Global Cooling is the Real Crisis

Scientist: Global Cooling is the Real Crisis

Global warming conference participant says reduced sunspot activity may cause extreme cold fatalities, mass starvation.

May 17, 2010

Business & Media Institute - Most of us have heard or seen what global warming alarmists say the consequences will be if something isn’t done to limit man’s impact on the environment. Al Gore, in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” warns global sea levels will rise by a whopping 20 feet, causing coastal flooding and creating a refugee crisis.

Others aren’t quite as gloomy, but that’s not the real threat to the planet.

At the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change on May 17, Professor Don Easterbrook of Western Washington University warned that the climate is headed for a period of cooling. He told the Chicago gathering of hundreds of scientists and policy professionals that there are three possibilities of cooling, examples of which we’ve seen within the last 200 years.

“I think that there’s three possibilities that we’re headed for,” Easterbrook said. “One is cooling similar to 1945-1977 — about a half degree. Not really all that bad. Perhaps something similar to the cold period of 1880-1915, to perhaps the Dalton Minimum, which would be even colder. And which of these happens, it remains to be seen.”

The Dalton Minimum, named after the English meteorologist John Dalton, was a period of low solar activity lasting from about 1790 to 1830 that resulted in a two-degree drop in global temperature.

Easterbrook explained that any significant drop — from a half-degree to two degrees — would have a much worse impact on human civilization than global warming.

“Impacts of global cooling are unfortunately worse than they are for global warming,” Easterbrook said. “The good news is that global warming is over for several decades. The bad news is that its going to be worse than global warming would have been because twice as many people are killed by extreme cold than extreme heat. We’ll have a decrease in food production. It’s already happening in various parts of the world.”

And just as global warming alarmists suggest the poor will be hit the hardest, so would the poor when it comes to a global cooling phenomenon.

“Hardest hit will be third world countries where millions are now near the starvation level. We will have an increase in per capita energy demands — people will want to keep warm — and a decrease in the ability to cope with a population explosion, which is happening and is scheduled to increase the population of the world by 50 percent in the next 40 years.”

And Easterbrook advised those in attendance not to be too narrow-minded, but instead rely on the actual science.

“So my conclusion is then that, keep an open mind, let the data speak for itself, and my hypothesis is provable, it’s testable with time,” Easterbrook said. “So if I live long enough, I hope to see whether my prediction is right.”

Cold Suspected in Chesapeake Fish Kill

January 5, 2011

UPI - Maryland officials say they are investigating a large fish kill in Chesapeake Bay, but suspect cold temperatures, not water-quality issues, were responsible.

The Maryland Department of the Environment estimated 2 million fish have been reported dead in the upper bay, The Baltimore Sun reported Wednesday.

Bay water quality tested as acceptable and biologists said they believe "cold-water stress" was the probable cause of the mass kill, department spokeswoman Dawn Stoltzfus said.

The dead fish are primarily adult spot with some juvenile croakers, she said, and spot are susceptible to colder water and normally leave the upper bay by this time.

Water temperatures plummeted in late December to 36 degrees, a near-record low for that time of year, Stoltzfus said.

Large winter kills of spot have been seen at least twice before, she said, with about 15 million dying in early 1976 and a smaller number in 1980.

Antarctic Cold Snap Kills Millions of Aquatic Animals in the Amazon

August 27, 2010

NatureNews - With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere's recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country's tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.

Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history.

"There's just a huge number of dead fish," says Michel Jégu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. "In the rivers near Santa Cruz there's about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of river."

With such extreme climatic events potentially becoming more common due to climate change, scientists are hurrying to coordinate research into the impact, and how quickly the ecosystem is likely to recover.

The extraordinary quantity of decomposing fish flesh has polluted the waters of the Grande, Pirai and Ichilo rivers to the extent that local authorities have had to provide alternative sources of drinking water for towns along the rivers' banks. Many fishermen have lost their main source of income, having been banned from removing any more fish from populations that will probably struggle to recover.

The blame lies, at least indirectly, with a mass of Antarctic air that settled over the Southern Cone of South America for most of July. The prolonged cold snap has also been linked to the deaths of at least 550 penguins along the coasts of Brazil and thousands of cattle in Paraguay and Brazil, as well as hundreds of people in the region.

Water temperatures in Bolivian rivers that normally register about 15 ˚C during the day fell to as low as 4 ˚C.

Hugo Mamani, head of forecasting at Senamhi, Bolivia's national weather centre, confirms that the air temperature in the city of Santa Cruz fell to 4 ˚C this July, a low beaten only by a record of 2.5 ˚C in 1955.

Dearth of surveys

But exactly how the cold temperatures caused such devastation remains a mystery. So far, there have been no rigorous surveys of the ecological damage, only anecdotal observations.

Fons Smolders, a fisheries scientist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, is one expert who has visited the area and is keen for the phenomenon to receive proper study because such freak climatic events may become more common in the future.

Often, when cold weather causes fish deaths in lakes, the mortalities are directly due to hypoxia, when oxygen levels are too low to supply the animals' cells and tissues. This is because the colder surface temperatures can reduce mixing in the water column.

Because the deaths occurred mainly in rivers, Smolders suspects that they are linked to infection.

"Some of the fish that I saw had white spots that may indicate disease. The cold probably made them very susceptible to all kinds of infections," he explains.

"When fish die, it's usually not a single stressor, but multiple stressors interacting," agrees Steven Cooke, an aquatic ecologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, who last year wrote a review of cold shock in fish. "So, if cold shock or cooler temperatures are being implicated in mortality, there's probably something else going on as well."

Most of the research in the field of cold shock in fish has been carried out on rivers in temperate climates, rather than tropical ones. For example, fish in temperate rivers often die when a power station pumping warm water into a river suddenly shuts down.

Jégu has another hypothesis. He thinks that the burning of farmland around Santa Cruz, a regular part of the farming cycle locally, has occurred at particularly high levels this year. That might have been a contributing factor in the fish deaths, possibly because the smoke added to river pollution.

"We hope to secure financing for these studies to find out why the fish are dying," he says. With luck, and money, these will start in October.

Recent Mass Bird and Fish Deaths