GLOBAL WARMING FREEZES UP

On the heels of record freezing weather in Europe, there was a story this week (carried by the Drudge Report and WorldNetDaily so you may have seen it) about a Russian scientist predicting global cooling.

Russian astronomer Khabibulo Absudamatov expects a “decrease in the flow of the Sun’s radiation,” over the next several years which will lead to cooling, not continued warming of the planet.

While his prediction may be right, he is wrong about the cause. As discussed in Solar Warming last September, it’s not the sun’s heat radiation causing a warmer earth, it’s the sun’s magnetic activity.

It is Absudamatov’s colleagues who understand this, and unfortunately they were not mentioned in the news story.

Vladimir Bashkirtsev and Galina Mashnich, senior researchers at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics of the Russian Academy of Science have made a $10,000 bet with British government climate expert James Annan that in ten years the Earth will be cooling, not warming.

They made their bet after studying sun spots, the giant bursts of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Sun spot activity has been incredibly massive for the last several decades, leading to global warming – but now, say Bashkirtsev and Mashnich, this activity is rapidly decreasing.

Thus they predict that by the middle of this century the whole planet may be plunged into a repeat of the “Little Ice Age” of the late 1600s when the Po River in Italy froze solid.

In Solar Warming, we discussed the cost-free solution to global warming: Let the world’s airlines use high-sulfur jet fuel while flying at cruise altitude.

The solution to global cooling is the mirror image of this: Have international jetliners burn their fuel “rich” at altitude. Give them a tax credit as an inducement.

They would continue to use the low-sulfur fuel they do now. At cruise altitude above 30,000 feet in the stratosphere, the pilots would adjust their fuel rate to burn 1% more jetfuel. This would produce a lot of smoke. (Way high up and not that noticeable from the ground.)

(Yes, just this tiny adjustment of 1%. Try this experiment. Have your car idle for a while so the engine is hot. Then put a single drop of motor oil on the exhaust manifold. You’ll be amazed at the clouds of smoke.)

The smoke contains minute particles of carbon or carbon aerosols that have the opposite effect of sulfate aerosols. The sulfate aerosols from stratospheric high-sulfur jetfuel will reflect the sun’s heat back into space, thus cooling a warming earth. The carbon aerosols will absorb the sun’s heat, thus warming a cooling earth.

In addition, stratospheric carbon aerosols will block heat radiation from the earth’s surface from escaping into space at night.

Carbon would have other uses as well to prevent global cooling. Spreading a thin film of carbon dust over the snow-covered Arctic and ice-covered Arctic Ocean will help melt the snow and ice, exposing ground and water with a much lower albedo, absorbing rather than reflecting sunlight.

We need not freak out over global freezing any more than global warming. There’s no need to get paranoid about either. Just remember that, as explained last December, To The Point is your Paranoia Antidote.