Everyday, it's a-getting closer...

... going faster than a roller coaster. So sang Buddy Holly back in 1957, but it is actually to the early 70s that we are travelling today.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, that nice Croydon-based fellow has pointed out that we can look forward, once again, to parties on the frozen Thames.

"Temperatures on Earth have stabilized in the past decade, and the planet should brace itself for a new Ice Age rather than global warming, a Russian scientist said in an interview with RIA Novosti Tuesday. "Russian and foreign research data confirm that global temperatures in 2007 were practically similar to those in 2006, and, in general, identical to 1998-2006 temperatures, which, basically, means that the Earth passed the peak of global warming in 1998-2005," said Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of a space research lab at the Pulkovo observatory in St. Petersburg".

Well, knock me down with a feather! As young Croydonian observes with an entirely undue level of cynicism—ahem—

Good job a certain lobby started referring to climate change rather than global warming a while back, eh?

Indeed. This was, of course, only for our benefit: the scientists are only trying to protect us from ourselves.

And there's more:

"By 2041, solar activity will reach its minimum according to a 200-year cycle, and a deep cooling period will hit the Earth approximately in 2055-2060. It will last for about 45-65 years, the scientist added. "By the mid-21st century the planet will face another Little Ice Age, similar to the Maunder Minimum, because the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041," he said".

Shall we remind ourselves of what some of those scientists—many of whom are still around, and pontificating wildly, today—said back in the 1970s? [Emphasis mine.]

Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend… But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.—Peter Gwynne, Newsweek, April 28, 1975.

[T]he threat of the new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.—Nigel Calder, International Wildlife, July, 1975.

The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations… If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000.—Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, 1976.

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since World War II is also in accord with the increased global air pollution associated with industrialisation, mechanisation, urbanisation and an exploding population.—Reid Bryson, Global Ecology: Readings Towards A Rational Strategy For Man, 1971.

An increase by only a factor of four in global aerosol background concentration may be sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5 degrees Kelvin… sufficient to trigger an ice-age.—Dr S I Rasool and Dr S H Schneider, Science, July 9, 1971.

This last is quite interesting, because then Dr Schneider pops up again, describing nicely the climate change advocates' methodology.

[W]e have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.—Quoted by Jonathan Schell in The Fate Of The Earth, 1982.

Of course, the earth hasn't suddenly started cooling really, or not yet at least. Why?

For the very simple reason that there was no warming in the first place; as I have pointed out before, the only warming trend that we have seen was in the "adjustments"—for which read, "corruption of the data to fit the hypothesis"—made by climate scientists after the raw data had been taken.

Without their positive bias, the raw data shows no significant warming trend at all. Further, if we accept that many of the measuring stations are now in "warmer areas"—i.e. they are now near roads, or heat exchangers, or are in any other way affected by the warmer air of a city or town when twenty years ago they were not—surely any bias applied should be a negative one.

In other words, in terms of the raw data, there is no real warming. If we were to apply a sensible negative bias, the US data would actually show a cooling trend.

No doubt scientists will, once the evidence becomes incontrovertible, attempt to convince us that we must all prepare ourselves for disastrous cooling; they will be no more correct on that than they were on the warming. Except...

We have quite a severe problem. As I have documented before, food prices are rocketing; grain prices have risen by something like six times in the last year and there is a worldwide shortage. This has been partially caused by bad harvests, but also by the turning over of land to biofuel production. And the EU has not only been instrumental in this, but has also fucked things up royally by selling grain stocks whilst simultaneously decoupling subsidies from production.

Worse, we have seen what happens when we move from a relatively warm period into a colder one.

When the Mediaeval Warm Period established hold, it was a time of then unprecedented affluence in Britain: the warm weather resulted in consistently good harvests and the population of Britain grew massively; and, given the economies reliance on harvests at the time, people in general became much richer.

Conversely, as the Little Ice Age hit, so were the harvests leading to the Great Famine of 1315–1317.

The Great Famine of 1315–1322 was the first of a series of large-scale crises that struck Europe early in the 14th century, causing millions of deaths over an extended number of years and marking a clear end to an earlier period of growth and prosperity during the 11th through 13th centuries. Starting with bad weather in the spring of 1315, universal crop failures lasted through 1316 until the summer of 1317; Europe did not fully recover until 1322. It was a period marked by extreme levels of criminal activity, disease and mass death, infanticide, and cannibalism. It had consequences for Church, State, European society and future calamities to follow in the 14th century.

We are, relatively speaking, far richer now than we were at that time but we should not be complacent; it is becoming increasingly likely that, whilst we will not starve (or, at least, not in the West), we may well have to tighten our belts somewhat.

Whilst I would not like to conjure up any hypobolic scenarios of the type that the AGW doomsayers indulge in, I do at least have history on my side.

But, on an upbeat note, the sudden impact of colder weather did have a very positive outcome: it forced humans to adapt, and quickly. As such, as the Little Ice Age started, there then followed several centuries of incredible technological and industrial progress. We can hope that any severe downturn in our fortunes would be accompanied by a similar burst of development.