The Earth’s climate seems to be changing faster than Al Gore predicted – it’s getting colder. Image courtesy of NASA.
Joel Kontinen
It might not be a bad time to buy a good sledge and a snow shovel. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado predicts that we in the northern hemisphere will probably get used to snowstorms and harsh winters for the next twenty or thirty years.
According to the Center, the Arctic Sea ice has increased 26 per cent since 2007.
The new figures make Al Gore’s theses sound somewhat outdated. In December 2008 Gore, the self-appointed Father of the Climate Change movement, predicted that within five years, the Arctic would be ice-free in the summer.
At last December’s Copenhagen Climate Conference he was slightly less optimistic, saying that the Arctic ice would probably melt by summer 2014.
The new predictions are based on the normal temperature fluctuations in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Professor Mojib Latif, a member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says he warned of impending cooling in 2008. Together with his colleagues he designed a method for measuring ocean temperatures 1000 metres (3000 ft) below the surface instead of relying on surface temperatures in order to get a more reliable estimation of the effect of ocean currents on climate.
According to Latif, perhaps 50 per cent of the warming in the 20-year period ending in 2000 was caused by exceptionally warm ocean currents. Now we are seeing the beginnings of a cooler period.
Professor Anastasios Tsonis, Head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, says that cooler and warmer periods lasting 20 to 30 years also alternate in the southern hemisphere.
Latif and Tsonis do not deny that overall temperatures have risen, especially in the past century, but they suggest that researchers should also take normal temperature fluctuations into account in their models.
Obsessed with their belief in the omnipotence of carbon dioxide, Al Gore and many climate scientists have obviously forgotten to pay any attention to this.
Sources:
Stanglin, Doug. 2009. Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014. USA Today (14 December). http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2009/12/gore-new-study-sees-nearly-ice-free-arctic-summer-ice-cap-as-early-as-2014/1
Rose, David. 2010. The mini ice age starts here. Daily Mail (10 January) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html
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