An odd prediction: global cooling

With all the talk about global warming lately, how do you feel about an organization that predicts that global cooling may be in our future instead?

Last year, this organization did very well with it's North American forecast, predicting above-normal snowfalls in the Northeast and drier weather elsewhere. As you will recall, Toronto and other cities broke snowfall records.

We're talking about the Old Farmer's Almanac, which has just published its latest edition. Founded in 1792, The Almanac is the oldest continuously published periodical in North America. It uses a complex formula for it's forecasts, based on sunspot cycles and other factors. The publication says that solar activity and marine temperatures indicate that, contrary to public opinion,  a cold climate may be in our future for maybe the next half-century.

If they're right again, we will need to stock up on oil and gas for more heating.  Is it possible that we'll have record demands on energy, while global temperatures go down instead of up?

It's an intriguing question. 

You can read more in the articles listed below.

USA Today story on the Almanac

Almanac: 2009 predictions for Canadian weather

How The Old Farmer's Almanac predicts the weather

The Almanac's article on the possibility of climate cooling.

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I'm back in in the province of Alberta for a few days and it's interesting to see how weather patterns appear to be similar to Southern Ontario this summer.

Everything looks green from the air, indicating crops and fields have good moisture. High, thick clouds gather in the afternoon and bring summer showers . I assume they're welcomed by most farmers and gardeners. Toronto has had the wettest June and July on record and continues to get an afternoon or evening drenching just about every day.

Of course we wonder if this is a new phase in the global warming trend, but we won't know for a few years until a trend is established. Last year, it was hot and dry in Southern Ontario. This year seems the opposite.

Just as the technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of no real growth in the economy, we can't be sure whether this year's weather is truly related to climate change.
We'll ask the meteorologists when they're finished analyzing the data.

Meantime, we can carry sunscreen with an umbrella on the side.

What spectacular sunsets tell us

We had some spectacular sunsets last week. In this photo, the CN Tower in Toronto looms over the Rogers Centre under an orange-red sky.

At about the same time, coverage of the Chicagoland Nascar Sprint Cup race in Joliet, Illinois, paused for some incredible high definition beauty shots of the red sky over the race track.

Talking it over with Duilio Zane (my father and the photographer who took the stills shown here), the question arose whether the sunsets are becoming redder because of a higher concentration of atmospheric pollution.

Scientific American writes that a higher percentage of aerosols, particles suspended in the atmosphere, can result in the scattering of light waves resulting in a predominance of oranges and reds. These particles can arise from the burning of fossil fuels and the release of sulphur dioxide into the air.

So the redness in the sky indeed may be caused by internal combustion engines and their exhaust. However, when pollution is very heavy, the sun appears misty and out-of-focus, not clearly defined as it has been on some recent nights.

The magazine points out that aerosols in the sky can also come from natural sources like forest fires and volcanic eruptions.

Well, neither of those were present in Toronto and Chicago last weekend.

But this brings us to another interesting connection. A team at the Observatory of Athens is studying the paintings of old masters to see if they can learn something from the colours of their sunsets. Specifically they want to learn how natural climate change in the past can be used to build better computer models for the effects of global warming.

In the last century, a huge amount of natural pollution was thrown into the sky by volcanic eruptions like the one that shook Indonesia in 1883 when Mount Krakatoa blew its top. These eruptions changed the colour of the sky for years afterward, and paintings from those periods show a lot of orange and red in the sky. See Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893).

By analyzing the colours and feeding the data into computers, scientists hope to understand a modern effect called "global dimming, " which relates to how increasing pollution paradoxically may be slowing global warming.

No matter how one looks at them, summer sunsets are fascinating phenomena.


For more information see "How old masters are helping study of global warming"

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Photos courtesy of Duilio Zane

An urgent call for action

I must say it gave me a special kind of pleasure watching and hearing news excerpts of today's speech by former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore's speech in Oslo today, as he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

It seemed a powerful, clear and dramatic speech. The kind you want to hear on grand, ceremonial occasions like this one; the kind you wish you'd hear more often from the present leaders of the world's superpowers.

Evoking Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi and other luminaries, Gore made a strong plea for immediate action to save our planet from environmental disaster. In accepting the prize together with the UN climate panel and it's leader Rajendra Pachauri, Gore said humanity risks "mutually assured destruction" if we don't act now.

"We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war," he said.

Gore made a special appeal for the United States and China to make bold moves on climate change or "stand accountable before history for their failure to act."

"It is time to make peace with our planet. "

Later in the evening, he was joined by Pachauri and their wives on the balcony of the Grand Hotel in Oslo, where they were greeted by crowds of supporters. The public filled the streets of the Norwegian capital, under Christmas decorations.

It was a particularly important day for Gore, who took on his environmental crusade after that controversial and close political defeat seven years ago in the U.S. presidential election. His wife Tipper, one of his most public supporters, was beaming by his side.

Later this week, Gore will be taking his message to the international conference on climate change in Bali, Indonesia.

If the world's leaders can't agree on ways to reduce harmful emissions, let's do our part at the neighbourhood level and let's also find ways to support our youth -- I'm confident they have the drive to make a critical difference.

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To read excerpts of today's speech, click here:

To see photographs of the Nobel ceremony and acceptance speech, see this link.
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The photo of our planet was taken by the crew of Apollo 16 in April of 1972. Courtesy NASA through http://www.pdphoto.org/.