Global warming???

[The Conquistador]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.
The Sun (BBC)
Recent research has ruled out solar influences on temperature increases

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

Ocean cycles

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth's great heat stores.

Pacific ocean (BBC)
In the last few years [the Pacific Ocean] has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."

So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.

They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature.

But those scientists who are equally passionate about man's influence on global warming argue that their science is solid.

The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.

In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models.

In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.

What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.
Iceberg melting (BBC)
The UK Met Office says that warming is set to resume

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.

So what can we expect in the next few years?

Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.

It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).

Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely.

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

[franalexes]

We just had our coldest summer anyone can remember and you STILL believe in global warming?

[Tread]

Originally Posted by franalexes

We just had our coldest summer anyone can remember and you STILL believe in global warming?

You can't say something about a huge global slow reacting system by only one summer.

[The Conquistador]

Do I believe in GW? Yes. The Earth has warmed significantly in the past 100 years and there is data to prove it. However, there has been a noticeable cooling trend within the past decade and there is also data to prove this too.

Do I believe that humans are the cause of GW? No. We haven't been keeping temperature records and other forms of data long enough to come to an accurate conclusion about our role in temp. changes. There are too many things to factor in like volcanic eruptions and forest fires that can produce significant amounts of CO2 and other pollutants.

I believe that what most people refer to as "Global Warming" is actually a natural warming cycle of the globe which will inevitably be followed by a natural cooling cycle.

[TracyCoxx]

Originally Posted by franalexes

We just had our coldest summer anyone can remember and you STILL believe in global warming?

Fran, read the article from Angry Postman. It talks about how ocean temperatures influence climate over 30 year cycles. Currently we're on the way down. It was a good article. What people, especially politicians and pundits like Gore & Limbaugh need to understand is that climate is not political. Gore had no business making a movie about a scientific topic like global warming. You read articles like the one above and see what scientists are saying or at least scientifically trained writers.

The evidence is obvious that climate does change and is still changing. The overall trend since the last several thousand years is up. Whether humans are accelerating it is still unclear, because we are still learning to understand the natural cycles that come into play.

But let's at least put an upper limit on the problem. Can humans influence climate if they really tried? Absolutely. If we wanted to we could carpet bomb the planet with nukes. I bet that would have an effect don't you think? And the lower limit. Can we have zero effect? We make more waste than breathing and shitting, so no, we do have some effect. Then the answer is that we have some effect. Therefore we should think about what affect our activities could have on the climate as scientists, not politicians, try to determine how much effect we really have on the climate.

And if it is determined that humans negatively affect the climate, I certainly wouldn't trust a politician to make laws to protect the climate. There's too much special interest BS that gets in the way, and too much potential for politicians to manufacture evidence that says some activity we do is harmful - so create fines and taxes on those activities, because I've already seen speed limits get set back down to 55 mph on freeways a few years ago, in the name of clean air. Thankfully reason prevailed and a few months after they spent money to lower all the signs to 55 mph, they raised them back up again to 65 mph. Why not 70 like it was? I don't know. Probably some political BS. Either way, I typically drive at least 80 on freeways in my 16 mpg Mustang.