UPDATE: The subject of this article, Mojib Latif, has challenged the Daily Mail article and it’s interpretation. In another story at the Guardian, Latif says the interpretation by the Daily Mail and a similar story in the Telegraph is wrongly interpreting his work.
Read the Guardian story here and decide for yourself. If anyone knows of a contact for Dr. Latif, please leave it in comments as I’ll make this forum available to him should he wish to elaborate further.
h/t to WUWT reader Werner Weber for notifying me.
UPDATE2: Werner Weber writes to me in email:
> I have send him an e-mail, pointing out what happened during the night
> and invite him to take the oportunity to present his views in one of the
> leading sceptics blogs.
=====================================
We’ve been covering a lot of the recent cold outbreaks under the “weather is not climate department” heading. This story however is about both weather and climate and what one IPCC scientist thinks is headed our way.
The cold this December and January has been noteworthy and newsworthy. We just posted that December 2009 was the Second Snowiest on Record in the Northern Hemisphere. Beijing was hit by its heaviest snowfall in 60 years, and Korea had the largest snowfall ever recorded since record keeping began in 1937. Plus all of Britain was recently covered by snow.
The cold is setting records too.
Oranges are freezing and millions of tropical fish are dying in Florida, there are Record low temperatures in Cuba and thousands of new low temperature records being set in the USA as well as Europe.
There are signs everywhere, according to an article in the Daily Mail, which produced this graphic below:
According to IPCC scientist Mojib Latif in an article for the Daily Mail, it could be just the beginning of a decades-long deep freeze. Latif is known as one of the world’s leading climate modelers.
Latif, is a professor at the Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University and an author of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Latif is a prominent scientist in the UN’s IPCC climate research group.
Latif thinks the cold snap Americans, Brits, and Europeans have been suffering through is the beginning of another cycle, this one a down cycle. He says we’re in for 30 years of cooler temperatures. While maybe it is a harsh prediction, he calls it a “mini ice age”. That phrase is sure to stick in the craw of more than a few people. His theory is based on an analysis of natural oscillations in water temperatures in the oceans.
According to his He believes our current cold weather pattern is a pause, a “30-years-long blip”, in the larger cycle of global warming, which postulates that temperatures will rise rapidly over the coming years.
At a U.N. conference in September, Latif said that changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation could mask over any “manmade global warming” for the next few decades. He said the fluctuations in the NAO could also be responsible for much of the rise in global temperatures seen over the past 30 years.
In a stunning revelation, he told the Daily Mail that:
“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 percent.”
Quite a revelation, and a smack down of much of the climate science in the last 30 years that attributes the cause mostly to CO2 increases.
In other news, Arctic sea ice is on the rise too.
According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007.I’m betting that summer 2010 will have even more ice retained.
Right now, there doesn’t appear to be much of that “rotten ice” that one Canadian alarmist researcher squawked about to the media just a few weeks ago. In fact, we aren’t looking bad at all compared to 30 years ago.
Note that 30 years ago, the technology didn’t exist to display snow cover on the left image, but today we can see just how much our northern hemisphere resembles a snowball.
Now, watch the warmists throw Latif under the bus.
Sponsored IT training links:
Subscribe for 70-667 online preparation and get guaranteed success in real exam using 642-165 dumps and 640-721 practice exam.
answer to concerned transatlantical fellow about our “happiness” in Scandinavia due to low indoor-temperatures: I think we are fine. Both appartements and houses are thouroghly insolated even in the south. I’ve never seen a one glass window in this country (i should now as I clean windows to get some extra money). 2-glass windows are probably the most common although 3’s cannot be very far after. Scandinavians normaly leave their shoes at the door so indoor conditions must be thereafter. An article in a paper suggested we had the higest indoor temperature worldwide in Sweden, which I doubt.
I know from personal experience that it can be frigging cold indoors in both Belgium and France where I have lived, even though not very cold outside. Britain is not well-known for insolating buildings either, but I can’t say really because I haven’t been there much.
Tim Groves (21:05:37) : “Any chance of an ice bridge forming this winter between Greenland and Iceland? . . .”
I am not an expert on this issue, and others would be better to answer this; but my long-standing understanding without recent research is that the warm Gulf Stream from the south passes between Greenland and Iceland which would make such an ice bridge highly unlikely.
All he is saying is: We are set for 30 years of cooling -“a global trend towards cooler weather”. However, he believes in manmade global warming, and he does not want this latter notion to be misrepresented.
I might just be writing this for the benefit of newbie’s to this site but this needs to be summarized.
For starters some argue that the ocean have no net effect on climate over the long term as they have little to do with the heat balance. It goes something like this: Air and water can move around but in the end that’s all it’s doing the heat content doesn’t change. The problem with that is readings for the long term are mainly from surfaces; the land surface and the sea surface. We know the deep ocean can contain a lot of heat (even though it’s cold there) and just like we recently observed, the layers of the atmosphere can also fluctuate relative to one another.
So now we have to look closely at what Kevin Trenberth said here: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1048&filename=1255352257.txt
The key phrases being “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment”, “Our observing system is inadequate.” And “That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on a monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn’t decadal. The PDO is already reversing with the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time since Sept 2007.”
Working backwards through the quotes Trenberth tends to say that decadal fluctuations in the PDO are nonsense, and as some might agree, we are just watching a side effect of ENSO. He then however, lends credence to the PDO by saying that it has shifted. One could extract that there are shifts but there is no decadal pattern. Fine, but some think there is a decadal pattern. One of those people is Mojib Latif. Both Trenberth and Latif believe AGW is a big problem but they may disagree on exactly how the ocean works into it.
Then of course, as a response to Trenberth, Steve Schneider states “there will likely be another dramatic upward spike like 1992-2000. I heard someone–Mike Schlesinger maybe??–was willing to bet alot of money on it happening in next 5 years??” lending to the idea that he tends to disagree with the idea that the current stasis, that even Schneider admits to will stop soon.
Start by comparing this graph with this graph http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/ps3_latif_slide10.jpg with this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Temperatures_1880-2000.png
You can see from the two graphs that both seem to acknowledge a linear trend with a natural fluctuation imposed over it. Now compare this graph: http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/ps3_latif_slide3.jpg with this http://media.photobucket.com/image/Syun%20Ichi%20akasofu/MSimon6808/pdo.jpg
Did you look at them closely? Can you see that how you account for shifts as small as tenths of a degree and how you interpret these fluctuations in the record can make a huge impact on projections. Of course the graphs referenced are from Latif and Syun Ichi Akasofu. Unlike Motif, Syun states: “Thus, there is a possibility that only a small fraction of the warming between 1900 and 2000 may be attributed to the greenhouse effect. In this view, the predicted temperature change in 2100 is about 0.5°C ± 0.2°C.” link: http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/pdf/Natural_Components_of_Climate_Change.pdf
Really is genius to let this out in the open for sure.
1. It gets colder for next 30 years and AGW’ers say it’s just a short term event so we better beware.
2. It doesn’t happen and AGW’ers can claim that the effects are stronger because of man and we must double our efforts now.
Seems like they’ve got a win/win scenario going.
What’s really going to happen?
Like Pam, I also hear crickets, but they are ones I made.
Jeff
http://www.theCRICKETtoy.com
for those awkward pauses (crickets chirping)
The cooling being experienced now is pretty much global. December 2009 was one of the coldest Decembers on record as also reported here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/04/coal-creek-redux/#more-14815
Note that in the graphs shown above the tipping point for warming/cooling is apparently between 2002 and 2003.
Interestingly enough:
1) It is exactly from about this time that the scientists from the university of East Anglia tried to “bend’ the graphs upwards whereas it is clearly going downwards.
2) It is exactly from about this time that ozone started going up and the ozone hole in Antarctica is closing
3) it is exactly from about this time that earth’s albedo (albedo=earth shine) as measured on the moon, increased significantly/
4) I have seen several reports on You tube that revealed that the measurements of temperatures in rural areas in the USA have pretty much stayed constant in the last decade, which can also be associated with ‘tipping” (balance)
5 In: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/07/suns-magnetic-index-reaches-unprecedent-low-only-zero-could-be-lower-in-a-month-when-sunspots-became-more-active
If you look at the first graph the light blue line (smoothed monthly values, you will also note a tipping point in 2003.
conicidences?
I would think not.
As shown previously in
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data
ice ages have a better claim on being the natural state of earth’s climate than interglacials. According to the records, we are in fact pretty lucky to be here in this rare, warmer period. The broader lesson is: Climate does not stand still. And global cooling could be on its way.
Unfortunately, I am afraid that this is not a hoax (like the carbon dioxide scam – and the carbon footprint nonsense)
For those interested, a more detailed argument against (human made) global warming can be found in
http://www.kidswincom.net/climate.pdf
(note that SST stands for sea surface temperature)
Remember that most skeptics believe that climate is strongly related to cloud formation.
If, as predicted by Fred 9quiet some time ago, I presume), global cooling is coming, I am not sure what we can do if it gets ugly.
As most skeptics know, pumping CO2 in the atmosphere is not going to help…….Stocking up some food might be a good idea.
UPDATE: The subject of this article, Mojib Latif, has challenged the Daily Mail article and it’s interpretation. In another story at the Guardian, Latif says the interpretation by the Daily Mail and a similar story in the Telegraph is wrongly interpreting his work.
Read the Guardian story here and decide for yourself. If anyone knows of a contact for Dr. Latif, pleae leave it in comments as I’ll make this forum available to him should he wish to elaborate further.
The guy is probably scared stiff that “If my name wasn’t Latif it would be global warming” will be perceived as out of lockstep with his IPCC colleagues.
kwik (05:25:15) :
If I felt like the AGW’ers were living in a Salvador Dali painting, what shall we call this? Has the world gone completely crazy….. Just look here;
http://translate.google.no/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=no&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aftenposten.no%2Fnyheter%2Furiks%2Farticle3460872.ece&sl=no&tl=en
I somehow cannot picture the leaders of Norway concluding that more ice and snow is in their best interest. I also cannot picture the Obama administration approving of the operation.
Add to that the silliness of the idea that the USA has that much power and that Russia couldn’t match it.
Mike Ramsey
HELP !!!!
( 1 ) Mojib Latif , How do you pronounce that ?
( 2 ) When pronouncing do you do it with tongue in cheek ?????
‘In particular, the study concluded that cooling in the oceans could offset global warming, with the average temperature over the decades 2000-2010 and 2005-2015 predicted to be no higher than the average for 1994-2004.’
This exhibits a confusion between cause and effect. The ocean heat sink is many times beginner than that of the atmosphere. Ocean temperatures drive air temperatures. If ocean temperatures fall then that is global cooling – the earth is shedding energy.
Dr Latif said in relation to the current excitement:
“we don’t trust our forecast beyond 2015″
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2010/01/climate-predictions-no-good.html
So I guess that predictions for 2100 are useless. According to the good doctor.
Thanks Vincent, I’ll try again:
I didn’t intend anyone to get the impression that I thought Latif had plagiarised anything. I was merely suggesting that he may have felt it wise to ‘clarify’ his AGW credentials in light of my work and real world developments.
My main problem with his work and his ‘clarification’ is the extent of the dissonance shown.
His work on multidecadal oceanic oscillations clearly makes him admit that the oceans provide at least a 50 % contribution to whatever happened to global temperatures in the past and he does not explain why it need be limited to such a modest proportion given the rapid responses seen on an interannual timescale to changes in the ENSO cycle.
Nor does he seem to note the several different timescales of ocean cycles (at least 3 in my opinion), nor does he acknowledge any possible effect of solar variations on the strength of the Arctic Oscillation which I have just gone into in some detail here:
http://climaterealists.com/attachments/database/Winter20092010.pdf
I used to deal in models too. My hayday was in the 1950’s. Navy brat all the way; Dad in The Big One on an aircraft carrier, the Hancock. Models are fascinating pieces of history. Glad to see some kids never grow up and this guy “Mojib” likes history models too. I don’t remember when we started calling historian modelers “scientists”. Guess I’m getting old, starting to forget things. Wouldn’t believe anything he says about the future if I were you, modelers deal in the past not the future. Everybody knows that. That is unless they work for an archetech(sp?); but have you ever seen one of them get it right? The actual building looks different from the picture or model by a mile. Now gypsies, they can tell you what things are going to be like in the future. Don’t know that by personal experience you inderstand, but various female members of my family say they can sometimes be very accurate. “Mojib” is a famous modeler? Never heard of him.
It seems I have to link to the article not the pdf.
Third time lucky:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=4859&linkbox=true&position=13
latif: “Nobody would discuss the problem of [Einstein’s theory of] relativity in the media. But because we all experience the weather, we all believe that we can assess the global warming problem.”
i’ve not buffed up on the weather-climate difference, but isn’t this one of those increasingly absurd statements we’re getting too familiar with? we need experts to tell us how hot and cold it is now. personally my own experience is all i trust in completely these days.
Professor Latif seems to claim that the current cold spell is a weather phenomena and he is talking about global mean temperatures over next 10 years. Yet they are both affected by the same natural cycles like AO, NAO,AMO ,PDO,ENSO, etc .You can’t have it both ways .The fact that natural cycles as illustrated by current extreme cold weather dwarf greenhouse warming , of course it questions the validity of global warming science . An additional ten years of cooling were not supposed to be. We have already had 10 years of flat global temperatures anomalies and any warming that there was, was due to El Nino effects. We were supposed to have unprecedented warming and winters were supposed to be over in UK by 2000 according to some CRU scientists .They are still claiming this even today at CRU.
I wonder if Professor Latif may have short memory lapse. In MAY 2008, he co-authored a PAPER for NATURE called, Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector and I quote part only from the ABSTRACT,
“Skill is improved significantly relative to predictions made with incomplete knowledge of the ocean state10, particularly in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific oceans. Thus these results point towards the possibility of routine decadal climate predictions. Using this method, and by considering both internal natural climate variations and projected future anthropogenic forcing, we make the following forecast: over the next decade, the current Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will weaken to its long-term mean; moreover, North Atlantic SST and European and North American surface temperatures will cool slightly, whereas tropical Pacific SST will remain almost unchanged.
Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/abs/nature06921.html
He said much the same at the last WORLD CLIMATE CONFERENCE in September 2009
http://www.wcc3.org/sessions.php?session_list=PS-3
MIT’s sortof my conceptual “hero.” While it seems reasonable that soft sciences, such as sociology, AGW, etc., might be politicized there please tell me that their hard sciences are still up to snuff.
Their hard science depts. are politicized too. The physics guys are deep into ITER dismissing all other approaches to fusion. OTOH their astrophysics (plasma) guys have done some interesting work on a Farnsworth type device.
It is all about money. ITER has big money. Other approaches pittances.
(Note to mod – sorry about putting the same link twice in the comments. I went to sleep and forgot I had posted the link previously)
I had the Following Link thrown in my Face after Posting this article on a Political Forum.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/11/climate-change-global-warming-mojib-latif
Seems like they have rebutted the article….
jmbnf (06:39:30) :
“Working backwards through the quotes Trenberth tends to say that decadal fluctuations in the PDO are nonsense, and as some might agree, we are just watching a side effect of ENSO.”
No Trenberth isn’t saying that decadal fluctuations are nonsense. He is saying that people are confusing PDO with ENSO: “tracking PDO on a monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the change in ENSO not real PDO.”
PDO is well documented: “The Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) is a pattern of Pacific climate variability that shifts phases on at least inter-decadal time scale, usually about 20 to 30 years.” (wiki).
Martin B (13:45:31) :
“The key question that needs to be asked of the AGW establishment is this: Did any of your models predict the stall in warming over the last 7-8 years or predict that this cooling trend might last 20 or 30 years? If not, then how good can these models be? One year of abnormal weather may be just that – weather. But 20 years? That IS climate…”
Think you hit the nail on the head there Martin. To my knowledge none of the IPCC models showed this, proving they have no predictive power – all politicians please note! However, this is just the first major problem they’ve got.
The second problem the CAGW brigade have is that CO2 continued to rise during the last 10years. So instead of their claimed water vapour amplification happening, which is necessary for catastrophic warming, the reverse has happened and it seems to have a damping effect.
The third problem with the hypothesis is that CO2 was supposed to be the major climate driver, but it seems to have been easily overcome by natural climate effects. So the star of turn of CAGW has ended up in reality to be just a bit-part player.
The fourth and biggest problem these issues cause are that they falsify the hypothesis of CAGW completely.
Perhaps no surprise that Mojib Latif, one of the IPCC cabal, is desperately trying to back-pedal on the significance of his work, as it confirms the above points.
Time to wrap up warm now and enjoy watching the cooling, although I’m expecting UK summers to be nice and warm and dry for a change.
I realized “kadaka” was referring to so-called “passive houses” in Germany and the Nordic Countries. I too wonder how that works out?
Sound and Fury (16:04:04) :
“More from those delta-T plots:
http://dev-null.chu.cam.ac.uk/htm/soundandfury/110110-more_climate.htm”
Thanks for posting this interesting stuff.
In your comments about the first graph you say, “Also of note is that the 11-year sunspot cycle does not appear, since it was filtered out of the input dataset. Here the main cycle appears to be between 80 and 100 years…”
I think the 80 – 110 year quasi-cycle has a big influence on climate:-
1410-1500 cold – Low Solar Activity(LSA?)-(Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA?)
1610-1700 cold – (LSA) (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold – (LSA) (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold???) – (LSA???)
Would it be possible for you to do an analysis on a longer time series to see what we get?
If the warmists scientists can be brought to admit that warming will *not* be monontonous, and that indeed there are 30 year cycles and 1/2 the warming in the positive cycle is indeed natural variation, that would be a huge win for rationality.
And it wouldn’t make AGW something to not be concerned about and addressed. It just would make it something that there would be time to make measured decisions and transitions to address. But of course, there are a lot of people who the whole point of their AGW-love is as a society-changer. If it wasn’t this, there’d be something else they’d be pushing that would have the same solution –transfer lots of money elsewhere.
Stephen Wilde,
The link is working now. You have written a very interesting and thought provoking article. One thing that came to mind, is that you associate a quiter sun with warming and an active sun with cooling (all else being equal). You must have been aware that periods of cold have been associated with quieter activity – Maunder, Dalton minimums. You seem to be implying that this is the result of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and that if the ITCZ and ocean oscillators were both negative, and the sun active, this would lead to extreme cooling, possibly a glaciation.
If this is true, then what could have kept these different phases from reinforcing each other at any time in the past millenia to prevent an ice age? Is there a mechanism that ties all these terrestrial cycles with the solar cycle?
From memory; 1901 – global cooling scare, 1933 – dust bowl and global warming scare, 1970 – global cooling scare, 2000 – global warming scare. 2030 – global cooling scare?