Global warming may 'stop', scientists predict

By Charles Clover, Environment Editor
Last Updated: 6:01pm BST 30/04/2008

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Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said.

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Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a "lull" for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.


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The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.

This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.

However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.

Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, said: "The IPCC would predict a 0.3°C warming over the next decade. Our prediction is that there will be no warming until 2015 but it will pick up after that."

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He stressed that the results were just the initial findings from a new computer model of how the oceans behave over decades and it would be wholly misleading to infer that global warming, in the sense of the enhanced greenhouse effect from increased carbon emissions, had gone away.

The IPCC currently does not include in its models actual records of such events as the strength of the Gulf Stream and the El Nino cyclical warming event in the Pacific, which are known to have been behind the warmest year ever recorded in 1998.

Today's paper in Nature tries to simulate the variability of these events and longer cycles, such as the giant ocean "conveyor belt" known as the meridional overturning circulation (MOC), which brings warm water north into the North East Atlantic.

This has a 70 to 80-year cycle and when the circulation is strong, it creates warmer temperatures in Europe. When it is weak, as it will be over the next decade, temperatures fall. Scientists think that variations of this kind could partly explain the cooling of global average temperatures between the 1940s and 1970s after which temperatures rose again.

Global warming forecast predicts rise in 2014
Writing in Nature, the scientists said: "Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic [manmade] warming."

The study shows a more pronounced weakening effect than the Met Office's Hadley Centre, which last year predicted that global warming would slow until 2009 and pick up after that, with half the years after 2009 being warmer than the warmest year on record, 1998.

Commenting on the new study, Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre said the model suggested the weakening of the MOC would have a cooling effect around the North Atlantic.

"Such a cooling could temporarily offset the longer-term warming trend from increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"That emphasises once again the need to consider climate variability and climate change together when making predictions over timescales of decades."

But he said the use of just sea surface temperatures might not accurately reflect the state of the MOC, which was several miles deep and dependent on factors besides temperatures, such as salt content, which were included in the Met Office Hadley Centre model.

If the model could accurately forecast other variables besides temperature, such as rainfall, it would be increasingly useful, but climate predictions for a decade ahead would always be to some extent uncertain, he added."

What I like most abt this article is its premise that the same models predicting all this warming, Man related, are the same models used to come up with the 8 year or decade strong COOL down. Guys, girls, these models NEVER work and will not ever work UNTIL we fully understand our natural world. We are nowhere close. Hellsbells, we know more abt the MOON then 85% of our oceans. MODELS are not realistic and they are not even close to having all the variables to predict. This stupid prediction is just a cover for the last 10 years of cooling and the next 7 to come. They cannot give up the ghost so they make excuses, never allowing that this is all natural, although they SAY this is a natural clean up to MANS mess. Good grief. Its either 1 hoax or another with these rabid enviro's. Its been a cold as heck past two years, and now that Global Warming doesn't sell anymore its now called CLIMATE CHANGE.

I'd put climate change as a fairly low priority for the U.S. to bother spending money and resourses on.

In order of importance, I'd rank the looming economic and environmental problems:

1 - Peak Oil. As we run down the negative slope of Hubbard's Peak, the world economy will sink into a permanent recession that will accellerate year by year. Resoures wars have already begun. We need to act to move beyond the fossil fuel economy now. New discoveries won't amount to enough new production to even offset the decline in existing production. And the new discoveries are all in very difficult to extract basins, which require an enormous amount of energy and money to extract. With extraction of these new basins taking so much energy, the EROEI of these new fields is often lower than even ethanol. World oil production peaked in 2005.

The solutions are simple. We have the ability to do what needs to be done right now. But we lack the intelligence as a nation to do it.

2 - Peak Food. The "Green Revolution" isn't so much an actual advance in the ability to grow crops as it has been an ability to pump huge amounts of cheap fossil fuel imputs into fertilizer, pesticide, farm machinery, and food transportation and refrigeration. As Peak Oil raises the cost and eventually the availability of these fossil fuel imputs, world food production will crash. And along with it world population, especially in developing nations. This is already happening.

3 - Overfishing and pollution of the ocean. Entire regions of the ocean are becoming dead zones due to overfishing and oxygen derpivation caused by phosphates from fossil fuel farming fertilizers washing into the ocean from rivers. The Gulf of Mexico is the hardest hit by the phosphates washed down from the midwest farms by the Mississippi River. The Pacific is being severely overfished on both the U.S. coast and the Asian coasts. The North Atlantic is suffering the same fate from both North America and Europe. This is directly related to problem number 4.

4 - Overpopulation. We currently have 6.5 billion humans scavenging to survive on this rock. It's projected to be 10.5 billion by 2100. The non-fossil fuel carrying capacity of the planet is around 1 billion. As fossil fuels become scarce, and world population continues to grow, we will run agains food and energy constraints that determine how many people the world can support. If this problem isn't addressed in some reasonable manner, nature will take care of it herself. And she tends to act swiftly and with an iron fist - starvation and resource wars will rear their ugly heads.

5 - Air and drinking water pollution. We can't live without clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. Enough said. But these tend to be localized problems. Just because Los Angeles has shitty air doesn't mean I have to breathe it in. I can choose to live where the air is better and the water is clear.

Climate Change doesn't even register on my radar. Mainly because if we solve these other problems, we've solved the climate change problem by default.

I agree with AEN on most of his post and when people bring up the Al Gore Doom and Gloom Global Warming bullshit now, I just tell them to do the reseach and prove the concept.

It's better described as Climate SHIFT A NATURAL occurrence since the birth of the planet. When they can prove otherwise with un-refuted facts based on scientific evidence, come back and convince me..........

Who knows?? We'll probably be in a damn Ice Age in 20 years....... and with a lack of alternative fuel or energy, we'll freeze our asses off.....

It's Monday and I think we should have MILF Mondays now to go along with Lesbian Tuesdays and Thursdays and Fat Chick Fridays.......

Yep, AEN for Prez and Doc as his VP. fgtb76

How about just solve #4 and the rest take care of themselves.

That's the warmonger solution.

I prefer Anti-Socialist. 678hnn77

Solution

BUT

Man will probably solve the problem before Nature has the chance.

Bi-directional Blast and Radiation play havoc on flesh. 20 or 30 years of nuclear winter.

There may be 2......................3 million left afterwards

I actually consider that part of nature's solution.

Man's tendency to kill one another over stupid shit is as much nature as anyting else.

Thats a Gaia Theory per TylerDurden.