Good morning!
I see you have been doing your homework / paying attention.
We should at least take precautions, yes. However I will note, that the Little Ice Age had fallen 4 degrees C from the height of the MWP, and we've regained 2.5C of that since the heart of the Little Ice Age, 250 years ago. So even if things do begin to fall into another LIA, we've got some time to go.
At the least, we are looking at 30 to 90 years of cooler temperatures. Will it get as cold as the LIA? I rather hope not. On the other hand, interglacials tend to last about 11,500 years... and we're past that point now.
I note below someone extensively refer to Wikipedia. I'm afraid one of the moderators there, William connolley of the UK, is extremely biased towards 'man-made' global warming, and has gone so far as to alter over 5000 articles submitted by over 2000 other people, to make it sound like they all favor the idea that humans are responsible for the current round of warming. He also banned most of those people from Wiki, so they could not fix the errors he built into their articles.
I would recommend Judith Curry http://judithcurry.com/
Or Anthony Watts http://wattsupwiththat.com/
And a good source for reading materials on climate change is Tom Nelson http://tomnelson.blogspot.ca/
In any case, we should be prepared for Cooling. Though I could wish the Earth would at least regain MWP temperatures. I've long grown tired of winter, and harsh winters are clearly coming back, world-wide.
What are you doing, trying to start alarmism in the other direction now?
You are right that all indications are that the planet is cooling, but maybe we should take our finger off the panic button for a few minutes. After all we've had it pressed for more than thirty years and all the dire predictions of doom and gloom turned out to be wrong.
And actually a temperature drop of a half degree Celsius would put us right back on the normal line.
The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity. I hate to break the news to you but we don't have any control over the Sun.
So just chill out for awhile... OK?
-----------------------
If the average global temps rose 10 C or even 15 C tomorrow it would still take 10s of thousands of years for all the ice to melt off the poles and Greenland.
You suprised me thought this was another AGW rant...
On cooling, yes its gonna get colder for at least a few decades. Most of the projections are that it will not be significatn enough to worry about. I do not beleive it is possible to properly prepare for a possible Maunder minimum type of event or even worse.
If such occurs then large parts of the world will go VERY hungry. The world does not have enough spare production capacity for food to store up enough researves to make a meaningful difference on a global scale. Some nations with high agricultual output, US for example, could stockpile enough to ensure all those in the US have enough food and possibly all of North America. However to do that they would have to all but cease exports. You could guess what that would mean.
Does 4.5 billion years of Earth's existence compare to 30 to 35 years of climate science studied by climate scientists (paid for with Government money) that were instructed to show that a recent warming period was catastrophic and was simply in revolt to oil embargos that had happened in 1973 and in 1979?
Margaret Thatcher in 1988 hated that Great Britain's energy costs were being controlled by Oil Cartels and then by Union Coal Miners. She had an opportunity with nuclear power to gain an independence from the controls of "outer influences" and also to gain favor from environmentalists. She wasn't as GREAT as she seemed!
A straight doesn't beat 3 of a kind when it comes to actual science according to climate scientists!
Quote by Will Happer, Princeton University physicist, former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy: “I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism....I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect....Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science. The earth's climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past.”
Notice: "There is no evidence that changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past."
So what are you proposing? That we should start worrying about something which we have no control? Just should we do? Raise taxes? That should solve an environmental crises, if there is one. How about enacting tyrannical laws, like the one that sent a man to jail for collecting rain water on his own property? That really is a good solution.
History shows, that the more tyrannical laws we let those in power enact, the more they howl for greater restraints. No problem is solved but these 'saviors of the world' cry out even louder for our subjection to their tyrannical rule. No scientific problem has ever been solved concerning the atmosphere by these so called 'saviors of the earth'.
Quotes by H.L. Mencken, famous columnist: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed ― and hence clamorous to be led to safety ― by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." And, "The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it."
If you productively want to worry about the future, worry about evil governments and the rising debt crises. Eliminating those would have more of an impact on the quality of life on earth than getting more ice for polar bears.
The most recent ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. The earth is currently in the midst of a natural warming cycle, which (in my opinion) is being accelerated by greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by humans. This warming cycle will likely last for hundreds of years, before going the other way. Don't let the short term re-freezing of the Arctic fool you into believing that the earth is cooling...because it's not. Climate change indicators all over the globe show a steady rise in global temps., despite this "blip" of cooling you heard about recently. A greenhouse gas which gets little publicity is methane. It is 24 times as potent as carbon dioxide, and increasing all the time. So unless the earth's atmosphere isn't saturated with the ash of a super volcano in the near future, you can expect global temps. to steadily rise for at least the next century or more.
Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will have many effects
Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will continue to increase unless the billions of tons of our annual emissions decrease substantially. Increased concentrations are expected to:
Increase Earth's average temperature
Influence the patterns and amounts of precipitation
Reduce ice and snow cover, as well as permafrost
Raise sea level
Increase the acidity of the oceans
Yes I think so, it does look like more cooling is heading our way, the low solar activity (and we are at a solar peak) should finally answer the question of how much effect the sun actually has on our climate.
It is up to you if you should be worried, as for me I pay more attentions to the thousands of reputable scientist, rather then politicians, "think tanks", or news outlets who large rely on advertising dollars for funding.
Lets have a look at Will Happer, who Sagebrush "quotes".
Will Happer, is the Chairman of the Marshall Institute [1], an American politically conservative think tank! A former director of the Marshall Institute, Matthew B. Crawford, has stated "...the trappings of scholarship were used to put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise. These positions served various interests, ideological or material. For example, part of my job consisted of making arguments about global warming that just happened to coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies that funded the think tank." [2]
Sagebrush also has the tendency to misquote [in this case a lie by omission] and for accuracy let me post the full quote by H.L. Mencken, "Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary." [3, 4] For the quote to be relevant he has to show that 40% increase of atmospheric CO2 levels is imaginary, or that Co2 is not a greenhouse gas.
Ironically sagebrush posts this partial H.L. Mencken quote AND pushes some alarmist rhetoric about evil governments (those governments are presumingly persuaded by the thousands of scientist all over the world, who conspiring in order to increase taxes on the worlds population.)
The Antarctic ice is melting at an extremely slow rate, and the Arctic is re-freezing at slightly above normal rates (compared to recent years), solar activity is tanking now that the maximum has passed (weakest since the Dalton Minimum. Everything is pointing toward a cooler climate. Should we be worried about the cooling climate, because we are only a few degrees from a full force ice age. Should we at least take precautions and keep an eye on what could happen, which would be mass famine if the climate cools even just a half a degree.
It's really worrisome when knowing of these things which are eventually happening .And the best solution for this is to minimize the use of energy because the energy we used every day releases gas which makes the world hot and melts the ice so no we should start first saving energy at home.
No, not unless the flow of warm water across the oceans stop.
Yes, the lower lands face an imminent danger.
