Intelligence Report Assesses Impact of Climate Change

Global warming is over

I don't know why the journalists have not picked up on this but global warming ended with the twentieth century. Global temperature since then has stayed the same within statistical limits and the warmest year on record is still 1998. The credibility of the IPCC predictions rested on only one thing: the observation that, as the partial pressure of carbon dioxide went up, so did global temperature. But this is no longer true which brings into question the hypothesis that the warming is due to carbon dioxide. Some IPCC modelers are already getting nervous and are trying to cover their tracks as a report in Nature that came out on May first shows. Now they say that "natural processes" have interfered with global warming but not to worry - even if we get cooling the warming will return. Just baloney. What we need to do is to consider seriously alternatives to the carbon dioxide hypothesis and of these the cosmic ray hypothesis of Svensmark is a leading candidate. It postulates simply that clouds are seeded by cosmic rays and makes a specific connection with low clouds at two to three kilometer height. But what does all this have to with climate? you may ask. Very simple - clouds rteflect sunlight back into space and thereby cool the earth. Looking down from a ten kilometer height of an airliner you notice their brightness and you also notice how dark the land or ocean looks. They are dark because they absorb sunlight which then warms the earth. Should the flux of cosmic rays coming from outer space for some reason fluctuate it would thereby increase or decrease the total amount of cloudiness. And with it, global temperature would vary: more cloudiness would mean less sunlight absorbed and cooler weather, fewer clouds gives sunnier skies, more sunlight absorbed, and a warmer earth. But what could modulate that flux? The solar magnetic field, for one. .It turns out that the strength of the solar magnetic field has more than doubled during the twentieth century, meaning that early in the century we were not well protected and received more of these cloud-seeding particles than later on. Which means fewer clouds and warmer weather towards the end of the century. There is speculation that the field has already peaked and may be going down which, if true, may explain the cessation of warming we observe today. Solar magnetism was really low during the so-called "Maunder minimum" in the middle of the Little Ice Age which may be the reason why the world was so cold then. But Svensmark's theory also ties the occurrence of ice ages to cosmic ray flux in our galactic neighborhood. As the solar system in its orbit around the center of the Galaxy traverses its spiral arms the high cosmic ray flux there can bring on a cooling period that leads to an ice age. We are currently within the Orion arm of the Galaxy which has brought us the Pleistocene ice ages. For more information I refer you to the web site ponderthemaunder.com of a bright young person.

Rapid Ecosystem collapse imminent security threat

"Few seem to realise that the present IPCC models predict almost unanimously that by 2040 the average summer in Europe will be as hot as the summer of 2003 when over 30,000 died from heat. By then we may cool ourselves with air conditioning and learn to live in a climate no worse than that of Baghdad now. But without extensive irrigation the plants will die and both farming and natural ecosystems will be replaced by scrub and desert. What will there be to eat? The same dire changes will affect the rest of the world and I can envisage Americans migrating into Canada and the Chinese into Siberia but there may be little food for any of them." --Dr James Lovelock's lecture to the Royal Society, 29 Oct. '07

"Leemans and Eickhout (2004) found that adaptive capacity decreases rapidly with an increasing rate of climate change. Their study finds that five percent of all ecosystems cannot adapt more quickly than 0.1 C per decade over time. Forests will be among the ecosystems to experience problems first because their ability to migrate to stay within the climate zone they are adapted to is limited. If the rate is 0.3 C per decade, 15 percent of ecosystems will not be able to adapt. If the rate should exceed 0.4 C per decade, all ecosystems will be quickly destroyed, opportunistic species will dominate, and the breakdown of biological material will lead to even greater emissions of CO2. This will in turn increase the rate of warming" --Leemans and Eickhout (2004), "Another reason for concern: regional and global impacts on ecosystems for different levels of climate change," Global Environmental Change 14, 219–228

"I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't: we may not be able to stop global warming. We need to begin curbing global greenhouse emissions right now, but more than a decade after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the world has utterly failed to do so. Unless the geopolitics of global warming change soon, the Hail Mary pass of geoengineering might become our best shot." --Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine, 17 March 2008.

There is a very inexpensive simple way to immediately cool the Earth: just put a small amount of aerosol into the air to dim the sun. We won't be able to stop rapid ecosystem collapse without geoengineering.