What Happened to Global Cooling?

Hard to believe anyone these days can talk about global cooling when it is so darn hot. So it’s a surprise when we see charts like this suggesting a slight downward slope to global temperatures. Don’t get too excited because HadCRUT still insists that we are up a degree F in temperature over the last century. But based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data issued by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

As recently as May Forbes Magazine wrote, “Natural climate cycles have already turned from warming to cooling, global temperatures have already been declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will continue to decline for another two decades or more. That is one of the most interesting conclusions to come out of the seventh International Climate Change Conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, held in Chicago.”

Officially it’s cooling but during the June 22-28 period, there were 2,132 warm temperature records set or tied in the U.S., compared to 486 cold temperature records. This includes 267 monthly warm temperature records, and 54 all-time warm temperature records. For the year-to-date, warm temperature records have been outpacing cold temperature records by about 7-to-1. But go back to last January and we were talking another story:

According to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on June 11, 2012, the South Pole Station measured a new record low temperature. The mercury dropped to -73.8°C (-100.8°F), breaking the previous minimum temperature record of -73.3°C (-99.9°F) set in 1966. There has also been some serious cold reported in New Zealand. And in Argentina serious frosts have led to a declaration of agricultural emergency and disaster as citrus crops take a beating.

As we said yesterday in the essay on heat and drought that even though it’s hot on the ground in the northern hemisphere its cold as ice up in the stratosphere and getting colder. August 2011 was the third coldest on record in the lower stratosphere, according to the National Climatic Data Center, and temperatures have been generally declining in recent years.

As the top chart indicates, over the last 180 months (15 years) global temperatures have been on a ‘slight’ cooling trend. This trend persists despite the increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 and at least two powerful El Niños since 1997. But now we have extreme heat breaking records right and left.

According to the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for May 2012 was 0.66°C (1.19°F) above the 20th century average of 14.8°C (58.6°F). This is the second warmest May since records began in 1880, behind only May 2010. The Northern Hemisphere land and ocean average surface temperature for May 2012 was the all-time warmest May on record, at 0.85°C (1.53°F) above average. The globally-averaged land surface temperature for May 2012 was the all-time warmest May on record, at 1.21°C (2.18°F) above average.

Global monthly heat content anomaly (GJ/m2) in the uppermost 700 m of the oceans since January 1979. The thin line indicates monthly values, and the thick line represents the simple running 37-month (c. 3-year) average. The increasing ocean temperatures would play havoc with the air above it. Are underwater volcanoes driving the rise in ocean temperatures?

People who have known me a few years know that I used to write quite a bit about global cooling and it is interesting to read that NASA climate alarmist James Hansen and his colleagues expressed alarm that the planet was inexplicably cooling three years ago.

In 2009, as the thermometer hit record lows in America, he and other climate scientists panicked in a flurry of emails: “Skeptics will be all over us—the world is really cooling, the models are no good.” They lamented that Mother Nature was not cooperating with their predictions that global temperatures would smash heat records last decade.

Hansen has taken off his sweater and is again swearing about man-made warming and the record-breaking heat and drought. Hansen, often called the “godfather of global warming,” asserted earlier this month that blistering heat across the United States is so rare that it can’t be anything but the man-made global warming he has been warning about for decades.

Does that really explain the dramatic climate events we are seeing this year? I am sure good ol’Al Gore will think so but whose intuition (most sensitive level of feelings as perception) is satisfied these days by what Gore thinks?

Conclusion

Climatologists are themselves confused about the extreme nature of the weather, which has made their lives most interesting this past year. In terms of science the slight increases or decreases in temperatures does not seem intense enough to explain the violent change in climate in many areas of the globe. Looking around at all the information it seems both colder and warmer thus the extreme nature of the world’s weather.

What counts and what will hurt most everyone is the fact that blistering heat in the US has destroyed 45% of the corn and 35% of the soya bean crop in the worst harvest since 1988. Russia and Ukraine have also had poor crop yields so the world is going down in terms of food reserves no matter which way the surface temperature tracks.

David Archibald recently delivered to the Institute of World Policy in Washington DC his analysis of declining sunspot activity, which to him means that global mean temperatures are going to decline by about 2 degrees C by 2040 – completely undoing the meager 0.8 degrees C global warming trend we have experienced in the last 150 years.

It is shocking to actually see this chart from Hamweather.

Leading climate scientists told The Mail in January of this year that after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

When I look at the information on cooling I am glad that I invested quite a bit of money this past winter in warm clothing for the future. At Sanctuary this winter it was cold and even here on the north east coast of Brazil, in the semi tropics it has been unusually cool. I hardly ever have to use the air conditioner in the winter anymore!

Special Note: There is probably little to nothing to worry about since the Israeli and American militaries are planning to start a new war in the Middle East, which could go thermonuclear—hot enough to warm the planet despite solar and global cooling.

2012-08-28 11:22:18

Source: http://blog.imva.info/climate/happened-global-cooling?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=happened-global-cooling