Global cooling on the way? Be prepared!
The climate is changing. We can agree on that.
The question is what is driving it, and what we can or should do about it. And possibly in which direction the wind is blowing.
In a recent short paper (by J. KAUPPINEN AND P. MALMI, June 29, 2019) the researchers demonstrate how natural changes in humidity explain, much better than, e.g., CO2 emissions, the variations in global temperatures over the last half century.
Variations in low cloud cover, and their corollary, changes in relative humidity, seem to be an order of magnitude more important for explaining both the general trend rise in global temperatures and even more so regarding the interimistic drops in temperature. The latter is of course wholly unexplained by the steadily rising levels of CO2.
The authors conclude that “During the last hundred years the temperature is increased about 0.1°C because of CO2. The human contribution was about 0.01°C,” i.e., “we have practically no anthropogenic climate change. The low clouds control mainly the global temperature”
Note (Note: the paper has been criticized here). The results, however, have been corroborated by a team in Japan: “New evidence suggests that high-energy particles from space known as galactic cosmic rays affect the Earth’s climate by increasing cloud cover, causing an ‘umbrella effect’“
It’s not us
So, humans aren’t doing it. Therefore there’s really no use in trying to reverse the effects by unnecessarily restricting human activity. Quite the contrary, actually. If galactic rays are causing temperatures to rise through changes in relative humidity and cloud cover, we’ll need all the human ingenuity and creativity we can muster in order to find out how to live and thrive in a much warmer world, including potentially higher water levels and frequency of extreme weather.
You can’t predict, but you can prepare
This is no joke. In fact, space weather changes could even cause a cooling before a warming, with potentially just as adverse effects. No matter which way the galactic gods lean in this respect, it’s better we come prepared, even if we can’t predict the outcome.
Winners from warming
No matter, the green revolution is still good for many things, not least combatting pollution (whether slightly warming or not), and fanning (!) innovation. So don’t give up on your recycling efforts just yet. And solar power is still our best bet long term to make sure our energy needs are met in the future, so if you like your solar companies you can keep them. The warmth of the sun is our cleanest, safest and most abundant source of energy. But we need to keep inventing better ways to capture and store it.
The corporate winners in this scenario will be solar energy capture and energy storage companies, including the entire value chain of industrial suppliers of complementary factory parts, not to mention finance companies (huge investments in storage infrastructure will be required once solar energy dominates the power supply).
However, even more interesting will be the opportunities within construction and construction materials. Imagine all the levees to be built, water-proofing solutions needed for buildings and other equipment, not to mention all the new buildings required higher up on dry land, to replace the multitude of new Atlantises being created.
And then there is the insurance business (extreme weather, remember?).
What about losers? Well, there’s the oil industry of course. And retail: the money to pay for all the new infrastructure must come from somewhere; my guess is higher housing and insurance costs will diminish the room for non-essential shopping for the bottom 99 per cent.
Tougher times might mean higher aggregate demand (whoa, Keynes!), but the resulting higher GDP doesn’t mean ordinary people will benefit. All the extra efforts are just going toward strengthening or moving all the things we’ve already got, rather than producing new and life-enhancing stuff
