Is this a preview of the climate change to come?

Our family has been so preoccupied with the insanity of the global warmists that we have not taken a good look at the oncoming threat of 20 years of global cooling until very recently.

The latest series of snow storms have dumped several feet of snow on our property in Floyd VA and we have been fortunate to have our neighbor Rodger Bower to dig us out each time we became snowbound.

Because we have been getting mixed snow and rain, the snow becomes so heavy that it is very difficult to shovel. If we did not have access to someone like Rodger and his tractor, we would have been confined to the house for weeks at a time. The snow was deep enough that the usually reliable all wheel drive Subaru could not get us out to the plowed road.

We have been very fortunate this year, but I am beginning to wonder what will happen when the winters are significantly longer and colder. Are we going to be able to handle months and months of deep snow drifts and 10 degree weather?

We have been able, with the help of friends and family, to amass a store of firewood that was many times larger than what we gathered in previous years, but we have burned our supply faster than in any previous year.

We will need to cut and split another few cords of wood to make it through to warmer weather. Fortunately, we have a supply of standing dead trees that can be easily dropped and rendered into usable firewood. I can see several years supply, but I wonder what will happen when the several years of colder weather turn into a decade or two?

Our backup heating is electrical baseboards which work like a charm but are quite expensive and are used as a last resort. I shudder to think what out heating bills would look like if we had propane or electrical heat.

Global cooling will seriously impact our growing seasons. Our micro garden (foot square gardening) was barely satisfactory because of the short growing season. Local farmers were also affected and did not have the crop yields they had last year. If we are in for a long siege of shorter growing seasons, I am sure that we will soon be constructing greenhouses to make the most of the cooler summers to come.

People are resourceful when pressed to the wall and I think we will see many changes in how we heat our homes, how we grow food, and how we live during the colder years to come.

 Our clothing styles may even change as time goes on. In May, we will change from our winter mukluks to lightweight summer mukluks. You read it here first...

Comments

[Zack]

Local weather does not equate to global climate. The EPA site shows that from 1901-2005 southern USA was cooling while most states were heating up. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/recenttc_tempanom.html

This could be a continuation of that trend.

Also note that polar regions are heating twice as fast as the rate of the rest of the world (from the EPA site) the loss of these cold zones will have unknowable impact on our lives since many ocean and wind currents are driven by the differing temperature zones. Some side effects include rising water levels, changing currents, and weather. The biggest problem is that we do not know the effects and may not be able to stop it.

When you argue that carbon sequestration is a huge boondoggle, do you take into account that man does contribute much carbon that would not otherwise be added to the atmosphere? There are other gasses that contribute as well but only by controlling variables can we learn about the problem.

CO2 may not be the only culprit but there seem to be measured correlations of CO2 and temperature and controlling for that allows us to learn more.

In general I am all for manufacturing having to pay for environmental impact of production. There is no penalty to using a dirtier process since the environment is essentially the village green. See "problem of the commons" for game theory regarding exploitation of common resource. The heart of the problem is that whoever exploiting as much of a common resource as possible is how companies get ahead.

Until we can hold companies accountable for all waste and pollutants produced and charge effectively for the process then there will be uncontrolled pollution and in a global economy there will always be countries that have no controls in place. It is a really nasty problem.

[David St Lawrence]

I would have thought the same, except that I rely on different data than the EPA does. The EPA is still operating on the basis that global warming is real and that the hockey stick model is still valid.

You will get different results if you plug in data from more accurate sources. The "polar region heating" is similar to the "Bolivia Effect" which is simply that there are no measurements being made in those areas and the data is being fudged with data from adjacent areas.

See:

"Is the NULL default infinite hot?", By E.M. Smith on http://icecap.us/index.php
also:

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/ghcn-gistemp-interactions-the-bolivia-effect/

Another point you may have missed is that water vapor is being shown to contribute much more to global climate change than CO2.

"Water vapour worse climate change villain than thought" By Shanta Barley, New Scientist, also on http://icecap.us/index.php

[Zack]

Icecap.us is run by the same guys who run heartland institute. Funding comes from many sources but in past heartland institute had a significant presence of energy interests.

Also heartland institute has mainly scientists in the pay of oil and energy institutions. Their list of scientists have hundreds of names yet only a couple have training in climate science. The heartland institute was originally a tobacco lobby group and as such they are strongly connected with junk science used to pollute policy debates as in the "tobacco does not cause cancer" debacle.

They have 2 scientists that seem to be credible yet neither have published anything recently that has been peer reviewed, only PR pieces which leads me to think this is a lobbying group and not a science center.

Icecap by using heartland as a major reference source and sharing most its scientists is similarly tainted. Many of the members are associated with right-wing think tanks as advisers or experts which makes their claim as independent science a lie. They also seem to rely heavily on meteorologists rather than climate scientists. And while meteorologists are fine for saying it is sunny today they are just about irrelevant given their training does not actually cover climate analysis. (climatologist opinion - http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0122-climate.html)

As far as I know there is no scientific organization that still disputes climate change. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

As for polar ice caps the data I was using only looked at measurement stations and was not averaging and did show high polar temperature change around each station. You can pull this data from the nasa data site - http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2009&month_last=12&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=12&year1=2009&year2=2009&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=250&pol=pol

[David St Lawrence]

Zack,

That's the same tired argument you used a while ago.

As for meteorologists rather than climate scientists, the current head of IPCC is neither. Right now the fraud count for climate scientists makes that one of the professions that has a lower reputation than lawyers.

Let's check back next year and see if the global warming meme even exists except as a SNL laugh line.

If, on the other hand, someone actually starts repairing the ground stations and moving them to the rural areas they were designed for, I will begin to take notice again.

[Bob Ferris]

Dear David,

Since I recently visited Floyd and am in DC getting pummeled by this current storm and cannot go out, I thought that I’d chime in on this thread. You are making a common mistake and equating snow with cold. In point of fact, it does not snow when it is really cold because cold air has nothing to dump. Warmer air, however, is more water rich and that is when we see lots of the white stuff. The folks at Time Magazine covered this counter-intuitive puzzler recently: (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1962294,00.html?hpt=T1).

In terms of the climate change beast collapsing under contrarian science and the PR campaign waged by interests vested in energy profits, I would not count on that any time soon. The science is extremely solid and has for a long time been accepted across the board—even by scientists working for energy companies (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/science/earth/24deny.html). And all this is likely to become more and more public as lawsuits launched by our nation’s first climate change refuges enter the discovery phase (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/business/energy-environment/27lawsuits.html?th&emc=th).

As one who has been involved in this issue for more than two decades, I find parts of it amusing as well as sad. I remember spending quite a bit of time with senior executives in the energy field in the early 1990s discussing carbon trading and potential mitigation approaches. Some of us even helped them develop multi-faceted strategies to purchase forest lands that could not only sequester carbon but provide wildlife benefit as well. It seems strange that all the work we did together was for a non-existent problem and all the land that these companies purchased in the South and in South America was just done on a silly whim. (I am trying hard not to be facetious here.)

Bottom line is that I agree with Zack, but am open to new lines of reasoning.

Bob Ferris

[David St Lawrence]

Bob, I am sure that the science of global warming seems quite solid to a reader of Time Magazine and the New York times.

Carbon trading is probably more lucrative than commodity trading to those with an inside position.

I am sure that if global warming occurs, you will be appropriately positioned to take advantage of it.

I will continue to prepare for what is more likely to happen. Let's compare notes next year at this time.