Global Cooling?

- The amount of ice in the arctic for this time of year is the highest it's been in years. See: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ (click on the graph on the right. The green line was last year and the blue line is this year. Notice that the blue line is way above the green line.

- The amount of ice in the antarctic set a all time record high this summer (winter for them). See http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/. Go down the page to "Another record high in the Antarctic" Note: 2012 was the old record year.

- Hurricane activity has been very low this fall.

These are all signs of cooling of course.

What is causing this?

- From what I read the high ice level in the antarctic is believed to be due to leftover effects from the ozone hole.

- The current sunspot cycle is weak and weak sunspot activity is correlated with cooler temperatures. More sunspots indicate a more energetic sun.

And now the story starts to get interesting.

The current sunspot cycle is actually the weakest in over 100 years and it appears that we may be headed for another "Maunder Minimum" or something close to that. That's what caused the "little ice age" between 1680 and 1725. 

Regardless of whether we hit (or surpass) the Maunder Minimum, it looks like we are headed for a period of very few or no sunspots for an extended period of time. See: http://phys.org/news203746768.html and http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml 

and this is strongly correlated with cool temperatures.

But you hear nothing about this in our media. Nothing. And it's pretty interesting!

Why?

- Liberals don't want to talk about it for obvious reasons: it might undercut their dire warnings on Global Warming.

- Conservatives don't want to talk about it either. It might come across as defending polluters: "gee we might be headed for an ice age without all those coal fired power plants?". That's not a winning message. It also might come across as "admitting" to global warming in a back door way - and some want to deny global warming.

- The mainstream media (both liberal and conservative) likes sensationalism and likes to hew to a story line. The story line is Global Warming. 

- No one wants to hear that some things are out of our control. That makes people feel powerless. Sunspots are 100% out of our control. They don't even have to sign up for Obamacare :)

- Once "truths" are established, the powers that be do not like to admit they were wrong. Think the new economy of 1999 and "housing prices cannot go down on a nationwide basis for an extended time" crapola of 2003-2007.

One other interesting tidbit: on Sept 12, 2001 a noticeable increase of global temperatures was seen: something like .3 degrees. The reason is hypothesized to be the lack of contrails from jet airplanes that were not flying that day. Those contrails apparently cool things a bit. Take them away and the temp goes up. But before that contrails were thought to be another cause of warming. 

Takeaways from all this:

- Climate is influenced by things other than human activity

- Some things that humans do tend to increase the temperature and some things humans do tend to decrease the temperature. 

- It's complex and not at all straightforward.

- If climatologists got the contrail thing wrong (they did) then what else are they mistaken about.

The rise in CO2 is well documented and not controversial. The rise in CO2 is due to human activity. I asked my cousin Bradley about this last time we got together (he is a professor at Northwestern and a global warming expert!). He assured me that the rise in CO2 is attributable to fossil fuel and not volcanic activity and they can know that via isotopes and other very rigorous methods.

But the temp has not gone up nearly as much as the models predicted given the rise in CO2, and for the moment we have a noticeable cooling trend.

I think the reasons are a) the sunspot cycle and b) some human activity is having a cooling effect.

I think the biggest bias in our media is sensationalism and hewing to established story lines (herd behavior) and that's why you hear pretty much nothing about what I talked about above: a dramatic rise in ice in the arctic, very few hurricanes, all time max ice extent in antarctic, early cold in North America, a foot of snow in Kiev the other day but nothing about the trend. Important information is not getting through.