response to the 10-12 year solar cycle lags the irradiance variation by 1-2 years. Thus, relative to the mean, i.e, the hypothetical case in which the sun had a constant average irradiance, actual solar irradiance will continue to provide a negative anomaly for the next 2-3 years."

--------------------------

That said, if a Maunder minimum does somehow manage to give us a couple extra decades to get our house in order (before the subsequent recovery of solar activity), that's a godsend. Let's hope it pans out.

> if a Maunder minimum does somehow manage to give us a couple extra decades [...] that's a godsend.

Maybe not. Suppose the actual effect is to give those who say climate change isn't real, or doesn't matter, enough extra rhetorical ammunition (THE EARTH IS COOLING!!!11!) to prevent anything actually being done to get our house in order. That would be ... not so good.

True. But if lucky happenstance lets us be where we are now in 2060 instead of current predictions, that's still a net win--we'll be a significantly richer world then with more resources and technology to adapt to climate change.

On the other side of things, the ability of CO2 to contribute to the greenhouse effect may well be saturated by then, just counteracted by the solar cycle. Which would leave us in the place where we're at the mercy of sunspots (which have no control over) and our ability to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere (which we may or may not have control over). Not so good.

People might say the earth is cooling merely because it is? Heavens, we can't have that!

Oh ho ho. But it might be worth distinguishing between (1) "temperatures over the last few years have been decreasing" and (2) "the longer-term trend, of which those last few years are a sample, is downwards", because #2 would mean that global warming isn't a problem after all and #1 wouldn't.

And I'm afraid the recent history of people with a very decided political agenda declining to distinguish between #1 and #2 even when the short-term trend in question consists of one slightly colder-than-average winter takes some of the fun out of your ironic wit, for me.

I'd be pretty happy if we were granted a 20 year reprieve from the consequences of climate change. Perhaps later on we'll be better able to suck CO2 out of the air, etc.

> that's a godsend.

You're saying that if the problem disappeared tomorrow, people would suddenly become more serious about combating global warming? Pardon the pun, but what on Earth makes you believe that?

I don't think an ice age is really imminent, but its occurrence would be a outright calamity. We'd continue merrily down the present course, and be seventy years more fucked when the pendulum came swinging back.

Let's say we could kick it down the road 50 years--I don't believe a mini-Ice Age is coming either, and even if it is NASA for one expects it to counteract only around seven years of carbon emissions. So this is all a bunch of pointless hypotheticals. But bear with me.

50 years from now, assuming around 2% annual global growth (a conservative guess), the world will be over two and a half times richer than it is now. We'll have had 50 years of technological advancement. Given that right now the biggest roadblocks to dealing with climate change are (a) the very real costs of mitigation and (b) the lack of technological ability to cost effectively generate carbon-free energy and remove CO2 from the atmosphere, there's a decent case on the face of it that we'd be more able to deal with it, notwithstanding the couple hundred extra ppm of CO2 we'd have to worry about.

Part of my motivation is also that I'm increasingly pessimistic about us getting our shit in order in the present day. The current radically corporatist administration in the USA gives only lip service to the problem, and the opposition... well, the less said about the opposition, the better. So if the hand we're dealt is that we have to deal with climate change in the present, we're pretty much fucked. Kicking it down the road would at least offer some hope.

"notwithstanding the couple hundred extra ppm of CO2"

if you're saying that ppm will be in the 600-700 range then humanity will be on an irreversible express train to extinction, so not much else in your post matters

>Maunder minimum does somehow manage to give us a couple extra decades to get our house in order

Have you considered that this may change the scientific community's opinion on global warming? If CO2 levels drop faster than expected it may prove that CO2 levels are a symptom rather than a cause of climate change.

Delaying it 60 years might help. If we ran out of oil, or started getting low by then (ie oil prices through the roof), that would be a big motivator, and help cut emissions.

Betting on sunspots to reverse a century of adding carbon to the atmosphere via fossil fuels is a bit of a long shot bet. Right now we're still in high gear contributing to global warming, but predicting sun spot activity isn't a sure thing.

I'd like to think that as techies we see not just the humanitarian potential but the business potential of energy efficiency, new storage techniques and even new sources of the stuff. It wasn't long ago when we used substances like whale oil and trees to produce fuel -- if we limited ourselves as a society to those sources we wouldn't be where we are today. This is a time where those who embrace disruptive technologies are needed more than ever (and not just for energy but for water and food as well).

I think what trumps a lot of your awesome points is our efforts in sustainability and forward thinking use of recycling with our products/waste.

wrong. that bottle of organic shampoo from whole food commits about 98% of the sins as a bottle of a nonorganic varity from safeway. both are put in plastic which may or may not be recycled but was certainly made from oil (like all plastics), and was driven to the store in a vehicle that emits CO2, stored in a room kept warm or cool with a device that emits CO2, and then driven back to your house in another vehicle that emits CO2, where it is stored in your closet kept warm or cool by another CO2-emitting device.

and in the end its a toss-up if it even gets recycled, even after you put it in the blue bin. but that process also emits CO2

I agree that current efforts at sustainability are pathetically weak, but I disagree that CO2 emissions are fundamentally the problem. Global warming is an environmentalist boogeyman that makes for good PR, but climate disaster or not we have politically intractable problems with the waste of natural resources. We can always grow more plants to reclaim CO2, but we can't continue to just extract everything and then throw it in a landfill 6 months later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

>Betting on sunspots to reverse a century of adding carbon to the atmosphere via fossil fuels is a bit of a long shot bet.

Based on what? A single sunspot may be many times the size of the earth. There is no question that if the sun "wanted to" it could do drastic things to our climate, dwarfing any mechanism on the earth, man-made or no. Predicting sun spot activity is on the same level of difficulty as predicting the climate, after all: chaotic systems.

I don't question your overal premise; carbon-based global warming isn't going to just "go away." I'm also in favor of embracing 'disruptive' technologies.

But your language comparing sunspots to global warming seems inadequate, somehow.

> Betting on sunspots to reverse a century of adding carbon to the atmosphere via fossil fuels is a bit of a long shot bet.

What possible basis could you have for making this judgment? I dearly hope that folks aren't going to accept only the science that agrees with their previous public policy goals. In the face of new evidence, one's opinions are required to change.

For my part, an ice age is more scary to me than a hot age. I can't quite tell if that's just because I personally hate cold weather or if my observation that humans seem to thrive more easily in warmer weather is a fact.

Incidentally, that global warming happens is a sure thing. The magnitude and effects of global warming aren't any more of a sure thing than predicting sun spot activity.

My comment from the other link: reference: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml

Some more sensational coverage in The Register [1]. The correlation between low sunspot activity and the 'mini ice-age' is well documented, its not proven that solar activity caused that ice age, but it looks like we are getting a chance to run the experiment again.

I'm continuing to follow are reports from the STEREO mission [2]. After reading this paper [3] on the correlation between geomagnetic activity on the sun and terrestrial temperatures.

BTW, the last chart in that paper is pretty amazing.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/

[2] http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

[3] http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt760405/PDF/2005MmSAI..76..9...

The article is misleading. The part about an impending period of solar inactivity comes from the solar physicists; the part about a mini-Ice Age comes straight from the blogger based on a snippet from NASA's web site which he either deliberately or inadvertently misread. Had he continued the quote for only one more line, he would have included this important caveat:

The connection between solar activity and terrestrial climate is an area of on-going research.

The article is misleading, which is utterly unsurprising if you're already familiar with the previous work of Lewis Page at El Reg.

He has a penchant for pumping stories that downplay climate change, Fukushima meltdown, etc. If you want stories that play favourably for legacy energy industry, he's your man at The Register.

This story is mostly bogus. There is no proven correlation between sunspots and terrestrial temperatures.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/06/14/science/AP-US-SCI...

Probably a better post, from the Bad Astronomer:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/14/th...

If you thought the climate change debate was crazy before, well this will take crazy to a whole new level.

Yes, it either proves that

(a) natural variation in the Earth's climate is far larger than anything we can manage anthropogenically anyway so attempts to cut carbon emissions are a waste of time, or

(b) We're only being saved from CO2-induced global warming by a mini ice-age, therefore it's even more urgent to cut CO2 emissions because temperatures are just gonna shoot up as soon as the ice age ends.

Another way to look at (b) is "We're only being saved from a mini ice-age by CO2-induced global warming, therefore it's urgent to avoid cutting emissions and plunging into it for real". The Earth has seen warmer and colder than now, but the warm extremes have been better for life than the cold extremes.

Which life? Industrial age humans? That's who we care about. Our goal is (or at least I hope it is) to enable humans to thrive, we don't really care about other life (at least if we had to pick between humans and other life) as long as it is not instrumental to our success.

The problem is that without the other life there can be no human life. We are on the top of the food chain and as such we depend on all other animals for our survival. Hopefully it makes sense what I'm saying.

oddly enough some climate scientists (james lovelock, in this case) take it as a given that most animal life is already doomed, and that humans will have to engineer a food source in order to survive. green goo might be in your future

Soylent Green perhaps? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

Some other life, not all other life.

;)

Thriving is overrated.

Taking a contrary view: there are too many of us already. A smaller population will be more sustainable in the long term.

Unless you want unlimited growth with a huge apocalyptic human extinction event at the end.

In other words, I don't care specifically about industrial age humans. I want post-industrial and post-post-post-industrial age humans to survive too.

Eventually there will be some extinction event anyway. Is it more important to maximize number of humans who ever lived, or more important to maximize the age of the species? Your stated desires could mean either, but they prescribe very different strategies.

What's the confidence on this?

I recall a hub-bub a year or two back because a climate scientist made the scientifically reasonable statement that it was "inconclusive" whether the Earth had warmed in the last 15 years, because the statistical significance of 15 years of data was only at 90%, and scientists like having a 95% confidence before they say something. (With the extra year of data, it is now "conclusive", eg, >95%, that the Earth has warmed since 1995.)

I see 10 or 12 years of data on that graph; what's the confidence based on these measurements that we are entering a mini Ice Age?

The basis of confidence intervals holding any usefulness is pretty shaky. See http://uncertainty.stat.cmu.edu/ (it also has a chapter on old ideas such as this).

Reading the comments on here and many other places about global warming, it makes me sad that nobody is open-minded enough to entertain the possibility that an increase in the Earth's temperature could be a positive-sum change.

We know very little about the Earth's natural cycles and the effects we have on them, so we are very far from knowing whether things are going in a good* or bad direction.

* Good for everyone involved, such as humans, animals, plants, etc.

It is probably because people are comfortable with the familiar. Sure, a warmer earth might be a positive-sum change, but there's an equally good chance that it won't be. So why take the risk of losing what you have if you can avoid it?

> equally good chance that it won't be.

   probability = ??????

is not at all the same thing as

   probability = 0.50

In this case, it is! The GP is using a uniform prior assigning "equally good chance" to either outcome (good or bad). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability

Of course stopping there seems to be silly since I'm sure more informed people have evidence that can shift that probability one way or the other.

If I have a question [???] and the answer is "true" or "false". The probability of it being "true" is 50%; Every question you can come up with, you can come up with a negative version. e.g. "Is your name gwright" vs "Is your name not gwright".

So given any question where you know absolutely nothing at all about it, the probability the answer is "Yes" must be 50%!

The correct answer is the correct answer 100% of the time. And the wrong answer is the wrong answer 100% of the time. If I gave you a question where the correct answer is "no" and you knew _absolutely nothing_ about it, your answer "Yes" would be correct 0% of the time.

That is true, the probability of "Yes" is 0, but only according to you. Relative to me, however, the probability is still 50% chance.

It's just like if there was a stock the market know nothing about, but you know it just scored a magnificent deal a couple of hours ago, the market will see it as "meh, 50 50" (no price change), while you see "100% going to go up, must buy."

That's called insider trading, however. ;)

Exactly. The worst case, I'm afraid, would be another MARS in the solar system.

Down votes? I know physicist, who tell me in private, that they are afraid about a point of no return. That we heat the climate up to a point where the system gets unstable. This is, as far as I know, what could have happend on planet Mars and it could happen here. Yet, you barley see anyone mentioning this public.

A sane risk assessment number should be something like:

Gain / (Risk * Damage)

So if the, theoretical, damage on Earth could make it something like Mars, we should act, even if we loose a lot of gain, that is comfort, and though the risk might seem low. On a sight note, the same goes for other humanity threatening dangers, like big asteroids.

Looking around the solar system, we would have to conclude that significant climate change in either direction is bad for life. None of our neighbors appears to support even microbial life, much less complex species. All the evidence suggests that the conditions for life lie in a narrow band, which we are sitting in nicely for the moment. We manipulate the climate at our peril.

First off, the global warming debate is not just about temperatures. It is also about resource use, pollution, waste, contamination of environments, etc.

Secondly, the effect of this 'mini ice age' will last a scant 10 or so years. Call me crazy but it doesn't make sense to burn more fossil fuels and continue to cause potentially unrepairable harm to our environment to optimize for a period of 10 years of relatively cool temperatures.

If the scientific community agrees that warmer temperatures are in the planet's best interest, I'm sure there is a safer and more effective way to bring that about then the massive amount of pollution and CO2 we are currently pumping into the atmosphere.

some interesting food for thought. in james lovelock's last book, he discusses how recent volcanos have indeed had a measurable cooling impact (abeit short term)...he suggests that it may indeed be the case that humanity, in a fit of desperation, may have to (try to) engineer a large scale introduction of such material into the atmosphere to create immediate cooling...even though such material itself poses many dangers

There's a fine line between open-mindedness and having a hole in your head.

Seriously though, it's very certain that global climate change of unpredictable magnitude right now is not desirable. The key problem is that we're not prepared to preserve biological diversity.

We're placing our ecosystems under extreme pressure, severely compromising them, sometimes depleting their resources so they will take hundreds or even thousands of years to recover. This results in mass extinctions and near-extinctions (which can be very damaging through genetic bottlenecks, aka inbreeding). For most species, we currently have no adequate technology to preserve single individuals, let alone entire populations, outside their original habitat.

Why does this matter? Because biological diversity is critical to our long-term success in bioengieering, and mind-bogglingly hard to replenish in an accelerated way. We will be able to preserve and resurrect species much sooner than we will be able to mutate them in a natural way to preserve their intraspecies diversity. But so far we can't even do that, so we're losing entire genotypes forever - genotypes that we have no idea how to reconstruct, or what hidden treasures lay in their genomes.

And this is just the biggest problem, not taking into account the philosophical preservationist argument, or the smaller problems like increased risk of global conflicts due to mass displacements, ocean acidification, etc.

On behalf of Maunders around the world, I'd like to extend my apologies for the Minimum you're about to experience.

Maybe nobody will read my comment since I'm a bit late but anyway: It seems like nobody talked about the implication of the diminution of the solar magnetic field.

If I remember correctly, the solar magnetic field (SMF) is held responsible ’not entirely, earth's GM too and other things’ for deflecting galactic cosmic rays. What are the consequences of the current diminution of the SMF?

Looks like it will be better for space travel..(the article says) and how is that? Solar storm > Cosmis ray?

Excuse me but seems to me like it's the other way around: "The storms actually improved the radiation environment inside the station." via (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/07...)

What are you views on the subject? I don't know what to think anymore.

"This could overturn decades of received wisdom on such things as CO2 emissions, and lead to radical shifts in government policy worldwide." - What exactly is the article implying? Are they somehow saying that CO2 emissions aren't a bad thing? Or that we should increase them so we can prevent the 'mini ice age' by increasing our negative effect on the climate?

Seems to be an extremely uninformed and misleading bit of 'reporting'...

I guess that's kind of what it is saying? An Ice Age would be about as bad for civilization as we know it as the ice caps melting (just in different ways), in a time of global cooling, I suppose increased CO2 would keep the Earth warmer then the last ice age.

Ned was right, winter is coming.

Is the movie out yet? I am still not sure if I want to continue reading the series. It was so depressing.

I've been totally waiting with baited breath to launch this rant at some poor unsuspecting sap. So, hi Tichy!

Man, I really really wanted to love that whole book series. The characterization was fantastic, the settings were detailed and rich, the story telling was great ...

But, sometime part-way through A Feast For Crows, I just couldn't stand reading it any more. The violence seemed too unnecessary; the destruction of characters that had been so carefully built had started to turn into an expectation -- "I wonder how he's going to later make this interesting new character suffer? Will he maim them? Murder them? Destroy them psychologically?" For me, in that volume, it somehow went from being a great story with difficult events to a really ugly story that just wasn't worth reading anymore. I no longer cared about the characters because, y'know, they were gonna die anyway. Or worse.

Now I'm starting to hear from people who are watching the HBO series but who never read the books, and they're talking about how they really love this character or that character, and every time inside I get this massive troll face on and think, "Heh ... just you wait and see what happens to that one."

I sold my copy of the set to a used bookstore. I hear there's another one out now, but I have very little desire, or curiosity, towards it.

I only read the first book, but as I said, I found it too depressing. It builds great atmosphere, but then everything just goes down the drain.

The announcement made on 14 June (18:00 UK time) comes from scientists at the US National Solar Observatory (NSO) and US Air Force Research Laboratory.

Does anyone have the link to the original announcement?

Maybe this? http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~deforest/SPD-sunspot-release/SP...

If true, the 70-year cold period could turn out to be a grace period that allows us to get carbon emissions under control by the time solar activity returns to normal. Of course, this could lessen the imperative and make the political task of reaching global consensus more difficult.

Relevant: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_on_our_place_in_the_c...

As David makes the point (at the near end of the video), the best available science in the 1970's predicted that the climate was cooling down. The best available science of today (not the least, with the help of best marketing) would predict Global Warming.

The same best scientific estimates of the day also predict that our best projections to bring down the emissions (which we will not achieve) themselves suffice only to move the disaster point a little further, but not prevent the inevitable.

Our capacity to study the Earth's climate has improved dramatically since the '70s. We barely had an idea of what the weather on other planets looked like.

And I was under the impression that the global cooling folks were a fringe minority of the scientific community (like the AGW people today).

David doesn't say global cooling fyi.

He just points out that, if our best measures to prevent Global Warming, Kyoto Protocol (which itself will not be implemented) themselves intend not to solve the problem, but just to postpone by a decade, we should probably start looking for solutions to live at higher temperature.

Too bad that it is not informing a public debate.

Nah, a few scientists in the 70s believed that the Earth might cool, nothing like today. To compare both predictions and their supporting evidence is laughable.

The evidences are not being compared by themselves but rather used to lead to the fact that "We can only do something based on what the current scientific prediction is."

Based on the current scientific prediction the best measures that we even intend to implement, The Kyoto Protocol (for all it's economic constraints), is by far pushing the effects at most by a decade. Would it not be a good idea rather to start looking at living at higher temperatures?

it is important to note that half of the CO2 in our atmosphere is produced by our exhalations and those of our animals [source:gaia's final warning]...so indeed not only would ceasing all industrial activity be required to stop increasing CO2...we would also have to drastically reduce population. even then, there is enough CO2 already in the atmosphere to move the temperature to a new steady state which could take thousands of years to change

we are increasing population when we should be enforcing a global one-child policy

For those who don't have time to read the article, "mini Ice Age" literally means that winter will last longer, and be more prevalent at lower altitudes/latitudes. Mildly sensational, but an interesting read.

As seemingly benign as a "slightly longer winter" seems, I would venture the consequences of this will be larger than we anticipate.

Well, assuming they're correct in their predictions, quite possibly.

Indeed, considering that the much-feared "global warming" constitutes an increase of one degree per _century_.

"World temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 °C (2.0 and 11.5 °F) during the 21st century" IPCC

So, "one degree per century" is accurate if (a) you clarify you mean Celsius, not Farenheit and (b) you're saying the minimum increase, while also noting the maximum increase could be six times as high.

I know and not only that but the oceans could rise 6 whole inches. That's like half a foot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise says 90 to 880mm, with average estimate of 480 mm, i.e. 4 feet.

Agreed! Some of my favorite vegetables (spicy peppers) have long growing seasons of 100+ days. If winter starts lasting longer, then those vegetables can no longer be grown in high latitudes/altitudes.

For those who don't have time to read the article, "mini Ice Age" literally means that winter will last longer, and be more prevalent at lower altitudes/latitudes

Well, that's what "ice age" meant in the days of wooly mammoths too. Longer, colder winters. It just needs to be sustained for a few thousand years before the glaciers start rolling through Central Park.

That's a relief. I went to the comments first to see if the article was worth my time, but because of the title, I was under the idea that we were all going to die in 10 years.

There's a good book on the political and social consequences of the last little ice age: The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 by Brian Fagan.

It's not exactly news. Reduced solar activity has been observed for some time and satellite measurements of the troposphere show a slow cooling of the average global temperature over the last ten years.

Here is a presentation by Fred Singer if anybody is interested (in the past he has headed the US weather satellite program for many years). http://videolectures.net/kolokviji_singer_nnha/

Article written by Lewis Page - the Register's resident climate change denier. Not a trustworthy author on the topic I'm afraid.

So we will either die of cold or heat. Maybe.

>Maybe.

I think it's pretty definite that each one of us will die. The only relevant factor is how, and how much we suffer between now and then.

>> I think it's pretty definite that each one of us will die

:). I meant die, dinosaur style.

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

News like this always makes me wonder if the Maya calendar is an accurate description of cycles in nature. The end of there calendar also ends within a decade. Maybe just a prediction of another cycle.

For more reading about the possibility of a new mini Ice Age, see http://www.iceagenow.com.

Where is the link to the announcement by the scientists that the author talks about? I'd be curious to read it and make up my own mind.

Boy, that went well. I'm sure they'll believe us next time we say the sky is falling.

A mini ice age + global warming = cool sailing ahead!

far from facing a global warming problem

We don't have a "global warming" problem. We have a manmade climate change problem, which may be worsened by the Sun's own agenda. I haven't read the Bad Astronomer's take on this, but he's a lot more trustworthy than the OP.

Anyone have Al Gore's email address?

I don't know whather to cry because it'll be cold, cry because skeptics will be wrongly smug dumbasses, enjoy the cold I prefer, or enjoy skeptics being dumb as always.

Yay! Lets grab every bit of remaining oil for the next 50 years and spew it into the air! We'll be mostly dead by then anyway, maybe the grandkids can figure it out. SUVs for everyone!

I'm going to save the world. Where's that Hummer showroom?

Sorry, humor is against the rules.

Ironically, I chuckled at your statement...

No, we just have high standards.

I know climate change is not directly related to the current temperature but wow it's strange to read this when it's currently 100 degrees here (no exaggeration) and setting new temperature records for the past few decades.

Basically what's happened is our overly aggressive industrialization has ruined the temperature stability we used to enjoy. And sadly we aren't done yet as China rushes to catch up while we blow up mountains for more coal.

umm...you did notice that the article was talking about temperature variations caused by the GIANT NUCLEAR EXPLOSION AT THE CENTER OF OUR SOLAR SYSTEM THAT PROVIDES ALL OF OUR HEAT AND LIGHT....right? or are you suggesting that our pesky first-world lifestyles are somehow causing a decrease in sunspots.

No it means our lifestyles are reducing the earth's natural shielding and buffer from extreme changes. Earth is recovering more slowly and dealing more poorly with what is being thrown at it.

We have billions fewer trees around the world than we did even just a few hundred years ago.

If you actually read the article you'll see that they're not predicting some drastic new changes that haven't happened before, they're predicting a repeat of what happened a few hundred years ago.

If anything, the changes to the environment that we have caused since the industrial revolution could help reduce the effects so that we are less affected than when the same thing happened a few hundred years ago. Or maybe the changes we've made is too insignificant in comparison and has no impact. Either way, this mini ice age they are predicting is in no way because of any changes we've caused.

I seriously doubt that after 175 years of industrial CO₂ that suddenly we're going to see this drastic change out of nowhere. It's much more likely to occur gradually over time. That said, I welcome the ice age. I'm in Vegas and it'd make the climate here perfect.

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