What if it’s really global cooling?

April 3
It snowed all day yesterday. This morning we have freezing fog and whiteout conditions. It’s April.

What the heck happened? Are we going to have a Spring at all?

Or since we live in Scandinavian settled territory, is this the Fimbulwinter? The long winter before the doom of gods and men?

I always caution not to draw conclusions about long-term climate trends from atypical seasons. We’ve always had long hot summers, long cold winters, cool summers, warm winters, etc. It’s just
weather!

But I’m going to indulge in some speculation. Don’t take it too seriously because I don’t. So what if the long-term trend is not global warming but cooling?
We know there have been periodic ice ages throughout the history of the earth, and we’re about overdue for one.

The chief rival to the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis (APG) is the solar hypothesis, the notion that average global temperatures are controlled by solar radiation, not earthly factors.

Since we seem to be entering a period of diminished sunspot activity, that could mean a short-term trend of long hard winters. Long-term, who knows?

But even assuming the APG hypothesis is correct, the result might be the same. I vaguely recall some years back a scientist speculated that an ice age might start with a period of global warming, resulting in more evaporation of water, blocking sunlight and falling as snow which reflects more light from the surface, etc.

Or perhaps we are affecting the weather and human activity either alone or in conjunction with diminished solar activity is beginning to cool the earth.

Something we have now that is different from any time in human history is high altitude air travel. And there is a lot of it.

High altitude jets discharge exhaust into the stratosphere. Not a lot per plane, jets are very efficient, but there are a lot of jet liners flying around the world.

One proposal I’ve seen for countering global warming was to require passenger jets to slightly de-tune their engines, thus discharging a bit more sooty exhaust which would block enough sunlight to cool the earth.

What if that has already happened? What if air travel is one reason global warming hasn’t happened as quickly as predicted?

And what if the increase in world-wide commercial air traffic has or will soon reach a tipping point, significantly cooling the earth?

Will we have shorter growing seasons, creating food shortages? Or will agriculture move south into newly fertile deserts? Will we see migrations south from the north temperate zone, reversing the current trend? Will the great glaciers return carving the landscape into new shapes?

Or will we decide we have to significantly reduce high-altitude air travel? And what would that do to our economy?

Most long-distance cargo freight is by ship and rail, but for passenger travel we rely mostly on airplanes and cars. Could we go back to trains and ocean liners?

I love the comfort of trains and the adventure of ships, but they’re slow. On the other hand you can have an Internet connection on board these days.

Or perhaps the age of the great airships would return. Stately liners of the sky flying low and slow.

As I said, it’s only speculation. Don’t take it seriously, and do dress warmly.

A collection of Steve’s columns, “The View from Flyover Country: A Rural Columnist Looks at Life in the 21t Century” is available on Kindle.

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