Guest Post by Steven Goddard
It appears that global cooling recognition may be starting to make headway in the scientific community. We have this Discovery/MSNBC article about a NOAA scientist titled “Warming might be on hold, study finds”
“It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970’s was due to a free variation in climate,” Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. “Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.”
And Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years.
Here’s the complete story from The Discovery Channel via MSNBC:
For those who have endured this winter’s frigid temperatures and today’s heavy snowstorm in the Northeast, the concept of global warming may seem, well, almost wishful.But climate is known to be variable – a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn’t mean the planet is cooling. Still, according to a new study, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.
Earth’s climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.
“This is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. “Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn’t have one.”
Instead, Swanson and colleague Anastasios Tsonis think a series of climate processes have aligned, conspiring to chill the climate. In 1997 and 1998, the tropical Pacific Ocean warmed rapidly in what Swanson called a “super El Nino event.” It sent a shock wave through the oceans and atmosphere, jarring their circulation patterns into unison.
How does this square with temperature records from 2005-2007, by some measurements among the warmest years on record? When added up with the other four years since 2001, Swanson said the overall trend is flat, even though temperatures should have gone up by 0.2 degrees Centigrade (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time.
The discrepancy gets to the heart of one of the toughest problems in climate science – identifying the difference between natural variability (like the occasional March snow storm) from human-induced change.
But just what’s causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths. Or an overabundance of tropical clouds may be reflecting more of the sun’s energy than usual back out into space.
“It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970’s was due to a free variation in climate,” Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. “Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.”
Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. But he warned that it’s just a hiccup, and that humans’ penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us.
“When the climate kicks back out of this state, we’ll have explosive warming,” Swanson said. “Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive.”
© 2009 Discovery Channel
That is strange. We hear from highly respected authorities that we were in a period of “unprecedented warming.” How can it be both warming and cooling at the same time? Maybe those DC protesters didn’t need to stand out in the cold and try to shut down their primary source of energy today.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
Leif Svalgaard (09:03:00) :
David Archibald (04:31:05) :
F10.7 is also on the rise, so solar minimum is past, also months ago.
http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png
Yep, it’s going to cool off for about 30 years, then it’ll warm again for another 30 years, then cool again for another 30 years, then………..! Get the picture? I am only a humble engineer but there seems to be a pattern here? I am guessing a fair about of CYA work going on too. We in the UK have been suffering a spate of recent “Oh calamity” announcements from Aunite Beeb about more & more evidence of climate change happening faster than before & faster than experts predicted, etc. They’re on the ropes folks, tired, sweating, breathing heavily, bleeding, & badly bruised! Keep up the pressure!
It reminds me of that little gem the Met Office slipped under the radar a short while back. They apparently did a study back over the last 300 years & apparently the good old UK gets a bad winter every 18-20 years or thereabouts, so this winter is nothing unusual! So let me get this straight, the UK winters get a tad cold every 20 years according to the Met Office & has done so for the last 300 years! Surely is this not cyclical in behaviour? So could the climate go through cycles?
Goodness. Some people even when they’re trying to be reasonable. . . just. . .can’t. . .make. . . themselves. . . .do. . . it. “AND THEN JUST WHEN YOU’RE ABOUT TO FALL ASLEEP THE MONSTER WILL LEAP OUT FROM BENEATH THE BED AND EAT YOU.”
That’s what his last para says. “Explosive” “bang” “aggressive”. Righto. As if the rest of the article he didn’t just basically admit “well, it seems global warming might only be happening 1/2 as fast as we thought because it turns out we could have alternating 30 year cycles where 1/2 the time nothing happens”.
Yes, try to hide that with the big scary finish.
“But just what’s causing the cooling is a mystery.”
AT LAST! Some truth from the alarmists. So they, in this one statement, admit that they do not know how climate works, that their studies are incomplete and they cannot account for cooling, because the do not know how the climate works. YET they expect us to accept being taxed and regulated back to the stone age based on computer simulations based on incomplete and inaccurate understanding of the climate?
The problem with this whole thing, on both sides, is that we’re living under the fantasy that “global mean temperature” is a valid construct. I don’t think it is. Nothing is happening “globally”. Some places have gotten warmer (if you believe the surface temp measurements), some have gotten cooler, some have been pretty static, mean-wise. But they’ve all had ups and downs that don’t always match up to each other.
No one can say with certainty that “it’s the sun” or “it’s not the sun”, or “It’s ocean cycles” or “It’s not ocean cycles”. It’s all these things and none of them. I seriously doubt we’ll ever know for sure how this system works. We sure as hell don’t know right now. And anyone who says they know what will happen in in 30 years, much less next year, is deluding themselves, or being purposefully dishonest. That goes for both sides of the argument. Anyone can make a prediction, and have a fair chance of getting it “right”, but that’s all it would be, chance.
Pamela Gray @ur momisugly 07:15:58,
I understand that claims of solar influence are not proven, but also water doesn’t generate and destroy heat of itself. Clearly the Sun is the major source of energy for the Earth, and it not only varies, even if slightly, but so does the Earth’s albedo and orbit. The oceans’ sloshing around redistributes, stores and releases this energy.
Unfortunately no “climate scientists” appear curious about these pretty self-evident observations.
What’s really regrettable here is that even if AGW will “only” happen 1/2 as fast as they’ve been predicting, it is still a long-term problem that needs addressing over time. But will there be anyone left who is willing to listen once the AGW radicals are done discrediting the credibility of science?
global warming needs to be studied more before we get an accurate understanding of what it actually means. about 3 years ago, a texas tech professor took a research team to where chernobyl had a radiation spill. he concluded that there is such thing as a reasonable amount of radiation that can actually help animals thrive. but that study was done over 19 months, and for such serious conclusions about radiation or climate change or anything that affects human decision making in daily life, we need about 45 years to study what is really happening. that’s not to say that we didn’t know in the 1970s what was happening to the earth with all the man-made pollution, but it’s been a cold winter here in the northwest, and how do you explain that?
The Discovery article (also picked up by MSNBC and others) has an interesting comment: “But just what’s causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths”. I’m confused! What I don’t understand is how if the water that’s sinking is (possibly) taking heat with it, it must be warmer, and I thought that warm water RISES. Perhaps you can explain what I’m missing?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7921230.stm
We will spend the next several years being bombarded by new studies which ‘prove’ that while natural factors are ‘temporarily’ ‘masking’ AGW, it will come back with a vengeance in 20 – 30 years.
Of course, we will also be told that we must act now, while we have the respite.
On a related topic, we need to gear up for a fight against cap-and-trade. This will bankrupt the USA, accelerate the movement of manufacturing jobs overseas while causing everybody to pay more for everything.
The upside? Cap-and-trade will create more need for more government.
The Sphinx’s erosion is on the body and the pit walls surrounding it, but not on the head, which is too small, suggesting that it was recarved by the earliest pharaohs from a larger, eroded pre-dynastic head. The most likely source for water erosion would be the rainy climate following the last ice age, which was thousands of years before the pharaohs. The Egypt of recorded history has always been dry, with everyone living within a couple miles of the Nile.
That is what I believed back when I was studying Egyptology a long time ago. But I could not find any reference to a pre-dynastic statue that the Sphinx replaced. If one existed the Egyptians would have recorded it because they were meticulous at making records of monuments.
Also, destroying a monument, statue or any depiction of a god or king was something of a taboo. They believed by doing so you were doing actual damage to the astral or other worldly counterpart.
K.MT (black land) wasn’t just two miles of fertile land on either side of the Nile. We frequently read stories of the pharaoh having to travel quite far out to reach DSRT (red land, or desert).
But of course they didn’t have the Suez Canal and damns back then so the Nile was able to flood and fertilise more of Egypt during the flood season.
If “brown cloud” pollution in India and China actually causes warming I wonder if the current climate models take this into account? (IPCC AR4 does not appear to list this type of pollution as a positive forcing) This could make the cooling we are going through now even more significant (cooling against man-made co2 and brown cloud). It also could diminish the fraction of warming that can be assigned to industrial CO2 emissions.
This goes back to the original IPCC global warming “signature” which was the difference between the predicted natural temperature and the observed rise. The difference was assumed to have been caused by industrial co2 emissions. What’s happening now casts doubt on the accuracy of their initial forecast, doesn’t it?
MattN (05:15:39) :
I would tend to agree with you. RSS MSU TLT land and ocean Feb months overlaid with January months.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/RSS-MSU.jpg
Given Arnold Schwarzenegger’s stance on global warming and Kyle Swanson’s statement: “When the climate kicks back out of this state, we’ll have explosive warming. Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive.”, I propose AGW believers use Governer Schwarzenegger’s famous line: “I’ll be back” as their official sound bite.
I don’t know whether to be happy about this first step or depressed about the 1000 miles to go.
Bruce Cobb wrote:
“This all seems more a desperate attempt to keep cognitive dissonance at bay than anything else. A “fraction” of the warming was due to “a free variation”, eh? Just more weasel words.”
Pop goes the weasel!
Bruce Cobb (08:39:36) :
It is just as much a mistake to say “it’s the sun, stupid,” as it is for you to say “it’s the oceans, stupid”.
Yes, of course the oceans have a huge effect, at times counteracting the sun’s effects, and at other times compounding it.
Leif Svalgaard (09:06:40)
The issue is that the mistakes are not equal, as one effect [guess which one] is much bigger than the other.
Of the two, I’d have to say the sun’s effects are the larger, but the jury is still out on that. Solar deniers claim otherwise, of course.
Pearland Aggie (08:04:54) :
Not sure about average but Global SSTs are still low over a ten year period.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/GlobalSST.jpg
Aron (01:23:22) :
Around the same time, Greenland had tribes living in the north and grapes grew in in the most northern parts of North America exactly where it is freezing cold today. When the Norsemen arrived over two thousand years later they called the area Vinland precisely because of the grapes they found growing made for good wine.
This is one possible, but perhaps not the most likely explanation. I don’t think the Vikings drank much wine, and the name Vinland could just as well be a use of ‘vin’ – an Old Norse word with the meaning ‘meadow, pasture’. You can find this word in contemporary names such as the city of Bergen (actually ‘Bjørg-vin’). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland
Gerald Machnee (08:41:47) wrote:
“So does this mean that “The Science is Unsettled”?”
I suggest those magnificent four words be used as the title to the thread on the next AGW concession.
Bruce Cobb (11:31:22) :
Of the two, I’d have to say the sun’s effects are the larger, but the jury is still out on that. Solar deniers claim otherwise, of course.
Who is the jury?
Perhaps ocean deniers should not use the derogative term ‘denier’ 🙂
If one wants to establish something, one must demonstrate that it happens. If the jury is out, such demonstration has not taken place, in spite of 400 years [and counting] of effort.
And ‘I have to say’ means that there is a need to say so, a need fueled by which agenda?
Bottom line, both from the article and from the comments here:
They don’t know what is causing the cooling:
THEREFORE
They also don’t know what was causing the warming.
Take CO2 off the table, boys, obviously it’s not the cause. Now, do some real science and let’s figure out more of what causes climate.
In the end, the sun will win.
The Science is not only “Settled” – it’s Irrelevant to the AGW Movement – so changes in the science will not impact the AGW Movement and it’s fellow travellers.
The financial crisis and the Stimulus response to it, mandate a massive increase in taxation to pay for the Stimulus and the expansion of Government.
The result will be the rapid push through of CAP and Trade and the impost of a new massive indirect tax burden on all americans as all goods and services dependent on energy for their delivery will be affected by higher costs and hence higher prices.
It is (unfortunately) almost certainly too late to stop this from happening.
It will be interesting too see what happens at the next elections…
WRT the article.
It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970’s was due to a free variation in climate,”
Natural variation gets a guernsey – would that be 100% natural???
Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. “Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.”
And Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years.
30 years of warming, followed by 30 years of cooling, followed by warming….
Has Swanson not heard of the PDO?