CDN scientists predict global cooling

For all our our investments in alternative energy and green power (our Fund III has put $ into wind farms and biodiesel), it turns out that some scientists at the National Reserach Council think we are barking up the wrong tree. It isn’t global warming that we should be worried about, it’s global cooling!

Here are two excerpts from the February 7th edition of Investors Business Daily. The entire piece is worth a read:

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

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Patterson, sharing Tapping’s concern, says: “Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth.”

“Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again,” Patterson says. “If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than ‘global warming’ would have had.”

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming “community” — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by “dramatic changes” in temperatures.

A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.

“The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100,” according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.

The study says that “try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures.”

The study concludes that if you shut down all the world’s power plants and factories, “there would not be much effect on temperatures.”

Let’s just hope that the Chinese government, under international pressure to slow the growth of its coal-fired power plants, doesn’t have a subscripton to IBD (although Google Analytics tells us that China is ranked #19 of the 79 different countries that sent visitors to our web site during the past four weeks).

MRM