Norman Page, the ice age comether, is back at WUWT

There are a few strange climate cranks who still resurface from time to time. Today Anthony Watts is host once again to the ice age comether, Dr Norman Page. (Despite being a sun-worshipper, he is, or was, an oil consultant of the fossil fuel type, not suntan oil.)

No Re-evaluation from Norman

Five years ago, Norman had another one of his spurious articles at WUWT proclaiming a coming ice age. At the time he qualified his prediction, writing:

If there is not a 0.15 – 0.20. drop in Global SSTs by 2018 -20 I would need to re-evaluate.

If he did re-evaluate, it doesn't show.

David Archibald (again) predicts an ice age to cometh @wattsupwiththat

No sooner had I predicted that an ice age cometh article would appear at WUWT than Anthony Watts posted one. My wish is his command :)

David "funny sunny" Archibald wrote another of his solar articles (archived here) and, despite all the failures of his previous predictions, snuck in this comment (my emphasis):

On that assumption, Solar Cycle 25’s amplitude is likely to be two thirds of that of Solar Cycle 24, and thus 60. Further climatic cooling is therefore in store.

What climatic cooling has there been? How can there be "further" climatic cooling in store, when there's not been any so far?

The ice age wolf is lurking at WUWT, with Rod Martin Jr

Anthony Watts is not deluded. He's a science disinformer. Okay, his intellect isn't the greatest but that doesn't mean he doesn't know how to feed his fans the sort of nonsense they want to read. Today he's got another "ice age cometh" article (archived here). It's written at a level suitable for his fans. The reading level is for seven-year-olds, while the content is not suited to any outlet other than a climate conspiracy blog like WUWT.

Anthony's guest, Rod Martin Jr, starts off with a synopsis of the tale about the boy who cried wolf. So what does he do? He cries "wolf" even though there's virtually no chance of his wolf appearing inside of the next 50,000 years at least. Rod wrote:

Untenable denier delusions: Another Norman Page "ice age cometh" at WUWT

Times are tough in climate conspiracy land. Today there is another ice age cometh article at WUWT by Dr Norman Page (archived here). His headline is "Collapse of the CAGW Delusion: Untenable Past 2020". Anthony hasn't posted an "ice age cometh" article from this greenhouse effect denier for some time. His article seems to be based on the "work" of Syun-Ichi Akasofu, who is also a greenhouse effect denier. Akasofu's article was published in one of the journals of Scientific Research Publishing, which Beale has identified as a predatory publisher of junk. That is, it accepts any old nonsense. It's a "Little Ice Age bounce" paper otherwise known as a "the world warms by magic" article.

Norman Page's forecasts and imaginary millenial peak

Norman is also a "world warms by magic" proponent. He hides it by writing a lot of gobbledegook about patterns and cycles that don't have any physical basis. This time he put up some of his own forecasts. Here they are:

Stretching credulity or the limits of knowledge at WUWT: An ice age cometh

There still isn't much happening in deniersville. The hottest year ever has flummoxed them, leaving them flailing ahead of Paris - so far. Anthony Watts is so stuck for contributions to pin on his blog noticeboard that he's scraping the bottom of the barrel with a very dumb "ice age cometh" article by petroleum geologist Dr. Norman Page (archived here). I wonder if this is the sort of thing that Anthony will publish in the first edition of his OAS journal?

Norman is a science-denying ice age comether from way back who by now should have learnt a few things. He hasn't. What he claims to have done is written an article for an eight year old child. From what he's written, an eight-year-old would run rings around Norman when it comes to climate science.

Norman starts off badly, when he can't even get the name of a well-known publisher of dictionaries right. I mean it's cute, but ...:

Miriam (sic) – Webster defines Epistemology as
“the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity “

"Screams" of an ice age cometh at WUWT, because it snowed in autumn

Oh dear. Anthony Watts has another ice age cometh article at WUWT, complete with video (archived here). [Note: In the article below, where I link to the video, the link goes to the spot that I reference.]

Anthony writes - he just copied and pasted this from YouTube:

100 Year Snow Records broken across the South Eastern US on October 31st and November 01st. It was the earliest and heaviest snow in several places since records have been kept dating as far back as 1880. Reduced sunspot count shows Solar hibernation is occurring along with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) showing a cooling Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMO) Atlantic Ocean temperature is predicted to fall by 2020, which screams of cooling events to take place globally.

"Screams of cooling events globally"? Really? Just because a few places in the USA had a record early snowfall? This just after the hottest September on record globally?

Science denier Bob Carter comes out as an ice age comether

Bob Carter, one of Australia's own climate science deniers, has written a letter to The Australian (h/t MB). Extract follows:

Heading for ice age

...we have a report by Sue Neales that the size of our grain harvest remains in doubt following severe frosts in southern NSW killing large areas of early wheat crops and also damaging wheat and canola crops in South Australia and Victoria (“Trifecta of calamities to deplete. crop harvest”, 12/9)

See below for more on the frost damage.

Is it unreasonable to be surprised that none of your writers, much less the government, has noticed that leading solar astrophysicists, such as Habibullo Abdussamatov from Pulkovo Observatory in St Petersburg, have for years been commenting on the declining activity of the sun?

Not true. In May last year Graham Lloyd wrote about the ice age comether, Habibullo Abdussamatov, with derision from anyone who read it. Graham Readfearn tells all.

These scientists are projecting a significant cooling over the next three decades, and perhaps even the occurrence of another little ice age.

Bob only mentions one "solar astrophysicist". Who are the others? Where are they hiding? Why can't Bob name any? Maybe because reputable solar researchers know that a dip in solar activity won't herald an ice age, little or big.

Obsessed as they are with a gentle global warming trend that stopped late last century, should the expected solar cooling eventuate, policy makers will rue the day they failed to heed the advice of independent scientists on climate change issues.

Bob Carter, Townsville, Qld

Habibullo Abdussamatov is a government scientist who heads up a space research division in Russia. It seems he favours lesser scientific "journals". Bob Carter used to be a researcher at a university, paid by government funding. He's paid a stipend by the Heartland Institute and is affiliated with a number of climate science denying groups. He's not an independent scientist.

Neither of them are climate scientists.

Both of them are "ice age comethers".

Both of them are in a tiny minority of scientists who deny climate science and not on any scientific grounds. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists know that humans are causing global warming. Whose advice should policy makers take?

Frost damage to winter crops in part because of the mild winter!

This is from an article by Lisa Castleman, Riverina Local Land Services (NSW Government)

...The occurrence of ‘Stem Frost’ in cereal crops such as wheat, barley, oats and triticale or pulse crops such as lupins, field peas and faba beans is rare but not impossible. Stem Frost can occur when a severe frost (less than -2°C) occurs shortly after a rainfall event and water has settled inside the boot only to be frozen by the frost which then damages the sensitive stem tissue in close proximity....  

...Frosts in winter are not unusual but an early sowing window this season and milder temperatures through winter has meant that many crops have developed quickly, making them more vulnerable to severe frost events. “Advanced crops with a run of severe frosts coinciding immediately after rainfall events is a combination that we rarely experience” said Ms Castleman who is based in Wagga Wagga.  

So the reason the winter frosts wrought such devastation is because the milder temperatures in winter (consistent with global warming, you'll note) meant that the crops were more developed when the frosts hit. The rain made the damage worse.

Bob Carter is not only not a climate scientist, he's not an agricultural scientist either.

Denierism of the week: What is increasing the overall cooling rate? Global warming, of course!

Seen at WUWT today, in comments under an article by Bob Tisdale. He was writing about August sea surface temperatures reaching an all time monthly high, for any month in the record (archived here).

A C Osborn  September 1, 2014 at 6:46 am (excerpt)

...this warmth in the sea surface will not take long to disappear in to space, thus increasing the overall cooling rate....

Credit: Plognark

.Bonus quote just seen from pochas  September 1, 2014 at 8:41 am

Is this how a glaciation gets started?

Frozen in ice at WUWT

A smidgen of snow on a mountain and we're heading for an ice age? What utter nutters!

Science deniers who congregate at blogs like WUWT are really, really odd creatures. I wonder what proportion of them also follow non-climate conspiracy theory blogs. Today I found on Anthony Watts reformatted blog, another article about ice (archived here). It's about a science trip on the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis, probably the most famous mountain in Scotland. The team reported new finds of fauna as well as spots of "compacted, dense, ice hard snow call neve" on the the mountain's North Face, which I guess is the cold side of the mountain (seeing it's in the northern hemisphere).

Eric Worrall decided that this means an ice age cometh. He wrote:

This is how ice ages start – a buildup of snow which does not melt in the Summer, which leads to a positive feedback loop, as the growing ice sheet reflects more and more sunlight back into space.

Well, no. Not exactly. How an ice age starts is Earth starts to lose more heat than it gains from the sun.  A build up of snow and ice happens because it's colder. It's not colder because of the build up of snow and ice. One could argue that it's a chicken and egg thing but it's not. Not usually. Once the snow and ice builds up then that hastens the cooling, because the snow and ice surfaces tend to reflect more radiation back into space. What causes the snow and ice to build up is the earth getting colder. Most of the time. Sometimes it could be changes in ocean currents for one reason or other. The system is complicated.

Anyway, without getting too bogged down in details, the BBC had an article about the survey that's being done on Ben Nevis. There was no suggestion that what was being recorded and observed was anything new. It was just that some things hadn't been reported before. Like:

So far, many new populations of rare fauna [sic] such as highland saxifrage, tufted saxifrage and wavy meadow grass have been recorded.

Sou: fauna?

Lead survey botanist, Ian Strachan, said: "Many of the rare arctic-alpine species we are searching for are relics from soon after the last ice age.

"Ben Nevis and a few other peaks in the Scottish Highlands provide the most southerly refuge for some of these species which can only survive due to the altitude and presence of semi-permanent snow fields."

Cathy Mayne, of SNH, said work so far had exceeded the project team's expectations.
She said: "Not only have we gathered potentially ground-breaking geological data and significantly added to the known populations of arctic-alpine species, the team have also discovered alpine saxifrage, which has never been found on the mountain before."

You can read the article here on the BBC website.

From the WUWT comments

WUWT-ers must be bored. There were 132 comments, almost none of them having any value whatsoever. Many deniers are falling for the line that just because compacted snow is on cold Ben Nevis, it means an ice age cometh.

fenbeagleblog  August 24, 2014 at 4:07 am

I guess that doesn’t fit in terribly well with the narrative, does it……Another re-write needed.

johnmarshall  August 24, 2014 at 4:15 am

I am surprised that the BBC reported this sign of global cooling. Out of character.

David Johnson  August 24, 2014 at 4:30 am

I wonder how old these climbers and scientists were! I used to go rock climbing in Scotland quite a lot back in the 70s and 80s. It was nothing unusual to see patches of old hard snow that had survived the summer in North facing corries and gullies On one occasion, as late as August 1990, it was quite difficult to get to the start of my chosen climb on Ben Nevis because of a small bergschrund!

jdseanjd  August 24, 2014 at 4:42 am

Looks like the 1974 CIA report may be on right track.
How the Eugenicist 1%s who have birthed, marketed & profited from this deadly scam must be laughing.
They’ve been selling the World global warming caused by deadly plant food, while a very possible New Little Ice Age approaches.
Holdren & Ehrlich will also be pleased.

Dennis T. Avery cycles toward an ice age; Anthony Watts senselessly ignores the ice @wattsupwiththat

They do have some funny ones at the Heartland Institute and doesn't Anthony Watts love 'em. This one's called Dennis T. Avery and apparently he's been an ice age comether for some time. He even scored a Wikipedia entry to prove it :)

Not only that, but he scored a ClimateProgress post all to himself when he couldn't tell the difference between growth and growth rate. And a SourceWatch entry. Now he's really hit the bigtime with a HotWhopper entry - but it's not all for himself. Ice age comethers are a dime a dozen at WUWT.

Dennis used to work for the government - the US Department of Agriculture. (Deniers forgive him because he's one of them.) I wonder how it feels to be a laughing stock among his former colleagues. It's easy to infer from his WUWT "guest essay" (archived here) that he doesn't accept the greenhouse effect. He was writing about an article by Geoffrey Parker in the NY Times. The article itself was about how climate change contributed to wars and social unrest in the past and postulated that it may well do the same as the world warms and food production is affected.  Dennis wasn't buying it. I think he figured that droughts only happen when there's a cold spell or something like that. He wrote:

Almost all past agricultural and cultural collapses occurred during “little ice ages,” not during our many global warm periods. 

Now I don't know if that's right or wrong but I do know that the way things are going, humans will never have experienced a global warm period like the one we're heading towards. The blue line in the chart below covers the period since civilisation. The red line is what's projected over the next few decades. Probably before this century is out.

Adapted from Jos Hagelaars

Dennis doesn't accept that we're warming the world. People in the future will probably feel heat like humans have never felt before. Ever. Not in all the time since we evolved. Dennis wrote:

The danger is the cold, chaotic weather of the “little ice ages” themselves. That will shrink agricultural zones and shorten growing seasons. Another such icy period is inevitably coming, though not likely in the next two centuries, if past cycles are an accurate guide.

Regardless, for the next 20-25 years, humanity will likely be in another cooling period, caused by the sun’s reduced energy output and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. We are about 150 years into the modern warming. Since the shortest of these warm periods during the Halocene was 350 years, and they generally last 350 to 800 years, it is unlikely that we will enter another Little Ice Age for a couple more centuries. 

That's it. He's doing climate by numbers - and not very useful numbers at that. He thinks that there are some sort of long term cycles lasting between 350 and 800 years - which is a nice wide margin for him, isn't it. He offers no evidence for his claim and it's not one I've ever come across before.

He's wrong of course. We aren't due for a major glaciation for around 50,000 years and as for mini ice ages, only if there's a few supervolcanic eruptions or an all-out nuclear war.

Anthony thinks that ice doesn't melt in the heat - again

Meanwhile, Anthony Watts has written another silly article (archived here) about how ice doesn't melt when it gets hot. Oh, he doesn't say so in so many words. What he does is claim that seas won't rise over the coming decades, or not by much. He reckons that the rate of sea level rise is currently linear (he's wrong) and that it won't change as West Antarctic ice slips into the ocean.  Anthony decided on the following senseless headline:

Making sense of senseless sea level scares in Norfolk Virginia – 60% of the rise is from subsidence, the remainder from landfill settling

It was Anthony's own article that was senseless, not the fact that seas are going to rise quite a lot. He didn't manage to make much sense, as usual. I've written enough about his fantasies on that score already (such as here and here and here and here) so I'll send you over to Tamino's excellent take down.

Before you go - or afterwards, if you want to see a couple of very good videos about sea level, try these two.

From the WUWT comments

Just a small selection today. First Goldie discusses the impending ice age that won't cometh for a very long time and says:

June 2, 2014 at 12:22 am
That sounds about right. But at the moment we have a group of people who are determined to blame everything on too much Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. I suspect the North Atlantic will freeze over and this group will still be trying to assign it to Carbon Dioxide. The reality is of course that these people belong to an interesting cabal who are anti any form of carbon based energy and instead would prefer to have half the population of the planet freeze to death whilst trying to use so called renewables. Indeed their thinking is so odd that they would probably prefer it if half of the population froze to death. 

ffohnad is writing about sea level rises and says:

June 1, 2014 at 8:46 pm
Do these people actually believe the ice caps could melt while the temperature remains far below freezing even with the 3 degree worst case projection ? It appears that only the dumbest portion of our population are hired by the media. 

Anthony Watts "heading for a mini-ice age" and quote mining from a denier!

Anthony Watts has just posted an article which is a cut and paste job of different bits and pieces he obviously thinks worth passing on to his readers. He makes much of the latest report of 2013 global temperature reports and the "pause".  I've already covered that lots of times so I'll just touch on a couple of the others. (Archived here.)

No, there's no mini-ice age cometh-ing!

The first and silliest one I'll mention is one I've already covered.  Anthony's decided it's worth repeating this bit of idiocy:

The Sun’s activity has plummeted to a century low, baffling scientists and possibly heralding a new mini-Ice Age.

The first part is correct but there is no chance of a mini-ice age, no matter what the tabloids or WUWT-ers say!

Quote mining deniers' own quotes!

The next bit relates to one aspect of the proposed EU plan which I've also just written about, though I didn't mention that "member states will have an "indicative" target - that is, not legally binding – of improving energy efficiency by 25% by 2030" (see the Guardian report). It's that aspect that this relates to.

What Anthony has done is distort something Benny Peiser of the GWPF is quoted as saying, changing it's meaning quite a lot.  I've copied the text and highlighted in bold the bit that Anthony left out.  Quote-mining is something deniers do all the time, but usually they cherry pick from quotes made by scientists or climate hawks.  This time Anthony has left out two crucial sentences of a quote from another denier.  Well, it's symptomatic of all the in-fighting that's been going on in denier-land this week.

The European Commission has finally begun rolling back the EU’s ruinous climate and green energy policies. But its modest climbdown does not signal the end of the climate hysteria that has dominated Brussels for nearly 20 years. The proposed targets have triggered protests from energy-intensive industries across Europe. Eurofer, an umbrella group for Europe’s steel producers, has called on leaders to weaken the targets much further. The roll-back is in part an acknowledgement that Europe’s green agenda has been an unmitigated fiasco, causing skyrocketing energy prices across Europe and harming competitiveness. But the old guard of commissioners are trying to salvage a green legacy before they are replaced in the autumn by a set of commissioners more concerned about Europe’s economic future. A more significant retreat from unilateral climate policies is likely to gather speed, and the proposed targets may not survive. Dr Benny Peiser is the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Deniers cherry-picking from deniers.  Is that a first?

Denier Weirdness: Wondering Willis Eschenbach wonders does "an ice age cometh"...

Wondering Willis "I'm Wonderful" Eschenbach has decided to join the "ice age cometh" deniers at WUWT.  Willis doesn't read scientific papers.  He prefers to "wonder" about stuff.  Today he's wondering about the next ice age and he says he's going to watch the snow cover to see when it's going to arrive.  He writes (archived here):

So … would it not be truly ironic if pollution, in the form of soot and brown carbon,  were all that has been holding off another ice age? And wouldn’t it be a cosmic joke if our efforts to clean up soot and brown carbon pollution were the straw that broke the back of the Holocene, and ushered in the new ice age?

Well, it would not only be ironic, it would be pretty near impossible for earth to enter an ice age this side of 50,000 years ahead, save a massive nuclear war or a few super volcanic eruptions.

An ice age isn't due for at least 50,000 years, even without AGW

If Willis had bothered to read any science he might have come across this paper from Berger and Loutre in Science.  They calculate that even without global warming, Earth wouldn't start getting cold for at least another 50,000 years.  That's because of the calculated insolation in future years.  Here is a diagram from their paper:

Long-term variations of eccentricity (top), June insolation at 65°N (middle), and simulated Northern Hemisphere ice volume (increasing downward) (bottom) for 200,000 years before the present to 130,000 from now. Time is negative in the past and positive in the future. For the future, three CO2 scenarios were used: last glacial-interglacial values (solid line), a human-induced concentration of 750 ppmv (dashed line), and a constant concentration of 210 ppmv (dotted line). Simulation results from (13, 15); eccentricity and insolation from (19).

Black soot and global warming

How much does soot contribute to global warming?  The IPCC AR5 WG1 Technical Summary has a chart that shows what contributes what.  I've highlighted black carbon.  You can see it makes quite a contribution but nothing like as much as CO2 or CH4.:

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Technical Summary

Just so you know, the IPCC report states on page TS-20 that the radiative forcing from black carbon on snow and ice is around 0.04 (0.02 to 0.09) Wm^-2, compared to well-mixed greenhouse gases, which exert a forcing of 2.83 (2.54 to 3.12) Wm^-2. So even if we were able to stop all black carbon from reaching the snow, it wouldn't make that much difference globally.

On black carbon, some of you might remember the article that showed that black carbon from mid-latitudes doesn't have much effect on the Arctic compared to black carbon from the far north.  This is because when the soot comes from the Arctic itself, it stays at low altitude and gets deposited on the snow and ice.

Northern Hemisphere snow cover is declining in spring

Willis has also put up some charts of snow cover.  The ones he chose don't tell much  of a story.  If he'd wanted to, he could have put up something like northern hemisphere snow cover on a seasonal basis, which would have been more informative.  Notice the change in spring cover compared to the other seasons in the animation below:

Source: Rutgers University Global Snow Lab

Maybe after being called out by Roy Spencer recently, Wondering Willis has decided he might as well give up trying to impress scientific types.  He's hoping to be fêted by the "ice age cometh" brigade at WUWT.

In the comments Willis proves that he doesn't read science by writing (excerpt):

October 18, 2013 at 11:33 am

By all astronomical Milankovitch calculations, we should be falling back into an ice age somewhere around now. To date there’s no sign of it, which is good … but there’s always tomorrow.

And more here from Wondering Willis (excerpt):

October 18, 2013 at 12:38 

Now, when I look at that, I say “Yikes! We could have another ice age at any time”. In part it’s the length of the Holocene, and in part it’s that the other interglacials rose to a peak temperature … and very soon thereafter, they started dropping quickly to glacial temperatures.

The Holocene, on the other hand, rose to a peak, but has only been dropping very slowly. It has maintained a fairly flat plateau for a long, long time now. I see nothing in the historical record to indicate that we couldn’t enter another ice age tomorrow …

To add, in Willis' article he is wondering about albedo and surface temperature.  His chart and wonderings look wonky but I haven't paid that part of his article any attention (archived here).

---

Berger, A., and M. F. Loutre. "An exceptionally long interglacial ahead?" Science 297.5585 (2002): 1287. DOI: 10.1126/science.1076120

Denier weirdness: a collection of alarmist predictions from WUWT and elsewhere

With the deniers at WUWT complaining about the UK Met Office (which doesn't do too badly), and Benny Peiser from the GWPF getting everyone worked up over a supposed ice age, I figured I'd see how the denier predictions stack up.

A few times a month Anthony Watts gives voice to the ice age alarmists.  They are a weird bunch.  Most deniers are of the type that fear fear but not the ice age alarmists.  They are contrarians. You may have met some of them.  First, here's Benny with some global cooling alarms.

• July 2013: Newsbytes: Sunspot Enigma – Will Inactive Sun Cause Global Cooling?
• July 2013: Newsbytes: Sun’s Bizarre Activity May Trigger Another Little Ice Age (Or Not)
• October 2011: New Climate Scare: Europe May be Facing Return Of ‘Little Ice Age’

As climate scientists will tell you, even a Grand Minimum would hardly make a dent in the global surface temperature these days.  CO2 has the world covered.  Here's a chart from realclimate.org:

Deluded Ed

There is Ed Hoskins, who thinks an ice age is coming because he reckons central England started getting cold thirteen years ago.  Why he thinks there should be an ice age based on the temperature record of central England escapes me.  In any case, he maintains central England "lost all the gains since 1850".  He is very wrong.  Only seven years ago, in 2006, central England had the hottest year in its 353 year record and in 2011 it had its second hottest year in its long record.  Nine of the ten hottest years in central England occurred in the last 23 years and seven occurred from 1995 onwards.  Just look at the chart and compare it to the temperatures of the mid-1800s.  Deluded Ed is deluded.

Data Source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre

David "funny sunny" Archibald

David Archibald is an Australian who makes the wildest claims.  He says that by 2020, Earth will become colder than it has in the entire Holocene.  Colder than the Little Ice Age.  Colder than any time in the past ten thousand years.  He is an extreme alarmist.  Here is his prediction, which he says is based on "on solar maxima of approximately 50 for solar cycles 24 and 25".

Data source: NASA and David Archibald

David is counting sunspots.  Solar cycle 24 was very weak as far as sunspots go, yet the temperature didn't drop.  Instead it kept rising.  2010 is the hottest year on record so far.  For a discussion of solar forcing, sunspots and TSI, there is a good article on skepticalscience.com.

Silly Sal

There is another regular on WUWT who goes by the name Salvatore Del Prete.  I don't think he's posted any articles yet.  He pops up frequently in the comment sections.  He predicts that before seven years is out, Earth will get colder than it has in more than half a century. Not quite as severe a drop as David "funny sunny" Archibald, but it still defies all physics, logic and reason.  Here is his alarmist prediction.

Data source: NASA

Denier Don

Don Easterbrook has been predicting cooling long before WUWT started.  He's way out in his predictions. There may well be earlier ones.  This is from 2001 in comic sans:

And from 2008 at WUWT (click for larger version):

And from 2008 again from here:

Don can't seem to get his story straight from one month to the next.

Blasts from the icy past

I found an old WUWT thread of predictions.  There are a few from some of the current regulars plus some unfamiliar names.

Pierre Gosselin says (extract - click the date to go to the full post):

October 23, 2008 at 2:03 am  -2.5°C by 2020!...My prediction is we’ve started a nasty cold period that will make the 1960s look balmy. We’re about to get caught with our pants down.  And a few molecules of CO2 is not going to change it.

This is what Pierre's prediction looks like:

This one's probably a fake denier, real deniers aren't usually this extreme, though it's hard to tell at WUWT.  SteveSadlov says:

October 24, 2008 at 10:55 am  Cooling continues into the next decade. By 2011, on average, we are back where we were in the early 1800s. The global food crises continues to worsen. The amount of viable ag land in Eurasia, particularly the interior, shrinks dramatically. As happened during the period 350 – 800 AD, this places migration and conquest pressure on the great powers who live there, especially Russia and China. They mount a general offensive, resulting in additional cooling due to the effects of WMDs used to smash Western and pro Western strategic military assets. The new Dark Age begins.

Diatribical Idiot says:

October 22, 2008 at 3:00 pm A thread after my own heart. Folly or not, prediction is what actuaries do. Why should letting a little thing like unpredictability in temperatures stand in the way of making a projection?
My methodology is based on actuarial papers, in looking at temperature as a series of values driven by constantly shifting parameters. Correlation is assumed to be driven by 132 months of historical measures.
There are 6 weighting schemes derived as follows:

See his comment for the rest, if you must.  Here is one of his predictions he linked to.  It does seem far-fetched even for an "ice age cometh"-er but a peep at his blog suggests he's the real thing: