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Posted on 03/02/2009 2:50:43 PM PST by presidio9
For those who have endured this winter's frigid temperatures and today's heavy snowstorm in the Northeast, the concept of global warming may seem, well, almost wishful.
But climate is known to be variable -- a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn't mean the planet is cooling. Still, according to a new study, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.
Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.
"This is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. "Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn't have one."
Instead, Swanson and colleague Anastasios Tsonis think a series of climate processes have aligned, conspiring to chill the climate. In 1997 and 1998, the tropical Pacific Ocean warmed rapidly in what Swanson called a "super El Nino event." It sent a shock wave through the oceans and atmosphere, jarring their circulation patterns into unison.
How does this square with temperature records from 2005-2007, by some measurements among the warmest years on record? When added up with the other four years since 2001, Swanson said the overall trend is flat, even though temperatures should have gone up by 0.2 degrees Centigrade (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time.
The discrepancy gets to the heart of one of the toughest problems in climate science -- identifying the difference between natural variability (like the occasional March snowstorm) from human-induced change.
But just what's causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths. Or an overabundance of tropical clouds may be reflecting more of the sun's energy than usual back out into space.
"It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970s was due to a free variation in climate," Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. "Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again."
Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. But he warned that it's just a hiccup, and that humans' penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us.
"When the climate kicks back out of this state, we'll have explosive warming," Swanson said. "Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive."
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Gee, you think this bad boy might have something to do with it?
I see. It's still global warming. It's just hiding. For decades.
So we don’t need no stinkin Cap and trade crap. Right?
Unless you drink the Algore koolaid...two warm days in a row = global warming! Catastrophe! Dogs and cats living together! Total chaos!
Two cold winters in a row = aberration.
a theory that predicts both “A” and “not A” is not a theory. It is an unfalsifiable conjecture.
If they were not such great opportunities for confiscatory tax policies...
That's because most people...including this "journalist" have confused weather for climate.
Nope, scientists understand quite clearly what bogus data is, and looking for the most likely culprit. It's that wacked out liberal arts major bunch who style themselves as climatologists who are starting to figure out that the nearly 100 billion we've tossed at them over the last 7 years has resulted in absolutely no verifiable model of the most basic environment.
Wow... these guys are amazing! THIRTY YEARS of cooling... all the while, still believing that CO2 is the culprit behind potential warming. Is THAT what they expect us to believe??
For Global Warming alarmists, that had to hurt.
Do I finally have a good definition of a "tautology?" For some reason, that one always eludes me.
OMG! The climate warms and cools all by its self! Who knew?
If people would read the farmers almanac they would have read that every 30 years there is a climate change. We are now entering a cooling stage according to this years Almanac.
Exactly. If CO2 has been and is going to be released in higher quantitities (even with "reductions") and yet there is actual cooling for three decades then the only rationale to claim that the "build-up of greenhouse gasses" will continue and then "Bang!" major warming was delayed is due to the fact that the Sun and, to a lesser degree, other cylindrical factors are at play. It's truly insulting.
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