Whisper it quietly – and don’t tell Al ‘Boiling Oceans’ Gore – but the Northern hemisphere may be entering a temperature cooling phase until the 2050s with a decline up to 0.3°C. By extension, the rest of the globe will also be cooled. These sensational findings, ignored by the mainstream media, were released last year and are the work of six top international scientists led by Nour-Eddine Omrani of the Norwegian Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research. Published in the Nature journal Climate and Atmospheric Science, the scientists say that the North Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, an important sea current that has been pumping warmer water into the Arctic, is weakening and that’s leading to a cooler North Atlantic area and lower temperatures, as was observed in the period 1950-1970.
Certainly, current observations back up these suggestions. As we reported recently, Arctic summer sea ice stopped declining about a decade ago and has shown recent growth. The Greenland surface ice sheet grew by almost 500 billion tonnes in the year to August 2022, and this was nearly equivalent to its estimated annual loss. Of course, climate alarmists have not quite caught up with these recent trends, with Sir David Attenborough telling his BBC Frozen Planet II audience that the summer sea ice could all be gone within 12 years.
Interestingly, the six scientists, whose work has helped debunk the ‘settled’ science myth, still attribute some global warming to human causes. The Northern hemisphere is characterised by “several multidecadal climate trends that have been attributed to anthropogenic climate change”. But producing work that predicts 30 years of global cooling puts them outside the ‘settled’ narrative that claims human-produced carbon dioxide is the main – possibly the only – determinant of global and local temperatures. At the very least, it dials down the hysteria pushing for almost immediate punitive net-Zero measures. Lead author Omrani is reported to have said that the expected warming pause “gives us time to work out technical, political and economic solutions before the next warming phase, which will take over again from 2050”.
Needless to say, such thinking was absent at last week’s Davos climate freak show, with elite delegates ramping up the fearmongering to record heights. Former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore went into full meltdown, ranting about “rain bombs” and “boiling oceans”. Current U.S. climate envoy, and private jet owner, John Kerry described the gathering as a “select” group of people trying to “save the planet”, while chief UN carnival barker Antonio Guterres claimed we were flirting with climate disaster and every week brought a new horror story. Of course, some might suggest that in the circumstances this was an all-round excellent effort to whip up more money – ahem, I mean more genuine climate concern – at a time when corals, Arctic sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet, polar bears and now global warming are having to be retired from the poster-alarm portfolio.
As we have noted on numerous occasions, rising global temperatures ran out of steam about two decades ago. Accurate satellite records show pauses from around 2000 to 2012 and a current one lasting over eight years. It could be argued that the only real warming for over 20 years was caused by a particularly powerful El Nino natural oscillation around the middle of the last decade. Surface datasets run by operations like the U.K. Met Office have added retrospective warming, while there are increasing doubts about the on-site recording of massive heat distortions caused by the growth in cities and towns across the globe.
The Omrani paper is complex but it revolves around the effect of the cyclical and natural North Atlantic Multidecadel Oscillation (AMO). Observations and records dating back to the start of the 19th century have shown enormous Arctic sea ice changes. It appears the AMO plays a major part in these changes. A key projection of the paper is “further weakening of the North Atlantic Oscillation, North Atlantic cooling and hiatus in wintertime North Atlantic Arctic sea ice and global surface temperatures just like the 1950 – 1970s”. If there is a drop comparable with this period, the global temperature could fall by up to 0.3°C.
Any science that downplays the involvement of human-caused CO2 is largely ignored in mainstream academia, politics and the media. But even some scientists who argue there is considerable anthropogenic input recognise the role played by natural atmospheric factors in a constantly changing climate. More sceptical scientists such as Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT have an intellectual objection to blaming all or most changes in global temperatures on just one trace atmospheric gas. Lindzen is dismissive of this “one dimensional” view of the climate. He is of the climate science school of thought that argues that temperature changes are caused by dynamic heat flows in the atmosphere and the oceans, and these in turn are caused by latitudinal differences in temperature, or ‘baroclinic instability’ to give it a scientific term.
For Lindzen, it is “absurd” to assume that the controlling factor for temperature changes in our complex, three-dimensional climate is the small contribution made by CO2. It seems that the more scientists look and explore, the more they understand that the atmosphere and the climate it produces is an immensely complex environment affected by many far-reaching natural influences.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. He was a recent guest on the podcast of online climate journalist Tom Nelson, where he talked about his early journalistic influences, life as a journalist and an entrepreneur, joining a rock and roll band and his recent work on the Daily Sceptic. You can listen here.
Stop Press: Check out the Extinction Clock, a website that keeps track of all the predictions climate alarmists have made that haven’t come true. For example, this prediction in a 2009 MSNBC documentary called ‘Future Earth: What Will Earth Look Like in 2025?’ that the Hoover Damn would be a ‘dry hole’ by 2021 if nothing was done to avert the looming water shortage.
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