By Steven Milloy
A new study indicates alarmist concern and a need to explain away the lack of actual global warming. Researchers belonging to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, reported in Nature (May 1) that after adjusting their climate model to reflect actual sea surface temperatures of the last 50 years, “global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming."You got that? IPCC researchers project no global warming over the next decade because of Mother Nature. Although the result seems stunning in that it came from IPCC scientists who have always been in the tank for manmade global warming, it’s not really surprising since the notion of manmade climate change has never lived up to its billing.
The Nature study, however, reasserts Mother Nature in her rightful place as our climate dominatrix. Although there is no evidence that manmade CO2 emissions play any detectable role in climate change, the very idea that Mother Nature may cool the planet despite humanity’s furious output of greenhouse gases should be even worse for the climate alarmists’ way of thinking.
A few weeks ago, Gore launched a $300 million global warming ad campaign. Do you think he’s at all interested in returning that money to investors and contributors? Or that he and the IPCC are interested in returning their Nobel Peace Prizes? The federal government has been doling out more than $5 billion annually for research into climate change and alternative energy. A generation ago, there were only a handful of climatologists around the world; now there are legions of taxpayer-funded climatologists, scientists and public health professionals from many disciplines also hooked up to the climate gravy train. What about the private-sector profiteers? Will the carbon footprint industry give up its CO2-offset ATM? Will companies that have been lobbying to receive trillions of dollars of free carbon credits from Congress - including Alcoa, Dow Chemical, and Dupont - stop pushing for all that free money?
How many outspoken politicians and celebrities will be willing to acknowledge that they have made fools of themselves? Finally, there’s the environmental movement that is now just a November presidential election away from its dream of turning the United States into a centrally planned Green state where under the guise of saving the planet, the Green elites would get to pick and choose who gets to use how much energy and at what cost. The bottom line of global warming - and that is why so many are behind it - is that its many vested interests are on the verge of a financial and political bonanza, something that scientific facts and climatic realities are likely only to spoil. Read more here.
By Andy Revkin, New York Times Dot.Earth Blog
If the new forecast of a decade of cooler temperatures in North America and Europe pans out, it will pose a substantial challenge to climate campaigners, politicians, and citizens: Can they produce meaningful action to limit the long-term warming that scientists still say is clearly ahead under a building greenhouse blanket even when it’s cooling outside?
One thing that may make this an even tougher challenge is the tendency of some campaigners recently to portray global warming as an unfolding catastrophe here and now. I’ve been criticized by some environmentalists in recent years for writing that the long-term picture (more CO2 = warmer world = less ice = higher seas and lots of climatic and ecological changes) is the only aspect of human-caused global warming that is solidly established, and that efforts to link dramatic weather-related events to the human influence on climate could backfire should nature wiggle the other way for awhile. Read this post here.
See previous day post announcing the new Nature study models predicting possible cooling here. In that post Revkin writes : The researchers, writing in the journal Nature, stress that this is a preliminary attempt to shift climate models toward becoming a forecasting tool, mainly by tweaking them with real-world data (in this case ocean temperatures) as they churn through their simulations. They forecast a plateau in warming and some possible cooling over North America and Europe in the coming decade, probably driven by shifts in ocean circulation in the North Atlantic and other ocean cycles that can affect climate. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA recently reported that the Pacific Ocean appears to be reverting to a cool phase, as well.
See also comment here and tonight this long interesting one from Chip Knappenberger of World Climate Report.
Marc Morano, EPW
Today’s BBC reports: The Earth’s temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted. A new computer model developed by German researchers, reported in the journal Nature, suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming. However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say.
This follows yesterday’s report in the UK Telegraph noting that researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a “lull” for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged. This would mean that the 0.3C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.”
This new study in Nature essentially finds that global warming will have stopped for nearly 20 years. According to the UK Telegraph article: “Writing in Nature, the scientists said: ‘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 [manmade] warming’”
The UK Telegraph article by reporter Charles Clover noted the significant deficiencies in UN climate models: “The IPCC currently does not include in its models actual records of such events as the strength of the Gulf Stream and the El Nino cyclical warming event in the Pacific, which are known to have been behind the warmest year ever recorded in 1998.” Read more here.