Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Russ Parsons on Food and Farming

This opinion piece by Russ Parsons is welcome. It is certainly the theme of this blog. We need to develop a common language focused around good husbandry that every operator can apply.

Industrial farming has filled our shelves. The challenge is to access similar technology to produce a wider range of top quality goods.

It is no good to produce range fed chickens if they go to the processing plant and are merely blended with all other chickens. You end up having to set up your own processing facility meeting government health standards. Not so tricky as it sounds, but still a long ways away from grandpa’s idea of farming.

Industrial farming was all about optimizing the output of the owner operator with little additional labor. A lot of things needed to be compromised because of this.

Today we need to integrate a pool of prospective temporary labor to enhance what we have. This is the core of my concept of directly tying together through ownership and land use, apartment complexes and farmland and the related social and economic contract.

Factory farmers have driven costs to the bottom through capital equipment for select products. This can not be done for much else. That extra dollop of quality takes a hard investment in hand work that must now be accommodated.

Until several years ago raspberries in our market were netting the farmer a little under $1.00 per pound before picking. The picking charge was around fifty cents per pound. This was provided by pickers who were not getting minimum wage. A good picker can pick a good ten pounds per hour. Minimum wage was finally imposed and everyone adjusted. You may not think it is not a big thing, but you cannot produce quality product without hand labor been available as needed.

We live today in a world in which the minimum wage can be set and also defended against the usual bottom feeders attempting to abuse it. That makes it plausible to integrate available labor for the many needs of specialty agriculture.

The facts about food and farming

Let's not join one of the armed camps deeply suspicious of one another shouting past each other.

http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-calcook6-2010jan06,0,6888223.story

One of the more pleasing developments of the last decade has been the long-overdue beginning of a national conversation about food -- not just the arcane techniques used to prepare it and the luxurious restaurants in which it is served, but, much more important, how it is grown and produced.

The only problem is that so far it hasn't been much of a conversation. Instead, what we have are two armed camps deeply suspicious of one another shouting past each other (sound familiar?).

On the one side, the hard-line aggies seem convinced that a bunch of know-nothing urbanites want to send them back to Stone Age farming techniques. On the other side, there's a tendency by agricultural reformers to lump together all farms (or at least those that aren't purely organic, hemp-clad mom-and-pop operations) as thoughtless ravagers of the environment.

Well, at least we're thinking about it, so I suppose that's a start. But the issues we're facing are not going to go away, and they are too important to be left to the ideologues. What I'd like to see happen in the next decade is a more constructive give-and-take, the start of a true conversation.

With that goal in mind, I'd like to propose a few ground rules that might help move us into the next phase -- fundamental principles that both sides should be able to agree on.

* Agriculture is a business. Farming without a financial motive is gardening. I use that line a lot when I'm giving talks, and it always gets a laugh. But it's deadly serious. Not only do farmers have expenses to meet just like any other business, but they also need to be rewarded when they do good work. Any plan that places further demands on farmers without an offsetting profit incentive is doomed to fail.

* What's past is past. Over the last 50 years, American farmers performed an agricultural miracle, all but eliminating hunger as a serious health issue in this country. But that battle has been won, and though those gains must be maintained, the demands of today -- developing a system that delivers flavor as well as quantity and does it in an environmentally friendly way -- are different.

* Food is not just a culinary abstraction. No matter how much you and I might appreciate the amazing bounty produced by talented, quality-driven farmers, we also have to acknowledge that sometimes food is . . . well, just food. So when we start dreaming about how to make our epicurean utopia, we also have to keep in mind that our first obligation is to make sure that healthful, fresh food remains plentiful and inexpensive enough that anyone can afford it.

* There's no free pass on progress. Just because you've always farmed a certain way does not mean that you are owed the right to continue farming that way in the future. The days of a small or medium-sized farm making a decent profit growing one or two crops and marketing it through the traditional commodity route are long past. The world is changing, and those who can adapt are the ones who will be successful.

* The world is not black and white. The issues facing agriculture today are much more complicated than lining up behind labels such as "local" and "organic," no matter how praiseworthy they might seem in the abstract.

* No farm is an island. That's not literally true, of course; there are several island farms in the Sacramento Delta. But even there, farmers have to remember that they're living in an ever-more crowded state where their actions affect others. Assuming that what happens on your land is nobody's business but your own just doesn't work anymore.

* Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Holding out for an unattainable dream may mean losing a chance at a more easily realized goal. At the same time, just because an idea may not be the perfect answer, it doesn't mean that there aren't benefits to it. A completely locavore diet is, well, loco, but buying as much locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables as you can is just common sense.

* Quality is more expensive than quantity. Farming fruits and vegetables that are not just healthful but also have great flavor takes a lot of time and work and usually means not growing as much as a neighbor who doesn't focus on flavor. So when you're shopping, don't begrudge a good farmer a little higher price -- that's what it takes to keep him in business.

* You don't climb a ladder starting at the top rung. In a system as complex as our food supply, change is evolutionary. Remember long-term goals, but focus on what's immediately achievable. Any argument that begins, "All we have to do is rewrite the Farm Bill," is probably decades, if not centuries, from reality. But there are plenty of small things we can do now to start us down that road.

* Don't assume that those who disagree with you are evil, stupid or greedy. And even when they are, that doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for making a constructive and convincing argument.

* What's political is also personal. If you believe in something, you should be willing to make sacrifices to support it, even if it's expensive or inconvenient. Wailing about farmers who use pesticides and then balking at paying extra for organic produce is hypocritical because the yields in organic farming are almost always lower. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with doing the best you can whenever you can -- as long as you're willing to accept compromises from the other guy too.

* Finally, and most important: Beware the law of unintended consequences. Developing tasteless fruits and vegetables was not the goal of the last Green Revolution; it was a side effect of a system designed to eliminate hunger by providing plentiful, inexpensive food, but that also ended up rewarding quantity over quality. We should always keep in mind that when we're dreaming of a system that focuses on the reverse, we run the risk of creating something far worse than strawberries that bounce.

russ.parsons@latimes.com

Sitchen's Ideas

I have generally been dismissive of Zecharia Sitchen’s interpretations for a lot of good reasons, not least because of his weakness in the sciences and his leaps. However he is still an important informant. Ignore the interpretation and he still shows you important evidence.

Yet one aspect he has struggled with is the arrival in the skies of Earth of a large body as reported in his sources. Others have simply dismissed such as symbolic or imaginative. That is always a serious mistake. All informants struggle to describe events in terms of their own language of objects and symbols. That still leaves the reality to be accounted for.

My error was to actually accept subconsciously his interpretation of a planet orbiting around earth on a long elliptical orbit. We can not see it and we see no obvious disturbance and a planet as described is actually pretty well impossible. Again the analogy is wrong but what about the fact?

My item on the Vostok Ice Core gave me a different reality that in fact conforms to the information he has supplied us with. There is an interstellar object interacting with our solar system over a cycle that is at least a hundred thousand years long. Except it is a large sun radiating in the infrared and part of the Sirius cluster. In reality, we are part of the Sirius cluster.

Once we choke down that morsel, a lot of the information Sitchen provides finds a home. It is plausible that a related planet will come close enough for traffic to be possible.

His speculation that they accelerated the evolution of humanity is also plausible and certainly does not contradict any evidence we have. If anything it quickly eliminates actual difficulties such as our odd raciation which conforms to a program of deliberate selection.

The emergence of modern humanity is roughly a hundred thousand years old and largely conforms to the schedule laid down by the Sirius orbit.

I read Sitchen’s material a long time ago and it is worth a revisit in light of this new and compelling information.

Origin of the Species, From an Alien View

If you're going to ask Zecharia Sitchin <http://www.sitchin. com/> , be ready for a "Planet of the Apes" scenario: spaceships and hieroglyphics, genetic mutations and mutinous space aliens in gold mines.

It sounds like science fiction, but Mr. Sitchin is sure this is how it all went down hundreds of thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia. Humans were genetically engineered by extraterrestrials, he said, pointing to ancient texts to prove it.

In Mr. Sitchin's Upper West Side kitchen, evolution and creationism collide. He is an apparently sane, sharp, University of London-educated 89-year-old who has spent his life arguing that people evolved with a little genetic intervention from ancient astronauts who came to Earth and needed laborers to mine gold to bring back to Nibiru, a planet we have yet to recognize.

Outlandish, yes, but also somehow intriguing from this cute, distinguished old man whom you may have seen shuffling slowly down Broadway with his cane, and thought, "Is Art Carney still alive?"

So you bring your laptop to his kitchen table, as if to take dictation, and ask what to write about him. He pads slowly to the stove and puts on the kettle.

"Well, you could start by calling me the most controversial 89-year-old man in New York," Mr. Sitchin says. "Or you could just say I write books. I understand you've got to have an opening sentence, but describing my theories in a sentence, or even something like a newspaper article, is impossible. It will make me look silly."

Mr. Sitchin has been called silly <http://www.sitchini swrong.com/> before — by scientists, historians and archaeologists who dismiss his theories as pseudoscience and fault their underpinnings: his translations of ancient texts and his understanding of physics. And yet, he has a devoted following of readers.

His 13 books, with names like "Genesis Revisited" and "The Earth Chronicles," have sold millions of copies and been translated into 25 languages. "And Albanian is coming," he notes, spooning the Taster's Choice into two mugs.

Mr. Sitchin himself represents a remarkable feat of urban evolution that often goes unnoticed. He lives alone, in the sprawling prewar apartment he has inhabited for 54 years, maintaining his independence by relying on the infrastructure many Manhattanites take for granted.

He works away on his latest book, answers fan mail, and at midday, reaches for his cane, floppy hat and overcoat, and rides the elevator down from the second floor to the lobby. The doorman hails him a cab for the $4 ride to a nearby diner, Cafe Eighty Two on Broadway, for the lunch special, the chicken gyro, where there are other elderly people doing the same.

The Upper West Side is Mr. Sitchin's Mesopotamia, Broadway a fertile valley. He has Lincoln Center

Zabar's, Fairway, dry cleaners that deliver and a galaxy of take-out restaurants. For research, the New York Public Library

is down on 42nd Street, and the archives of the Jewish Theological Seminary up on Broadway at 122nd Street.

"In Florida, if you don't have a car, you might as well lay down and die," he said. "I've been all over the Western world and I know of no other place where an older person like myself can survive on his own. I raise my hand, and my chauffeured car — a yellow cab — takes me anywhere. I can call any restaurant or store and get what I need delivered in minutes."

He slides over a cup of coffee in a mug with a 30th anniversary logo for "The Twelfth Planet," his seminal first book, now in its 45^th printing. It stated his basic theory, based largely on his reading of texts preserved on clay tablets from the pre-Babylonian era in ancient Mesopotamia, the so-called cradle of the civilization of Sumer.

Born in Russia and raised in Israel, Mr. Sitchin studied economics in London and worked as a journalist and editor in Israel before moving to New York in 1952. Here, he was an executive at a shipping company and, with his wife of 66 years (she died in 2007), raised two daughters. He spent his free time studying, leading archaeological tours to ancient sites and spreading his unusual gospel.

Starting in childhood, he has studied ancient Hebrew, Akkadian and Sumerian, the language of the ancient Mesopotamians, who brought you geometry, astronomy, the chariot and the lunar calendar. And in the etchings of Sumerian pre-cuneiform script — the oldest example of writing — are stories of creation and the cosmos that most consider myth and allegory, but that Mr. Sitchin takes literally.

In his kitchen, Mr. Sitchin pulled two Danish out of a Zabar's bag and began to explain. It starts with the planet Nibiru, whose long, elliptical orbit brings it near Earth once every 3,600 years or so. The planet's inhabitants were technologically advanced humanlike beings, Mr. Sitchin said, standing about nine feet tall. Some 450,000 years ago, they detected reserves of gold in southeast Africa and made a colonial expedition to Earth, splashing down in what is now the Persian Gulf.

Mr. Sitchin said these Nibiru-ites recruited laborers from Earth's erect primates to build eight great cities. Enki, who became the Sumerians' god of science, bestowed some of the Nibiru-ites' advanced genetic makeup upon these bipeds so they could work as miners.

This is how Mr. Sitchin explains what scientists attribute to evolution. He says the aliens' cities were washed away in a great flood 30,000 years ago, after which they began passing on their knowledge to humans. He showed a photograph of a woodcarving from 7,000 B.C. of a large man handing over a plow to a smaller man: Ah, the passing on of agricultural knowledge. Anyway, he said, the Nibiru-ites finally jetted home in their spacecraft, around 550 B.C.

"This is in the texts; I'm not making it up," Mr. Sitchin said, finishing his coffee. "They wanted to create primitive workers from the homo erectus and give him the genes to allow him to think and use tools."

He showed photographs of ancient Sumerian carvings and etchings showing what he said were alien gods dressed in space helmets and suits. He pointed to something he called Nibiru in diagrams of the solar system.

Quite a theory — has he sold it to Hollywood?

"Oh no, not yet," he said solemnly. "I'm waiting for Spielberg."

You need to research the information : http://litefx2012. com/

Monday, January 11, 2010

When Was the Bible Really Written?

This is a welcome piece of evidence. Hebraic writing is now confirmed as extant a minimum of four centuries earlier than previously known. Cultural evidence and the textual material certainly supported that much of the material had been written in the late Bronze Age. Much of it may well have not been written in Hebrew originally. Yet at some point, Hebraic alphabet was created by peoples living on this coast as a response to the simultaneous development among the Phoenicians. Recall that these peoples were in continuous contact and sharing family ties. The emergence of a useable script would immediately cause the collection of a local assemblage of disparate texts to be transcribed into the local script and language.

I suspect that this all happed prior to the events of 1159 BCE which caused a major local economic disruption that scattered societies to the winds. My reason for this is that there is no reporting of those events as a part of the textual content. If we take the contents as pre 1159 BCE we are pretty well off. We have the Philistines who are surely part of the copper trade and palace based imperium that established itself throughout the Mediterranean and was centered on Atlantis by Gibraltar. We have already policed up the details in past posts. (Search this blog using ‘Atlantis’).

We now know Hebrew existed in the right time and place.

This also once again reminds us of an important consideration with archeological evidence. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. Too many scholars make this blunder. Any piece of archeological evidence is most likely to be drawn from those time periods in which the use of the evidence was optimized and says almost nothing of the actual development of the evidence which would be naturally scant and usually located elsewhere.

We presently have no evidence to support a long prehistory for the development of the alphabet. It may have been quite short. It could also have been thousands of years old but exclusively used as a sacred media, leaving the rest to use a less effective script. I actually suspect the later to be true. Again, we need to find a cave with buried texts on clay to figure all that out. It would be remarkable if the legends of buried metallic texts were actually proven true someday and turned out to be several thousands of years old.

I expect that the core texts of the bible were written no latter than the period between 1300 BCE and 1159 BCE. This is actually a fairly brief period of time. It allows the Hebrews to leave Egypt, establish themselves and become allied to the Phoenicians and thus inspired to produce their own script and to produce the texts. Thereafter, the people became dug in and perhaps much more insular. I am presently happy with the chronology. Everyone is in the right place and time. I could almost write a creditable history.

When Was the Bible Really Written?

FOXNews.com

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/01/08/bible-really-written/

By decoding the inscription on a 3,000-year-old piece of pottery, an Israeli professor has concluded that parts of the bible were written hundreds of years earlier than suspected.

The University of Haifa

A breakthrough in the research of the Hebrew scriptures has shed new light on the period in which the Bible was written.

By decoding the inscription on a 3,000-year-old piece of pottery, an Israeli professor has concluded that parts of the bible were written hundreds of years earlier than suspected.

The pottery shard was discovered at excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa near the Elah valley in Israel -- about 18 miles west of Jerusalem. Carbon-dating places it in the 10th century BC, making the shard about 1,000 years older than the Dead Sea scrolls.

Professor Gershon Galil of the University of Haifadeciphered the ancient writing, basing his interpretation on the use of verbs and content particular to the Hebrew language. It turned out to be "a social statement, relating to slaves, widows and orphans," Galil explained in a statement from the University.

The inscription is the earliest example of Hebrew writing found, which stands in opposition to the dating of the composition of the Bible in current research; prior to this discovery, it was not believed that the Bible or parts of it could have been written this long ago.

According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, current theory holds that the Bible could not have been written before the 6th century B.C.E., because Hebrew writing did not exist until then.

English translation of the deciphered text:

1' you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].

2' Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an]

3' [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and]

4' the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.

5' Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.

i} ts@al'>

Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years.

As a result, the jetstream – the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain – is currently running not over the English Channel but the Strait of Gibraltar.

However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts – what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs).

For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.

But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.

'They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.

'We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’

Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.

But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.

Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.

For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.

It interviewed a Captain Martin Ingebrigsten, who had been sailing the eastern Arctic for 54 years: ‘He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, and since that time it has gotten steadily warmer.

'Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended into the sea they have entirely disappeared.’

As a result, the shoals of fish that used to live in these waters had vanished, while the sea ice beyond the north coast of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean had melted.

Warm Gulf Stream water was still detectable within a few hundred miles of the Pole.
In contrast, Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.

‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’

He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing.

For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible – as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’

Prof Tsonis said: ‘Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.’

Like Prof Latif, Prof Tsonis is not a climate change ‘denier’. There is, he said, a measure of additional ‘background’ warming due to human activity and greenhouse gases that runs across the MDO cycles.

'This isn't just a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while'

But he added: ‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount.

'These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’

Prof Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with ‘hate emails’.

He added: ‘People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.’

He said he also received hate mail from climate change sceptics, accusing him of not going far enough to attack the theory of man-made warming.

The work of Profs Latif, Tsonis and their teams raises a crucial question: If some of the late 20th Century warming was caused not by carbon dioxide but by MDOs, then how much?

Tsonis did not give a figure; Latif suggested it could be anything between ten and 50 per cent.

Other critics of the warming orthodoxy say the role played by MDOs is even greater.

William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect.

According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’

But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact.

In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.

Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.

'This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’

The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html##ixzz0cH6biZ5w

Winter Gets Ugly

I would still leave the Arctic sea ice out of the debate as yet. It is marching to a different drummer and present atmospherics may have little to say.

However, this fall it was recognized that the cosmic ray flux was at a surprising maximum and that the cosmic ray hypothesis was predicting a particularly bad winter. In short, it was going to get ugly.

I commented that this winter was an excellent stress test of this important hypothesis and that I would expect a strong cold winter. In fact I stated that the failure to materialize would be a good indication of theory failure.

Well folks, this is ugly.

So far the cosmic ray flux appears to be the one independent phenomenon that we can measure which appears to nicely correlate with our subjective sense of the climate and some of our objective measurements. I had noticed this before and certainly welcomed the clear test we were presented with this year.

There are other important factors, but this truly appears to be impacting directly on the atmosphere in a real time mode. This is something I am not comfortable claiming about shifting ocean temperatures.

Cosmic rays are also impacted by sunspot activity, but we are presently getting a lot more than that that applied this time making this stress test important. I expect to see more interpretation here.

Anyway, when some chap who is an expert on cosmic rays predicts an ugly winter and then delivers, it is time to listen, particularly if one is an editor of the Farmer’s Almanac.

The mini ice age starts here

By DAVID ROSE

Last updated at 11:17 AM on 10th January 2010

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html#

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/01/09/article-0-07CF1BA6000005DC-818_468x353.jpg

The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.

They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.

However, both main British political parties continue to insist that the world is facing imminent disaster without drastic cuts in CO2.

This image of the UK taken from NASA's multi-national Terra satellite on Thursday shows the extent of the freezing weather

Last week, as Britain froze, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer that the science of global warming was ‘settled’.

Among the most prominent of the scientists is Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.

Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.

He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.

Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.

'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.

‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’

As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance.

Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.

The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view.

On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ – a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.