Global Warming Continues to Cool

Would you believe that no matter how cold its getting there are still people who insist its happening because of global warming? Guo Hu, the head of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, linked January’s cold and snowy conditions to unusual atmospheric patterns caused by global warming. The United Nations has been insisting on global warming but Arctic air and record snow gripped the northern hemisphere the first week of January, inflicting havoc across China, India, South Korea, Russia, Western Europe, and the US plains, where residents were warned to “expect lethally cold temperatures of about minus 30C.” The icy conditions of Western Europe, which broke records in half a dozen countries in December, are expected to last for a good part of January.

A snowfall of 10 millimeters was reported in the southern suburbs
of Beijing where, according to the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV,
temperature s have fallen to their lowest in some 50 years.

The cold is again freezing oranges in Florida. Temperatures in Miami dropped to 36F; beating the record 37F set in 1938.  Officials are saying that hundreds of millions of dollars of food perished. Vegetables were among the hardest hit. At least one major tomato grower, Ag-Mart Produce, has already declared that most of its Florida crop is “useless due to the freeze.” Other vegetable farms were expected to lose their entire crop, and wholesale prices have already increased. “Tomatoes were down around $14 for a 25-pound box; now they are up over $20,” said Gene McAvoy, an agriculture expert with the University Florida, who predicted $100 million in vegetable losses. “Peppers — just after New Year’s they were $8 a box; now they’re up around $18.”

From corn to crude, prices for a wide range of commodities are
on the rise across the globe. In recent months, global food prices
have been growing at a rate that rivals some of the wildest months
of 2008, when food riots erupted across the developing world.
– January 9 Wall Street Journal

In the middle of December weeks before this present cold snap Eric de Carbonnel was already warning the world that. “There is overwhelming, undeniable evidence that the world will run out of food next year. When this happens, the resulting triple digit food inflation will lead panicking central banks around the world to dump their foreign reserves to appreciate their currencies and lower the cost of food imports.” Carbonnel reported that “the USDA has declared half the counties in the Midwest to be primary disaster areas, including 274 counties in the last 30 days alone. These designations are based on the criteria of a minimum of 30 percent loss in the value of at least one crop in the county.” It’s a devastating story Carbonnel tells and I will be publishing about this in Agricultural Apocalypse and in The Crushing Weight of Chaos, Upheaval, and Social Unrest.

A farmer and his tractor in Denshaw near Oldham, as heavy
snowfall continues across most parts of the UK.
Photograph: John Giles/PA Archive/Press Association

Shivering Britain faces the prospect of gas supply shortages as the worst cold spell in 30 years keeps a stranglehold on that country. The National Grid yesterday issued only it’s second-ever warning that demand for energy is threatening to outstrip available supplies unless industry quickly slashes its consumption and more gas is rushed in from abroad. The alert prompted the wholesale cost of gas to rocket by 70 per cent and raised fears that businesses and households could soon be hit by power cuts if the freezing weather persists as forecast for the rest of the month. Britons have been warned to brace themselves for an increase in food prices as plunging temperatures leave farmers unable to harvest vegetables and haulers struggle to distribute fresh produce.

Icy weather struck elsewhere in Europe, including Scandinavia, where temperatures plummeted to negative 41 degrees Celsius (minus 42 degrees Fahrenheit) early Wednesday morning at Roros Airport in Norway’s mountainous central region. It was the coldest reading recorded in mainland Norway since 1987, and the freeze was so deep that conventional liquid deicers were ineffective. Air traffic control chief Lise Faksvaag Dukan told national broadcaster NRK that frost had to be removed from the planes manually, using space heaters.

In Ireland, 6,000 acres of potatoes remains unharvested and there are claims that up to three-quarters of the crop may be ruined. Potato growers in Northern Ireland say they are facing some of the biggest losses in recent history because of frost damage. Meanwhile, greengrocers in some of the worst-hit areas are reporting shortages, with the price of carrots and parsnips reportedly rising by 30%.

Snow was piled so high in Iowa that drivers couldn’t see across intersections and a North Dakota snow blower repair shop was overwhelmed with business as residents braced in early January for heavy snow and wind chills as low as 50 below zero.

Another ice age really would be a problem. Imagine half of North America buried under ice — it once was and could happen again. So whatever happened to global warming? None of the above information fits with warnings from scientists that the Earth is warming because of greenhouse gases. But what do the experts the mainstream media likes to promote say about the killer cold? As predicted they say that the cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming at all — it’s just a blip in the long-term heating trend. It’s just a blip chilling everyone’s bones in the northern hemisphere setting off record snows and cold temperature. Yes El Nino is a factor but not for the whole northern hemisphere nor does it explain the cold summer in the state of San Paulo in Brazil this year.

Geophysicist Phillip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and president of the National Space Society, says the sun’s spotlessness could be temporary, but if the muted activity continues, it may be a sign of much colder times ahead. “The next Little Ice Age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do,” Chapman says. “It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning. During the Maunder Minimum, in the depth of the Little Ice Age, hundreds of thousands of people in Europe died from starvation when the climate turned rainy and cold and cut short the growing season. We’re being told there’s global warming, but I think we’re headed in the other direction . . . we’re right on the precipice of the next ice age. When it happens, we’ll be fighting in the streets for food long before we’re covered by ice.”

NASA solar physicist David Hathaway says “if the sun remains in its sleepy state, we could see a replay of the Dalton Minimum (a period of very low solar activity when sunspots numbers peaked at only 50), which occurred two centuries ago. During the Dalton Minimum (1790 – 1830), global temperatures plummeted, resulting in the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816. The abnormally cold weather destroyed crops in northern Europe, the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. Historian John D. Post called it “the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world.”

Still no mention of what is going on in the sun in the mainstream press; I imagine they don’t want to scare anyone. Scientists though continue to report on its inactivity while others are reporting about what is called Global Dimming, which is caused by the pollution caused by air traffic. Different scientists have reported that there is actually less sunlight hitting the earth’s surface and this phenomenon inverted the days after 9-11 when the government grounded all flights. One way or another there is less sunlight hitting the surface of our earth and this is having its effect on climate and agricultural conditions.

Special Note: The current record cold is not something new. Let’s go back to 2007. The Boston Globe reported that in South America, for example, the start of winter was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, “a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption.” In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country’s 24 provinces. In August, Chile’s agriculture minister lamented “the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years,” which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.