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Friday 16 December 2011

Global cooling?

It is still unwise to predict how our climate will change in the medium term, let alone long term, but evidence of cooling continues to grow. This post from NoTricksZone is worth a read.

Of course cooling would be far more dangerous than warming - we'd need more than windmills to keep warm. Shale gas would help, as would ministerial sanity. Which one is more easily developed though?

4 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Yup, global cooling was always the one that really scared me.

A K Haart said...

MW - me too.

Rob Pattison said...

I'm not keen on cooling either. But something I don't understand about CO2. At Vostok where the ice cores come from it is often below the temp at which CO2 becomes solid. Wikepedia says that it is so cold that the CO2 freezes out of the air and the scientists find it hard to breath. If so then what happens to the CO2 in the ice cores? Wouldn't the readings be lower because of this - or not?
Rob

A K Haart said...

Rob - − CO2 doesn't become solid until - 78.51 °C so most of the time it would stay gaseous. I'm a little wary of CO2 measured in ice cores because we don't really know how it would change over long timescales.