A very accurate weather prognosticator in the UK fears we may be on the verge of a mini ice age. Adding to his credibility in this matter are his accurate predictions of the arctic freezes that has crippled Europe for the last three years—a time when UK government scientists—perhaps with global warming models dancing in their heads—were predicting mild, damp winters. From the story:
Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again. Back in November, when the Met Office was still doing its “mild winter” schtick, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. Indeed, it was back in May that he first predicted a snowy December, and he put his own money on a white Christmas about a month before the Met Office made any such forecast. He said that the Met Office would be wrong about last year’s mythical “barbecue summer”, and he was vindicated. He was closer to the truth about last winter, too.
Rather than obsess on CO2 levels, he focuses on issues that would seem to more directly impact weather:
He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles. He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time - and he makes a prophecy.
Based on what he sees, Corbyn worries we may be heading for real cold:
Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.
I am certainly not arguing that we base policy on the purported coming frigidity. No global freezing hysteria here. But Corbyn’s accuracy—and other similar stories—should give a clue to GWHs as to why so many people aren’t joining them in panic:
Is he barmy? Of course he may be just a fluke-artist. It may be just luck that he has apparently predicted recent weather patterns more accurately than government-sponsored scientists. Nothing he says, to my mind, disproves the view of the overwhelming majority of scientists, that our species is putting so much extra CO? into the atmosphere that we must expect global warming.
The question is whether anthropogenic global warming is the exclusive or dominant fact that determines our climate, or whether Corbyn is also right to insist on the role of the Sun. Is it possible that everything we do is dwarfed by the moods of the star that gives life to the world? The Sun is incomparably vaster and more powerful than any work of man. We are forged from a few clods of solar dust. The Sun powers every plant and form of life, and one day the Sun will turn into a red giant and engulf us all. Then it will burn out. Then it will get very nippy indeed.
Yes, indeed. That’s an important, and legitimate question that doesn’t make those who wonder akin to “deniers of the Holocaust,” as some GWHs have maintained.
When GWHs yell that catastrophic human-caused warming is a fact—when, it is at best, a theory, perhaps even a hypothesis—not only do they lack humility in the face of a system of nearly infinite complexity, but they risk ridicule if they are wrong—and terrible damage to our economies if we follow them like the mice after the Pied Piper.
Catastrophic predictions are often so far out in time that the prognosticactors will never be held to account—although the story yesterday about the snowless winters the UK was supposed to be experiencing by now was a juicy exception. But this report of how the same experts who claim to be able to model climate in 30 years hence, but can’t predict the weather months ahead correctly—and yet a quality scientist who kept to the the basics did, and sees a different future based on other important climate factors—illustrates why GWH is counter productive.
