World might be heading towards Ice Age
Economic Times ^ | April 23, 2008
World might be heading towards Ice Age
23 Apr, 2008, 1327 hrs IST, ANI

CANBERRA: Scientists have warned that the world might once again be heading towards an Ice Age, with global warming approaching a possible end.

Evidence in support of this theory has come from pictures obtained from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which showed no spots on the sun, thus determining that sunspot activity has not resumed after hitting an 11-year low in March last year.

A sunspot is a region on the sun that is cooler than the rest and appears dark.

Some scientists believe a strong solar magnetic field, when there is plenty of sunspot activity, protects the earth from cosmic rays, cutting cloud formation, but that when the field is weak - during low sunspot activity - the rays can penetrate into the lower atmosphere and cloud cover increases, cooling the surface.

According to Australian astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman, this might have caused the world to cool quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C. (This is a gift from God – to save the US from further eviscerating itself with global warming legislation. -- Congress will not be stopped this year as all of them are beholden to special interest groups for their financial support, -- it will be two years of public outrage to slow this freight train and get its direction changed.)

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," said Dr Chapman.

"If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over," he added.

Dr Chapman has proposed preventive, or delaying, moves to slow the cooling, such as bulldozing Siberian and Canadian snow to make it dirty and less reflective. (This is so naïve – first because of the immense size of the area he wants plowed – there are not enough bulldozers in the world to plow up all of Siberia and Canada and add Alaska to this mix in a matter of weeks to be effective. Secondly this would be such damage to all of these “Pristine” areas. The environmental movement has locked up all of ANWAR in Alaska not willing to give oil companies even a 200 acre footprint for drilling oil wells and then running a 30 meter wide strip for an elevated pipeline to transfer oil to the existing Alaska pipeline.)

"My guess is that the odds are now at least 50:50 that we will see significant cooling rather than warming in coming decades," he said