More on Climate Cooling
Drudge evidently linked to a BBC post regarding the cooling trend seen by many climate experts, a trend that could last up to 30 years. It flies in the face of the more strident global warming advocates, but really doesn’t change much among the scientists studying the phenomenon.
Cooling and warming trends exist throughout history. So the question is if the overall impact of increased CO2 and equivalents is toward overall warming. If yes, then man made global warming is something we have to address. But the new information, if true, gives us more time to do that. Damian Thompson at the UK-based Telegraph, blogs about the BBC’s “about face” on the issue of global warming by correspondent Paul Hudson:Hudson’s piece is a U-turn – not because he has joined the ranks of sceptics who reject the theory of man-made global warming, but because at last he has written a story about the well-established fact that the earth’s temperature has not risen since 1998, and reports seriously the theories of climatologists (themselves not sceptics) who believe that we are in for 30 years of cooling caused by the falling temperatures of the oceans.
See Paul Hudson’s original article on the BBC. Hudson recounts studies showing that ocean temperature fluctuation seems to have more to do with decadal temperature fluctuations than previously thought.
Thompson notes the controversy is heating up, with The Great Beyond blog at Nature dissing two of the experts originally quoted by the BBC as dyed-in-the-wool skeptics. The intent of attacking these two experts seems to call the entire BBC post into question. But Nature ignores the quote from Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), a well-respected scientist who is not a skeptic and who claims we may be in for 10 to 20 years of cooling, not warming:Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world’s top climate modellers.
But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.
Nature and other “true believers” would do well to not stand in the way of true scientific inquiry. Skepticism is good, as it should turn people back to their climate models to prove the other guy wrong. But I’m not sure selective quoting and throwing what is, in essence, a hissy fit is productive.
Hissy fits aside, it appears to me that the correct climate model will be the one that most accurately predicts what will happen. If cooling continues, then we need a climate model that accurately predicts that.