Earth may be headed into mini Ice-Age within a decade.

"What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age."

"An immediate question is whether this slowdown presages a second Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period with virtually no sunspots [which occurred] during 1645-1715...During the Maunder Minimum and for periods either side of it, many European rivers which are ice-free today – including the Thames – routinely froze over, allowing ice skating and even for armies to march across them in some cases."

With current fuel prices being so high I'm not surprised that the sun is attempting to cut down it's usage...

Ahh, but the global gas warmiong camp maintain that the lack of sun activity will only subtract 1 degree from the 4 degrees taht we will have warmed it by in the next 10 years. So thats a net 3 degrees warming.

Of course these are the same people who cannot predict the temperature tomorrow so take of that waht you will.

It takes more than a 1 degree drop in temperature to freeze the Thames over.

I'll keep my decat on then

"Every little helps"

Bloody typical - just bought a rag top

There is a pleasant thought - miles and miles of frozen sewage.

I still believe the Earth has a negative feedback system going on, so that whatever happens it gets eventually counteracted. If that were not the case, life would not have evolved here. As long as scientists fail to take that into account they are going to be scaring people about what will probably not happen, at least to the degree they think it will.

Citation needed.

Brian, that's the very point that was completely refuted in the recent 'machines of loving grace' documentaries recently.
Living systems have *positive* feedback mechanisms: scoff all you can, then die.

Lovelock and his Gaea theory are somewhat at variance with observed facts.

I'm referring to climate stability, not all the other stuff. The observed fact, necessarily (weak anthropic principle), is that we are living on a planet that enabled us to evolve over a billion or two years. We couldn't have done that if the Earth's climate had not had a built-in negative feedback mechanism to counteract major changes in temperature.

More CO2, higher temperature, increased cloud cover, higher albedo, reduced heating, lower temperature ... etc.

More CO2, higher temperature, less ice cap, less coastal area, lower albedo, increased heating, higher temperature? CF Venus.

I don't think it's negative feedback; it's coincidental balance between positive feedbacks with different effects.

Whatever it is, the evidence is that it is. The Earth's temperature has never yet run out of control. Are you seriously suggesting that our contribution to the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is so extreme as to have no natural precedent in the past two billion years?

Venus has an atmosphere rich in sulphuric acid. It isn't a good comparison. Even so, are you saying Venus doesn't have a stabilised temperature?

It's been very close to complete ice world on at least one occasion, for a long long time. It's been ten or fifteen degrees warmer average temperature than it is now for most of the last couple of billion years.

I'm not saying Venus has a stabilised temperature; I'm saying it has a temperature *now*. Insufficient information to get an epochal temperature profile, though, just models.

There's nothing to say that the average temperature of the earth should be what it is today; it's the balance of a number of factors. Those factors include average CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases, ice cap coverage, desertification, forestation, algal activity, volcanic activity, and no doubt a thousand other things.

My point is that while individual processes may involve negative feedback, there's no overall negative feedback stabilisation effect.

An example: atmospheric oxygen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen) is unstable over time.

This thread is suggesting that the rise and fall of temperature on earth has nothing to do with CO2, but instead with the activity of the sun.

In the latter half of the 17th century there was very little sun activity and the Thames routinely froze over.

In the latter half of the 20th century the sun has been at it's most active for 8000 years, and the global temperature takes a sharp turn upwards just like it does every 8000 years.

It's most likely both, but climatology is one of those sciences where there's still a vast amount we don't know.

We know that in the long term climate isn't stable - over the past 100 million years there have been times when London has been under meters of ice and times when it has been a sub-tropical jungle. The climate now doesn't so much suit us as we suit the climate - we've evolved to match the climate as it changes, the things which didn't evolve in the right direction are now part of the 99.9% of all species ever to have lived which are now extinct.

The big picture is that in all of the vastness of space this little bit of real estate is the only spot which can support human life and while we don't understand the climate we understand that it's madness to fail to curtail our tinkering with it.

There's certainly good evidence that we're living in an ice-age.

Exactly, and in 99.9% of all the possible directions the climate could take over the next few centuries, we'll be just fine and so will the planet. It's pointless trying to speculate or force a certain outcome, we can only live as we know how and adapt to any changes as they happen.

I'm not entirely convinced we're on the same page of the hymn book here, but I'm heading off to my company BBQ in half an hour, to release a few more grams of laid down carbon into the atmosphere, so I'm not really inclined, qualified or entitled to rattle the green sabre

Oh dear, this Friday will be a load of doom and gloom. Evidently the scientists are now 95% sure that it is warming and 50% of that is man made. Although they also admit that the surface temperature of the earth has hardly moved since 1998.

I wonder who funds these buffoons?

What continues to annoy me about this stuff is that it takes the focus away from the real issue of waste and pollution. What this is a classic example of is FUD (Fear uncertainty and doubt), a classic tactic that nutty conspiracy theorists and religious fanatics use

Many parties have an interest;
The greens - they just don't like cars.
The veggies - they don't like people eating cows so blame them for methane (wonder if brontosaurus farts killed the dinosaurs off)
Do gooders - they jump on may band wagons.
Government - excuse to raise taxes further.
etc etc

The bit I love is the reporters (BBC 10 O'Clock news last night was a prime example) where a reporter flew to India, drove up to an glacier and then told me how pollution was melting it, turning it black and melting it some more. Brilliant.

BBC breakfast today was laughable. Lets interview some residents of eco-friendly houses to get the answers. Bloody hell why not ask Prius owners about the rise in petrol. Why does someone become a spokesperson for global warming based on the house they live in? These people were spouting out their own doom and gloom theories with absolutely no scientific credentials.

When the next space mission news breaks maybe we should ask the bloke who lights the bonfire night fireworks about rocket theory.

Aye, there's the rub. I fear that the true significance of this observed discrepancy over the past fifteen years, between predicted rises and an observed weak decline, is going to be lost. The establishment position at this point is that yes, we are confident that our CO2 output will continue to warm the atmosphere up, but no, we don't understand why it hasn't been doing that for fifteen years.

The proper scientific stance, surely, would be to infer that the warming model used to predict a long-term increase in temperature omits (unknown) factors which have the demonstrated power to cancel that effect out. So until those factors have been identified, the long-term prediction must be ill-founded. That would be the proper scientific approach, as far as I understand it.

The proper scientific stance would be to publish "global warming" as a theory. this theory would be complete with gathered scientific data, analysis and would be open for the "scientific" community to challenge. The global warming science often seems to be a bit sketchy yet certain isolated items get cherry picked and sold to the populous as proof positive that the whole theory stands up.

My own take is that yes we probably are having an effect on global temperature. But I, like John, question if this really is the real and immediate issue that our planet faces?

My own belief is they are hitting with the wrong end of the bat. It's the removal of vegitation that's having the greater impact, not only do plants absorb the suns engergy but they also convert CO2 and retain vast amounts of water in themselves and their surounding environment. Worse still the green bits are replaced by concrete and tarmac!
I really do believe that in the past plants have been the great equaliser. Spouting about a few cars that can't produce as much harmful gas in a year as a volcano can in a day of eruption is scaremongering.

The biggest threat we pose and what faces the planet is the destruction of what millions of years of evolution has created.