BY ALEXIA JAMES
Fighting Global Warming tends to be government policy in most nations these days. We are told to recycle as much as we possibly can and save energy to limit our carbon emissions which are fatally destroying the ozone layer and the future of the planet.
Billions are spent globally fighting climate change. There are numerous think tanks, scientific research centres and whole university departments dedicated to the challenge of global warming.
In his State of the Union address in January 2014, President Obama declared, “The shift to a cleaner energy economy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way. But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.”
So, when a prominent Russian astrophysicist called Doctor Habibullo Abdussamatov, who works as the head of space research for the Pulkovo Observatory at the Russian Academy of Sciences, declares last week that a new Ice Age started at the end of 2015, you scratch your head a bit, don’t you? And he’s not even referring to the eponymous animation.
Abdussamatov writes that the “new Little Ice Age” started at the end of 2015 due to low solar activity, kicking off decades of “deep cooling” in the latter half of the 21st Century. “As a result, the Earth has, and will continue to have, a negative average annual energy balance and a long-term adverse thermal condition. The quasi-centennial epoch of the new Little Ice Age has started at the end 2015 after the maximum phase of solar cycle 24,” Abdussamatov writes. “The start of a solar grand minimum is anticipated in solar cycle 27 in 2043 and the beginning of phase of deep cooling in the new Little Ice Age in 2060.”
Abdussamatov contends that diminishing solar activity will cause a steady cooling over North America and Europe, which could refabricate the conditions experienced during the “Little Ice Age” — cooler periods from the Middle Ages to the mid nineteenth century that coincided with a lull in sunspots.
“The gradual weakening of the Gulf Stream leads to stronger cooling in the zone of its action in western Europe and the eastern parts of the United States and Canada,” Abdussamatov continues. “Quasi-bicentennial cyclic variations of total solar irradiance together with successive very important influences of the causal feedback effects are the main fundamental causes of corresponding alterations in climate variation from warming to the Little Ice Age.”
Abdussamatov is not alone in his conclusions. For many years, some scientists have warned that diminishing solar activity could herald cooler global temperatures in future years, but this view has been contested by many scientists who see greenhouse gases, like CO2, as the primary warming agent. They would argue that the effect of any cooling will be negligible against the global warming that they also describe as “fact”.
Sunspot devotees argue the “pause” in global average temperature since the late 1990’s coincides with decreasing solar activity. Most scientists say the “pause” in global warming was caused by ocean oscillation cycles.
Is Abdussamatov right?
No harm in stocking up on bikinis and thermals just in case.