GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE DOES NOT MEAN UNINTERRUPTED WARMING

Note to everybody who saw An Inconvenient Truth and watches the National Geographic documentaries and understands the meaning of greenhouse effect: You are about to be bombarded by misguided questions from people who did not get the memo that it is NOT “global warming” but “global climate change.” Sorry.

Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) periodically stands on the floor of the Senate and rants about the “hoax” of “global warming.” In those rants, he usually refers to the very complex, detailed computer models of world climate that the best scientists in the field are constantly struggling to perfect as “computer games.” (Grand Theft Climate?)

A new climate model is now playing right into Senator Inhofe’s oily hands. It predicts the coming years may be cooler, not hotter, due to changes in Atlantic Ocean temperatures.

Ready for the answer to Senator Inhofe’s gloating? Quote the Vice President: “So?”

The interruption of warming is just a temporary “blunting” of centuries of rising temperatures from the greenhouse effect (heat-trapping gases accumulating in the atmosphere).

Noel Keenlyside, lead author, Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences: “We’re learning that internal climate variability is important and can mask the effects of human-induced global change…In the end this gives more confidence in the long-term projections.”

It is the complexity of constructing computer models that make them rough predictors at best. The new one is only for European and North American climate. The impact of the greenhouse effect will be invariable while the earth has many natural variabilities.

NASA scientists at JPL and other researchers earlier noted Pacific Ocean fluctuations that have shifted into a cool phase and will also offset warming tendencies.

Temperatures show an unmistakable trend upward associated with the increased burning of fossil fuels. That there was a drop off here or there due to independent global factors does not change the trend. (click to enlarge)

In a New Climate Model, Short Term Cooling in a Warmer World
Andrew C. Revkin, May 1, 2008 (NY Times)

WHO
Noel Keenlyside, lead author, Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences; NASA scientists at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL); Kevin Trenberth, climate scientist, the National Center for Atmospheric Research

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WHAT
Expect cool weather ahead of a warming trend.

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WHEN
- This new paper is one of the first potentially reliable model of a decade into the future of climate.
- For a computer simulation of the 1990s climate, the model ran the 1950s through the 1980s, adjusting sea temperatures to the real world, and then ran without other data 10 years ahead.

WHERE
- Published in the May 1 edition of the pretigious scientific journal Nature.
- The paper studied relationships between short-term climate and a system of currents in the Atlantic Ocean, the meridional overturning circulation, that undergo periodic changes.

Ocean temperature fluctuations do not change what is happening here... (click to enlarge)

WHY
- This new predictive modeling reflects a new dimension in climate science that follows nearly half a century of work on past climate.
- The new computer simulations and measurements of ocean temperatures predict slight cooling in Europe and North America, probably from shifting ocean currents.

...or here. (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
Kevin Trenberth, climate scientist, the National Center for Atmospheric Research: “Too many think global warming means monotonic relentless warming everywhere year after year…It does not happen that way.”