An interesting juxtaposition from a warmist and a denier.

Whilst I am firmly in the camp of the latter, I do not relish the prospect of being frozen like this (and more) every winter for the next 15 or 20 years).

First, the warmist :

Time to spend more money preparing for colder winters?

By Philip Eden Vice President Royal Meteorological Society 2007-09

December 2010 is every bit as cold and snowy as the worst December of the 20th Century – 1981 – and it could well turn out to be the coldest December since 1890.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Transport Secretary Philip Hammond has asked the government’s chief scientific adviser whether we might expect more severe winters in the coming decades, and whether we ought to invest in more equipment to keep our infrastructure moving during months such as this one.

…

I am often asked whether the last two winters mean that global warming has ended.

This is an important question, because it emphasises how much confusion there is about the difference between weather and climate.

Weather is caused by disturbances within the atmosphere, but climate is controlled by external influences, such as the distribution of oceans and continents, the extent of ice and snow-cover, variations in the amount of energy from the sun, and changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

Climate is the underlying average, or if the climate is changing it is the underlying trend, whereas weather is the noise in the system.

We have always had huge day-to-day and year-to-year variations in our weather, and we always will do, and a couple of cold winters are no more evidence that climate change has stopped than a single summer heat-wave proves that global warming is happening.

What can be said with very little doubt is that, once this cluster of cold winters has finished, we will have another lengthy run of mild and rainy ones, and if we spend piles of cash on snowploughs and de-icing equipment, we may come to regret it.

I like the last bit there – a little like spending piles of cash on the Met Office to pay for forecasts only to find out that they spend the money on lobbying government to tax the fuck out of everyone to ensure a supply of sacrifices to the great warming pixie in the sky.

Secondly, the denier (emphasis mine) :

The sun went spotless yesterday, the first time in quite awhile. It seems like a good time to present this analysis from my friend David Archibald. For those not familiar with the Dalton Minimum, here’s some background info from Wiki:The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity, named after the English meteorologist John Dalton, lasting from about 1790 to 1830.[1] Like the Maunder Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Dalton Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. The Oberlach Station in Germany, for example, experienced a 2.0°C decline over 20 years.[2] The Year Without a Summer, in 1816, also occurred during the Dalton Minimum. Solar cycles 5 and 6, as shown below, were greatly reduced in amplitude.

I predicted in a paper published in March 2006 that Solar Cycles 24 and 25 would repeat the experience of the Dalton Minimum. With two years of Solar Cycle 24 data in hand, the trajectory established is repeating the rise of Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum. The prediction is confirmed. Like Solar Cycles 5 and 6, Solar Cycle 24 is expected to be 12 years long. Solar maximum will be in late 2014/early 2015.

The prediction there (in case you are completely baffled by that excerpt) is that we are just at the beginning of a minimum in solar output which gives much colder temperatures than the warm period we have been getting used to.

The so-called Little Ice Age was the last major solar minimum (to a much greater extent than the Dalton minimum mentioned in the excerpt above.

As for cold, it was more than just a touch chilly (from wiki)  :

The Little Ice Age brought colder winters to parts of Europe and North America. Farms and villages in the Swiss Alps were destroyed by encroaching glaciers during the mid-17th century.^[16] Canals and rivers in Great Britain and the Netherlands were frequently frozen deeply enough to support ice skating and winter festivals.^[16] The first River Thames frost fair was in 1607; the last in 1814, although changes to the bridges and the addition of an embankment affected the river flow and depth, hence diminishing the possibility of freezes. The freeze of the Golden Horn and the southern section of the Bosphorus took place in 1622. In 1658, a Swedish army marched across the Great Belt to Denmark to invade Copenhagen. The Baltic Sea froze over, enabling sledge rides from Poland to Sweden, with seasonal inns built on the way.^[17] The winter of 1794-1795 was particularly harsh when the French invasion army under Pichegru could march on the frozen rivers of the Netherlands, while the Dutch fleet was fixed in the ice in Den Helder harbour. In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing that island’s harbors to shipping.

Whilst we do not know yet how this will play out, I certanly hope that it is the start of a series of long cold winters, if only to make our rulers see how they have behaved like a bunch of pricks sniffing around the cock-tease that is the AGW strumpet.

One of the comments on the Dalton Minimum article sums it up very nicely :

I am of the mind that we need to start seeing a significant drop in temperatures for the sake of humanity. For all the damage this would do (crops would suffer, millions would die of starvation and cold-related deaths) it would pale besides the damage our corrupt leaders and the UN would inflict on us. We have already seen deaths from starvation due to tax-subsidised farmers growing biofuel instead of food (pushing food prices through the roof). We have already seen masses of jobs lost as once-free businesses fail to compete with the tax-funded green industry. We have already seen energy bills sky-rocket. We have already seen an entire section of the population – i.e. those who know that scepticism in science is an essential element – stigmatised by our own political representatives as “climate deniers” (Gordon Brown used the term on many occasions during his short, unelected period in office, as does Obama, as do most of the unelected EU, as do most of the unelected UN). We have already seen Government-produced propaganda targeted towards children, designed to scare them and if necessary to turn them against their sceptical parents. This is showing no signs of stopping, despite the complete failure of alarmists to prove their corrupt hypothesis. If anything, the more evidence that mounts against them (i.e. that the recent warming is part of a natural cycle, and is nothing remotely unusual), the more totalitarian they become.

So again, I say bring on the cold.

Indeed.