Global cooling?
Forget global warming; we may be on the brink of another ice age, a handful of scientists are warning.
Tsuneta said solar physicists aren’t weather forecasters and they can’t predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Coincidence? Some scientists say it was, but many worry that it wasn’t.
This isn’t exactly new news. NASA has been warning about this solar inactivity since the first of the year. And, just last month, NASA announced that cooler waters were being observed in the Pacific, heightening concerns of a period of global warming. What is new is that some scientists are becoming increasingly vocal about the possibility of a sustained cooling period. In fact, they’re holding conferences on the subject just as their counterparts are on global warming, but cooling doesn’t warrant the media hype of warming. Which is why a meeting on the subject, including more than 100 scientists from around the globe, at Montana State University earlier this month went virtually unreported.
In the meantime, Australian geophysicist Phil Chapman says that the Earth declined by seven-tenths of a degree on the Celsius scale between January 2007 and January 2008, the fastest temperature decline since the invent of measuring instruments, and putting the average global temperature back at where it was in 1930 . . . off-setting decades of warming.
If most scientists are right, the activity on the face of the sun will soon resume, and the cyclical period of cooling will end. But there are a few who watch, and wait, and wonder: What if?