American Thinker | Marc Sheppard | May. 5, 2008
Mounting evidence of lower temperature trends despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels is becoming a real problem for the greenhouse gas crowd. And reports that the cooling appears to follow a period of dormant solar activity aren’t likely to ease their anxieties.
Indeed, without an immediate alarmist course correction, years of “the science is settled” campaigning could prove for naught, as prolonged temperature dips decimate the primary anthropogenic argument. After all, Lord Gore has shouted the IPCC’s proclamation of a 0.3°C warming over the next decade from virtually every rooftop. Given new data projecting the contrary, he and his green hordes will need to find a way to not only explain the error, but keep the AGW dream alive.
And perhaps they have.
On April 21st, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that an impending phase shift in a natural climate event would likely bring colder temperatures for as many as the next 20-30 years, noting that:
“The shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, with its widespread Pacific Ocean temperature changes, will have significant implications for global climate. It can affect Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, marine ecosystems and global land temperature patterns.”
[…]
Just 10 days later, the results of a model study on another phenomenon, this time affecting the North Atlantic, were published in the journal Nature [PDF]. Dr Noel Keenlyside et al, of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany, reported that the “conveyor belt” of southern warm water known as the Meridional Overturning Circulation is entering a weak cycle. As weak MOC cycles — which can last as many as 80 years — are associated with cooler North Atlantic temperatures, particularly around Europe and North America, the team expects global surface temperatures to decrease over the next decade. Oddly, a similar pattern between the 1940s and 1970s may explain the cooling of global average temperatures during that period, so assuming only the “next decade” seems an arbitrary call.
. . . more
