The Earth’s temperature for the month of October was the second-warmest since records began in 1880, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The month’s average temperature of 58.2 degrees was 1.1 degrees above the 20th century average of 57.1 degrees, trailing only October 2003. For the Earth’s land areas, it was the warmest October on record.

And this NOAA data does include the correct October temperature data for Russia...unlike NASA’s October data released last week, which caused the agency to end up with egg on its face. After NASA announced that October was the warmest ever recorded, eagle-eyed bloggers at skeptic blogs Climate Audit and Watts up with that pointed out that the data from Russia was for September, not October. Of course, this skewed the global temperature higher than it would have been.

Even if you don’t agree with all (or any) of the points or claims posited by the warming skeptics, I think they are doing a needed service by keeping the climate change adherents, such as authors of the RealClimate blog, on their toes. RealClimate’s Gavin Schmidt addressed this in this post: “the extra attention has led to improvements in many products. Nothing of any consequence has changed in terms of our understanding of climate change, but a few more i’s have been dotted and t’s crossed.”

Indeed, as noted above, even with the correct October data from Russia, temperatures across Australia, Asia (including Russia), the western USA, eastern Europe, northern Canada, eastern Brazil, and the southern countries of South America were all warmer-than-average in October. And so far this year, 2008 is the ninth-warmest year on record for the planet, with all nine of the Earth’s warmest years occurring since the mid-1990s. See post here.

This is not surprising as NOAA has become the biggest outlier in recent months. They have thanks to Tom Peterson and Tom Karl a global data base that is worth nothing. There is little or no adjustment for urbanization, land use changes, no adjustment for bad station siting (69% of the 560 US climate stations surveyed by Anthony Watts team of volunteers were poor or very poorly sited), 2/3rds of the stations globally dropped out around 1990, the number of missing months increased tenfold in the FSU and Africa after 1990, and changes in instrumentation like here in the US that Tom Karl himself found produced a warm bias of 0.5F. All these introduce a warm bias, none of which are corrected for. Not less than 6 peer review studies (bold in references) have shown these issues may account for up to 50% of the warming since 1900. Trust only the satellite. In fact, this October was the 10th warmest of the 30 years of data for the MSU satellite according to UAH with only a 0.167C (0.3F) anomaly instead of the 1.1F (2nd warmest out of 129 years) as per NOAA. Unfortunately satellite data extends only back to 1979.

Over the last few years, the evidence that sunspots on our sun are directly related to climate change on earth has been steadily increasing. I explained the exact proposed mechanism in some detail previously. Great work in this field is being carried out by Dr Henrik Svensmark and coworkers in Denmark and elsewhere. Briefly, the mechanism is that cosmic rays impact on the earth from deep space. These cosmic rays penetrate our atmosphere and lead to the formation of cloud cover. The cosmic rays nucleate sites in the atmosphere, from which clouds form from the natural water vapour. If one puts a spoonful of coffee powder into a cup of microwaved water, the water forms bubbles of foam on the coffee grains. This is basically the same principle as the cosmic rays forming clouds in the atmosphere.

The earth’s magnetic field, which acts as a shielding, is altered by the sun’s activity, which, in turn, is indicated by means of the number of sunspots. As the earth’s magnetic shield varies, so the cloud cover varies. Few sunspots mean a weaker earth shield, which means more cosmic rays, which mean more clouds, which mean a cooling earth. The correlation for this effect, going back thousands of years, is good, remarkably so. Scientifically, this looks believable, and it is consistent with the theory and observation.

In contrast, the argument that man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) is causing warming does not fit the facts at all. Firstly, there was no industrial CO2 produced in vast quantities when the Roman Warming period occurred, or when the Medieval Warming period occurred. Both are well documented in various archives, such as the historical and archaeological.

But there is more - global warming is extremely complex, and it is really naïve to believe that a relatively simple theory will explain it satisfactorily. It is far too simple just to say: CO2 traps heat and, therefore, more CO2 means more heat, and so we have global warming. As the makers of heat-seeking missiles know very well, the CO2 in the atmosphere has ‘windows’ in it. This means that certain ‘heat frequencies’ pass through the atmosphere easily but other frequencies are trapped. It is these windows that the missile uses to hunt its prey. As a consequence, there are ‘frequency bands’ related to the CO2 cover of the earth. In various ‘bands’, the infrared passes through easily, or not so easily.

Further, CO2 can trap incoming heat from space and outgoing heat being radiated from the earth. The frequency bands linked to the CO2 also become saturated - they cannot just keep sucking up more and more heat. Essentially, this CO2 argument is very complex. Over the last century, the temperature changes in our planet’s atmosphere, let alone ground and sea, just do not match the atmospheric CO2 concentration at all. This is cause for warning bells that, perhaps, this whole CO2 argument is not correct. In comparison, the cosmic ray and sunspot information match well. However, as I have said, this whole atmospheric temperature issue is very complex, and no capable scientist in the field is going to say otherwise.

Right now, we have been experiencing a rather long period of sunspot inactivity on our sun, some 200 days plus. This has happened before. Formal sun- spot data collection started in 1749 and has been monitored ever since. But long before that date, sunspots were known and informal measurements were taken. It is, therefore, known that the Little Ice Age, which took place from the midseventeenth century to the eighteenth century, was preceded and paralleled by a period of some 50 years with a virtual absence of sunspots, according to informal records.

In more recent times, we have had relatively long periods without sunspots. This year, we passed the mark of 200 days without sunspots, which is unusual. In fact, the sun has been blanker now than in any other year since 1954, when it was spotless for 241 days, and this year is now being called the sun’s quietest year of the space age. The sun was also very quiet in 1913, so runs of 200-plus spotless days are rare, but not that rare. As I have already said, the global warming and cooling issue is complex, and so a run of 200-plus days without sunspots cannot be compared to a 50-year quiet period during the Little Ice Age, but it is cause for some scientific thinking.

Further, a cooling that could be initiated by a lack of sunspots will induce other climatic effects that will either favour warming or cooling. The jury is still out on exactly what happens, but the evidence for sunspot involvement in climate change is just too compelling for it to be brushed aside by those who want to cling to the simplistic idea that man-made CO2 is the only factor.

I read all this week with great attention all the discussion regarding the temperature data from NASA’s GISS and other sources. If the exact dimension of the positive anomaly in Russia can be disputed, there is no doubt October was much warmer than average in that region. Russian press reported it was the warmest October on record in Moscow.

The October global temperature discussions once more reveal how unreliable all these metrics are. In fact, I suggest the reading of a very interesting post I read this week at Climate Skeptic exactly on this matter.

I tell my listeners and reader over here in Southern Brazil that October was near average globally (UAH data), but in the next day there is a report on the papers and on television that the month was the warmest on record on Earth. Of course, the average listener and reader start to question where my first information was correct. NASA is contracting the information from the day before. Try to tell people that the agency that has sent the man to the moon cannot measure the temperature on Earth correctly and you get a credibility problem with regular people. But the readers of ICECAP are not regular people and they know NASA, in fact, had some serious problems.

Every month, I take a look at these global maps not only to track the planet trend, but also to compare with my local reality. It is common to see very important discrepancies. I believe much of you do the same and have reached the same conclusion. If Steve McIntyre was surprised to see the warmer than average October in Toronto, I can say the same on Rio Grande do Sul. Both GISS and Met Office data for last month indicated a warmer than average October in Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil where I live. Take a look at the circles in this map:

See larger images here

In fact, October was not 1C warmer than average here. It was very close to the average with some minor positive or negative deviations, depending on the station. It was a very wet month with a cold start. Both conditions prevented a large positive anomaly as depicted by GISS and the Met Office. For this matter, take a look at the maps for October in Brazil with the anomalies for low temperature (minima) and high (maxima). The maps were generated early this month by the officials Brazilian weather bureaus: Cptec and Inmet.

See larger images here

Temperature in the metropolitan area of Porto Alegre (4 million people) was 0.1 below average last month, but the same area appears in the map as above average. The truth it was a mild and comfortable October over here with few very warm days. I am sure the same discrepancies with local reality can be found in many other areas in the world. For that and other reasons, I still believe UAH and RSS are much more reliable. At least they do not have almost the entire African continent in gray. See full post here.

Here’s another way of looking at things: global warming is good. And if there’s any bad news at all about global warming, it’s that it might be about over. Some years ago I stumbled onto Charles Perry with the US Geological Survey in Lawrence KS when I was trying to track down some information on climate. In the scientific community, Charles has established himself as a firm believer that the harmonic cycles of solar output have huge cause-and-effect relationships with not only our short-term weather but also our long-term climate.

In brief, there’s nothing really constant about the amount of energy being emitted by the sun. It’s almost like the sun has a heartbeat - with waves of energy coming in on a roughly 11-year sunspot cycle. Those short-term cycles then make up larger and longer-term cycles. And in those cycles, which have been going on for thousands and thousands of years, Charles has documented alternating periods of warming and cooling. While global warming has gotten a lot of bad press today, Charles feels events in history show warmer climates have been accompanied by more rain, longer growing seasons, more crops and more land to settle on-times in which civilizations have prospered. Contrasting that are periods of global cooling - times in which human populations probably declined because of cold, drought and war.

As mentioned, Charles has correlated those alternating periods with events in history. For instance, there was a warming period from 33,000 to 26,000 years ago which may have allowed the Cro-Magnon Man to migrate northward and populate Europe by blending in with or eradicating the resident Neanderthals. Another warm period ushered in the Bronze Age,which began about 3800 years ago. During this favorable climatic period, people migrated northward into Scandinavia and reclaimed farmland with growing seasons that were at that time probably the longest in more than 2000 years.

The great empires of the Bronze Age came to an end with the Centuries of Darkness chill, but warming returned during the Greco-Roman Age. During this period, philosophy made its first important advances with the thoughts of Aristotle. However, when the climate cooled again, the Roman Empire ceased. A flourishing Viking culture in Greenland met the same fate during the Little Ice Age, which ran from about l280 to l860. The little ice ages are cooler periods, which last several centuries. They occur about every l300 years. By the year l000, the Vikings had discovered Greenland, where their settlements started producing wheat and livestock. But after l200, the climate began to cool rapidly. The frozen harbors of Greenland failed to open in the summer -thus, trade with Europe dropped off sharply. By l400, Europe’s contact with Greenland had been lost. A slight warm-up about l500 allowed ships to make it back to Greenland, but by then the stranded Viking population had starved to death - with their graves becoming shallower and shallower as the permafrost returned.

Many today say our current global warming is because of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Charles disagrees. He says while we do have global warming, it’s still not to the same level as when the Vikings were farming in Greenland. “Therefore, the magnitude of the modern temperature increase being caused solely by an increase in carbon dioxide appears questionable.” On the other hand, solar output variations to climate change may be significant. Read more here.

The USA has two daunting problems - the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression; and President-Elect Obama’s energy policies, which will severely deepen the economic crisis. Obama stated in a San Francisco Chronicle television interview that he wants to implement an aggressive CO2 cap-and-trade system that could bankrupt coal companies.  He further stated that energy prices will necessarily skyrocket.  Obama believes that global warming is a critical issue, and he supports the use of solar energy, wind power and biodiesel. To his credit, Obama also supports a market approach and technological development.

In 2007, US primary energy consumption consisted of oil (40%), natural gas (25%), coal (24%), nuclear (8%) and hydroelectricity (2%). As a percentage of total proved reserves of fossil fuels, the US holds just over 2% of the world’s oil, 3% of natural gas, but almost 29% of global coal. See this.

Energy projects have been constrained due to fears of catastrophic global warming, allegedly caused by increased atmospheric CO2 from burning fossil fuels. However, global warming is just not happening anymore. For the last decade, average global temperatures have not increased. Since January 2007 all global warming has disappeared, as average temperatures plummeted to 1979 levels - when accurate satellite measurements began.

Global cooling is now occurring and is expected to continue for the next twenty to thirty years, due to the recent shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from its warm to cool phase. See here and here.

Despite shrill claims of ice cap melting, Arctic sea-ice extent is now at its highest seasonal level since modern satellite measurements began in 2002 – more evidence of global cooling. For decades, the US has experienced a huge balance of trade deficit, due primarily to high oil imports. Energy self-sufficiency has been the goal of recent US Presidents, without success. There is now an opportunity to address both these serious challenges, by rejecting global warming myths and creating an energy strategy based on true, verifiable facts.  Here is the outline of a responsible and economic Energy Strategy for America:

1. Reject CO2 taxes and cap-and-trade measures used to “fight global warming”. Examine the satellite data, the only accurate global temperature measurements in existence. Climate Dyslexics please note: The Earth is cooling, not warming. Global cooling should last for twenty to thirty years and could be severe. 

2. Generate much more electrical energy from abundant US coal reserves. Use existing technologies to control real atmospheric pollution from SOx, NOx and particulates, but do not control CO2. In the future, if CO2 sequestration becomes economically attractive (for enhanced oil recovery) or is proved necessary (in the unlikely event that global warming becomes a real problem), retrofit the coal plants with expensive CO2 recovery equipment at that time. 

3. As rechargeable battery technology continues to improve, electric and gasoline-electric light vehicles will become commonplace.  The power infrastructure already exists to fuel this fleet, and refueling can be done during off-peak periods, when power plants are underutilized. This major change in the light vehicle fleet will shift energy consumption from foreign oil to domestic coal.

4. Re-examine corn ethanol and wind power, which do not work economically or effectively. Corn ethanol for motor fuel requires huge ongoing subsidies and severely distorts food prices. Wind power also requires big subsidies, and almost 100% backup with conventional power generation. Wind power can also cause critical instabilities in the electric power grid. Conduct a full-life-cycle energy balance on corn ethanol, wind power, biodiesel and solar energy, and also examine the environmental demands and pollution associated with these so-called “green” technologies.

5. Re-examine hydrogen. It is an energy medium, like electricity, but if implemented would require a huge new hydrogen infrastructure to be built at great cost, for no environmental or energy gain.

6. Avoid energy subsidies, especially ongoing operating subsidies, which distort economic decisions and create expensive industrial and environmental boondoggles. Wind power and corn ethanol may prove to be two such costly mistakes.

Instead of skyrocketing energy prices, this Energy Strategy for America will result in lower costs, improved balance of trade, and in time could even provide energy self-sufficiency for the USA. Read more here.

Allan M.R. MacRae is a Professional Engineer and writer on energy and the environment. In 2002 he predicted in a newspaper article that global cooling would recur. He does not work in the coal industry, accepts no compensation for his writing and holds no coal investments