As anybody interested in history knows, periods of global cooling, even by a degree on average, lead to food shortages, spread of disease and 'social unrest'. There's no recorded instance of global warming leading to anything bad - those have been times of recovery, expansion and discovery. The people in Doggerland just waded ashore and did the same thing somewhere else.
As anybody interested in pre-history knows, for the last million years or so, planet earth has been in Ice Ages most of the time, interspersed with brief inter-glacial warm periods in approx. 100,000 year cycles. If the pattern persists, we'd assume that temperatures today are as high as they will get (give or take a degree) and will start gradually going down again. We might get a mini ice-age in the next century or a proper Ice Age in the next millennium, who knows what and when. Both will be bloody awful.
Hey ho, say the contrarians, it's global cooling we should be worrying about, not global warming.
The Warmenists blow hot and cold on this, pun intended, and haven't quite worked out which is the scarier scare story:
According to The Guardian:
Roughly every two years we’re treated to headlines repeating the myth that Earth is headed for an imminent “mini ice age.” It happened in 2013, 2015, and again just recently at the tail end of 2017.
Pots, kettles.
The most important takeaway point is that the scientific research is clear – were one to occur, a grand solar minimum would temporarily reduce global temperatures by less than 0.3°C, while humans are already causing 0.2°C warming per decade. So the sun could only offset at most 15 years’ worth of human-caused global warming, and once its quiet phase ended, the sun would then help accelerate global warming once again.
Which is what you expect the Guardian to trot out, fair enough.
Slightly more radically, according to thoughtco.com:
Some scientists believe that an increase in global temperature, as we are now experiencing, could be a sign of an impending ice age and could actually increase the amount of ice on the earth's surface.
The cold, dry air above the Arctic and Antarctica carries little moisture and drops little snow on the regions. An increase in global temperature could increase the amount of moisture in the air and increase the amount of snowfall. After years of more snowfall than melting, the polar regions could accumulate more ice. An accumulation of ice would lead to a lowering of the level of the oceans and there would be further, unanticipated changes in the global climate system as well.
Yup, global warming causes global cooling. So if we actually do enter a mini ice-age, the Warmenists won't accept that it was caused by volcanic eruptions, lack of sun spots, planetary alignments, the shape of the earth's orbit etc, the usual explanations, oh no... That's a win-win argument, and a scarier scare story IMHO.
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As ever, I wish the Warmenists would agree between themselves what their story is, rather than pushing mutually exclusive arguments. They are just as bad as Home-Owner-Ists.
Debate Magazine
