Global Warming Update: Expect Cold. Ice Cold.

Another no-count, dufus scientist who can't screw his head on right has parted company with the Warmies and declared the global warming hysteria to be hooey.

The goofball is just professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge's department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics. What a loser, past presidency of the Royal Astronomical Society notwithstanding.

He's Nigel Weiss and he's a sunspot guy. Sunspots, he says, have a profound effect on the earth's climate:

Weiss, 70, a native of South Africa, says sunspots are the markers of changes in solar activity. ... "If you look back into the sun's past," he says in the interview, "you find that we live in a period of abnormally high solar activity."

But these years of hyperactivity don't last, says Weiss. "Perhaps 50-100 years, then you get a crash. It's a boom-bust system, and I would expect a crash soon." According to Weiss, the sun's polar field is now at its weakest since the 1950s. When there is a crash every 200 years or so, sunspots vanish, solar activity declines, and the globe cools dramatically. These phenomena are known as "grand minima," and they have occurred with rough regularity over at least the past 10,000 years.

Notes Weiss, in the 17th century, sunspots almost completely vanished for around 70 years. That coincided with the Little Ice Age, when Viking colonies fled Iceland, Finland lost 50% of its population, and New Yorkers could walk on the ice from Manhattan to Staten Island.

By contrast, says Weiss, long periods of solar activity, such as we have experienced in the last 50 years, can produce dramatic warming. The example was the Medieval Warm Period, which drew the Vikings to Iceland and created a thriving wine industry in England - the source today of much dirty dancing among policymakers looking at the so-called `hockey-stick' climate record of Michael Mann et. al. (Source: Ken Maize's PowerBlog)

Meanwhile, the Warmies are all for scientific inquiry:

The Weather Channel's most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. ...

Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program "The Climate Code," is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their "Seal of Approval" for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.

She's got a lot of nerve. TV weathermen can't even get the weekend weather right and she questions those who question their ability to get the next couple of centuries right?

Hat-tip: Greenie Watch
Related Tags: Global warming