Climate Modelers May Have Got It Wrong
As pointed out in The National Post, from Canada, where they have to take winter cold much more seriously than down south in the U.S.A.,"And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.
"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.
But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."
He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased."
This article in the journal Nature by Toggweiler and Russell has all the details. These former Global Warming believers, and they privided some of the evidence for the IPCC report, seem to have recanted. It is not the thermohaline circulation, they say, it is the oceanic winds. Thus CO2 lags warming, because it is a result of warming, not the cause. Now that cooling has set in, CO2 will decline.
So it is not just conservative whackos who are declaiming the effect of mankind's burning of fuel that is making the world an unlivable place, the same lefty loonies who cried wolf before are taking their words back. Al Gore is in hiding, and humanity just survived a close call. And so it goes.