...so we need to keep burning coal to stave off an Ice Age seems to be the implication. Trouble is millions of people aren't coping with heat and drought abound now. 2023 was a hot year globally and southern Australian cities had a record summer. Some farmers couldn't justify watering heat damaged crops which were left to die.

If a cosmological cooling trend is discernible by 2050 that will be compounded by fossil fuel depletion. Those who can afford them will be driving EVs since there will be no petrol. More reason to find alternatives to fossil fuels sooner rather than later.

And still we continue to churn out more and more homo sapiens.
8 plus billion and increasing.
The cause of ALL our problems.

All the more reason why Australia needs to start generating power from MSR Thorium reactors which will produce cheaper electricity than anything else that will be available by then.

David

I agree with Ateday.

I do support the reduction in and eventual elimination of the use of fossil fuels, but only for the correct reasons, not in order to induce hysteria for political ends.

Neither electrical vehicles nor nuclear reactors are the answer, because they both are complex to produce, requiring massive international cooperation and therefore depend on keeping human population in the billions - but do prove me wrong on that: if they and all their components and know-how can be produced locally without too much sophistication, then I do support them.

Conventional light water reactors take years to build and cost billions! The rare as platinum uranium needs costly enrichment.

SMRs however, can be mass produced and dozens built in a factory setting annually!

The problem with either is the pressure required to keep super-heated steam as a liquid coolant.

MSR thorium, on the other hand, operates at ambient air pressure. Which reduces the build cost substantially. The metal thorium needs no enrichment, just two weeks in the blanket of a nuclear reactor to convert non fissile thorium into fissile U233. Making it the cheapest source of power!

Moreover, it is also carbon free. The fact that they are small and modular means they can be sited close to the consumer. Ending the need for miles of wire! And the majority of transmission and distribution losses, which in total today, average around 75% combined.

We entered a waning phase or cool/mini-ice age period in the late 1970s. This also saw a period of record heat waves and hottest days on record.

Australian families produce 1.3 children per couple. So, we need migration to increase the population. It's not us that are breeding like rabbits, but Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Perfected, Chinese made thorium reactors are for sale off the shelf at prices we could come close to with Australian made.

The Australin government needs to remove the self-imposed embargo on nuclear power and allow co-ops and councils to buy ready to generate, Chinese MSR thorium.

The free market is built on healthy competition not captive markets/price gouging foreigners charging whatever the market can bear.
Alan B.

Could come close to, should read, couldn't come close to.
Alan.

>Have we entered an era of global cooling?

We can empathically answer that as a NO

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-global-temperatures-years-today-unprecedented.html

Valley Guy. I take it you are a highly credentialed climate scientist able to refute the combined scientific ecumene of NASA And their solar observation/weather satellites.

Scientifically, I'd rate you still stuck in the dark ages on a flat earth, with "rocks" for brains/echo chamber.
Alan B.

The Roman Peak was around 0AD which had Rome at its peak.
Then Rome declined down to around 450 500 or so AD with falling crop
yields. Then the well known Medieval Warm period 1000 when the Vikings
settled on Greenland and started knowledge of Nth America.
They packed up and left around 1400 as it got too cold to farm in
Greenland. Then another 400 years later the Little Ice Age
arrived around 1800.
The cycle seems to be between 800 years and 1200 years long.
So I think it is too soon to expect a drop in temperature.
We probably need to wait another 100 years or so to feel the chill.

This cycle has been known for years and years but the global warmers
don't want to know.
Some scientists believe it is made up of multiple cycles.
The Milanovitc cycles the variation in cosmic rays modulating cloud cover and of course to quote someone "Its the Sun Stupid !"

There is no such thing as a "climate scientist".

Geologists are the closest to such a description, and their evidence has told us the climate mumbo jumbo is hysterical crap and lies.

Fortunately climate change deniers are a tiny but veracious minority. And will not prevail against the voting majority.

Change need not tank the economy, just the very opposite.

Change cannot include the asinine labor renewables (cult) ideopolitical imperative solution, which will tank the economy and destroy essential local economy dependant, discretionary spending.

Change must include nuclear power as MSR thorium and with it PKWH prices as low as 3 cents or less. Or as MSR nuclear waste burners almost free, burning mostly unspent fuel we are paid millions to take.

If it matters, both those options are also carbon free. And will create a new manufacturing economy here at home that ends our insane reliance on China for manufactured durables. We could have a car manufacturing industry again and an aerospace industry that manufactures planes and space craft.

We can also have all manner of heavy industry and a defence self reliance industries that we can afford!

When the energy bill became higher that the wages bill, most industry headed offshore. We can reverse that in spades and resuscitate our manufacturing sector, always provided we can get rid of (Chinese loving) labor!
Alan B.

Agree Alan, we are being led by the nose to disaster.
However climate change is a fact but it has nothing to do with co2.
Unfortunately the upsurge in the use of coal at the Little Ice Age
minimum 0f 1800 coincided with the start of temperature rise in the
current cycle.
There you are said the co2 fanatics just as the Industrial revolution
got under way.
And they still haven't twigged !
It is like the electric car introduction is thought to be because
of co2 raising the temperature. It was going to happen anyway.
The electric car introduction came about because the car makers were
given the drum by the oil companies. The last thing they wanted to do
was design a whole new range of cars.

Sometime in the next 100 years or so it will become obvious that the
whole global warming stunt was not real but a major blunder !
Paint it on your house; "I TOLD YOU SO !"

VERY helpful article, as I was starting to forget about Abdussamatov, and Tom Harris also mentions [Svensmark, Veizer, Shaviv, Zharkova]. I guess Abdussamatov may not have mentioned the [process, probability, timing] of going back into deep glaciation over the next 70ky or so. I doubt he follows astronomical concepts such as the Milky Way current sheet and potential solar micronova (or some other) events (6 & 12ky periods for our Sun?) as seen in other stars. Concepts are like stars in the night sky, filling space then standing silently as we super-impose our interpretations in some tiny pocket of it. I comment in a blog below about a 1ky history cycle.