Is the future a skate on thicker ice?

I found this piece in the Oz due to an Irate Warminista on twitter:

This is utterly idiotic http://t.co/Nz4nfhQklf That this person is an Abbott advisor speaks volumes. Newman is unstable at best.

— Evan Keith Beaver (@evcricket) August 13, 2014

So naturally I checked out the link only to find a quite interesting argument suggesting that the evidence supports the notion that its variation in solar activity that drives climate change rather than changes in the composition of the atmosphere:

Yet during the past 20 years the US alone has poured about $US80 billion into climate change research on the presumption that humans are the primary cause. The effect has been to largely preordain scientific conclusions. It set in train a virtuous cycle where the more scientists pointed to human causes, the more governments funded their research.

At the same time, like primitive civilisations offering up sacrifices to appease the gods, many governments, including Australia’s former Labor government, used the biased research to pursue “green” gesture politics. This has inflicted serious damage on economies and diminished the West’s standing and effectiveness in world ­affairs.

University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology Philip Tetlock explains: “When journal reviewers, editors and funding agencies feel the same way about a course, they are less likely to detect and correct potential logical or methodological bias.” How true. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its acolytes pay scant attention to any science, however strong the empirical evidence, that may relegate human causes to a lesser status.

This mindset sought to bury the results of Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark’s experiments using the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. For the first time in controlled conditions, Svensmark’s hypothesis that the sun alters the climate by influencing cosmic ray influx and cloud formation was validated. The head of CERN, which runs the laboratory, obviously afraid of how this heretical conclusion would be received within the global warming establishment, urged caution be used in interpreting the results “in this highly political area of climate change debate”. And the media obliged.

But Svensmark is not alone. For example, Russian scientists at the Pulkovo Observatory are convinced the world is in for a cooling period that will last for 200-250 years. Respected Norwegian solar physicist Pal Brekke warns temperatures may actually fall for the next 50 years. Leading British climate scientist Mike Lockwood, of Reading University, found 24 occasions in the past 10,000 years when the sun was declining as it is now, but could find none where the decline was as fast. He says a return of the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830), which included “the year without summer”, is “more likely than not”. In their book The Neglected Sun , Sebastian Luning and Fritz Varen­holt think that temperatures could be two-tenths of a degree Celsius cooler by 2030 because of a predicted anaemic sun. They say it would mean “warming getting postponed far into the future”.

If the world does indeed move into a cooling period, its citizens are ill-prepared. After the 2008 fin­ancial crisis, most economies are still struggling to recover. Cheap electricity in a colder climate will be critical, yet distorted price signals caused by renewable energy policies are driving out reliable baseload generators. Attracting fresh investment will be difficult, expensive and slow.

Only time will tell, but it is fanciful to believe that it will be business as usual in a colder global climate. A war-weary world’s response to recent events in the Middle East, Russia’s excursion into the Crimea and Ukraine and China’s annexation of air space over Japan’s Senkaku/Daioyu Islands has so far been muted. It is interesting to contemplate how the West would handle the geopolitical and humanitarian challenges brought on by a colder climate’s shorter growing seasons and likely food shortages. Abundance is conducive to peace. However, a scenario where nations are desperately competing for available energy and food will bring unpredictable threats, far more testing than anything we have seen in recent history.

Source

I don’t know if this line of argument is correct but it does suggest that when it comes to addressing any future change in our climate that we would be better served by not assuming that the climate is going to be hotter into the future if it were to swing the other way though what would it mean for this country? I don’t think that we would have too much trouble in terms of our agriculture  but we may have to change what we grow where.  In terms of our energy sources we are quite well placed because we do have extensive reserves of fossil fuels but on the downside much of our housing stock in the northern parts of the country are not well suited to the cold. The thing is though no matter which way the climate may change we have to be prepared to cut our coats according to the cloth and the most important thing that will enable us to do that is flexible minds that are good at problem solving. The trouble with so many AGW true believers is that they are utterly inflexible in their thinking and they feel very threatened even by the possibility that their profits may be wrong so how do you think that they would go in a cold future rather than a hot one?

Cheers Comrades

Is the future a skate on thicker ice?