Australian Scientist Warns about Coming Ice Age

Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer. Phil was the first Australian to become a NASA Astronaut. Phil’s worried about global cooling.

Phil documented his concerns and some of the reasoning behind them in Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh, which was published earlier today in The Australian.

The article is a great read and is quite well documented:

All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

Why is this global cooling occurring? Sunspot activity. Sunspots follow an irregular 11 year pattern, but this time the pattern has fallen behind schedule. The last time this happened was in the 1790’s and it resulted in several decades of cool Summers and bitterly cold Winters.

But that’s not as bad as it could get. Phil also writes about the odds of our planet returning to a more historically “normal” climate:

The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.

The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.

The article is a good read and it’s great fun to send to your friends who are still worried about global warming.