The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reveals their team knows even less about Earth’s global warming than it claimed to know almost 30 years ago.
The dominant thing the IPCC “knew” in 1998 was that we were already suffering a powerful, dangerous warming trend that would essentially shake humanity’s faith in its future. But that didn’t happen. Instead, we spent the last 20 years with no significant warming at all, while we wasted tens of billions of dollars fruitlessly re-analyzing the climate models that failed to forecast the non-warming.
Our recent “hottest years” headlines were essentially statistical gimmicks, citing temperatures that were “record-high” by thousandths of a degree C. The claims were possible only because lots more of our “official” thermometers are now located in bigger and more intense Urban Heat Islands than 30 years ago. The official thermometers are now surrounded by more cement and less greenery.
Simultaneously, the official thermometers at bigger and bigger airports have more and bigger planes burning more jet fuel as they await take-off.
Meanwhile, literally hundreds of “formerly official” rural thermometers have been decommissioned - - perhaps because they showed so little warming? Dr. Edward Long took one pair of official thermometer sites from each of the 48 States, one rural, one urban, for the years 1900-2010. The raw data for the rural sites showed only one-fifth as much warming as the urban sites. But the officially “adjusted” data shows both rural and urban instruments closely matching the urban record! NOAA had adjusted the rural sites to match the polluted “Urban Heat Island” trend.
Obviously, NOAA wanted to see “record warming,” and wasn’t above finagling the numbers to get it.
Now, about our 20-year warming” hiatus.” The climate modelers claim to be baffled by it, but they aren’t. It’s just a 60-year cycle in the Pacific Ocean that periodically warms that vast ocean by about 2 degrees Celsius for 25-30 years. Then the Pacific temperatures drop back to roughly their earlier level for the next 25-30 years. It’s called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The record shows PDO warmings at 1860-1880, 1915-1940 - - and during the “Al Gore” years from 1976-98! Thus we can expect another ten years or so of “hiatus” while the climate models fruitlessly whiz out “new” forecasts.
In other words, there was nothing unusual about the Earth’s warming from 1976-1998. It wasn’t “unprecedented man-made warming,” it was just another PDO cycle.
It’s no coincidence that over the past 150 years our newspaper headlines show we’ve had climate scare headlines every 25-30 years - - coinciding with the PDO shifts. When the trend was cooling, we scared ourselves about another Ice Age. When the trend was warming, we saw forecasts of an “ice-free Arctic” and a huge sea level rise.
The PDO cycle recurs, just like the longer Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle that brought us the Roman Warming (200 BC to 600 AD), the Medieval Warming (950 AD to 1300 AD). The Modern Warming dates from the end of the Dalton Minimum that dipped our temperatures from 1790-1830, and it’s not “unprecedented” either. We’re not yet as warm as the peaks of either the Medieval or Roman Warmings.
Nor will the alarmists get to claim runaway warming again after this PDO phase ends about 2030. NASA is now forecasting a deep solar sunspot minimum that could give us 60 years of even lower temperatures than we’ve had during the current 20-year “hiatus.” The temperatures are likely to drop again about 2040. Past solar sunspot minimums like the Maunder and Dalton were famous for causing big faminesm but minimums during warmer periods were sometimes missed. Recent reanalysis shows these minimum come about every 200 years, and the Dalton ended in 1830.
What’s apparently cooling the upper atmosphere already is extra Galactic Cosmic Rays, which create extra cloud seeds as they shatter carbon and oxygen molecules. The extra cloud seeds mean more clouds, which are already cooling the outer layer of Earth’s air.
Earth will likely get more cloudy - - and thus cooler - - until the sunspot minimum is over. In complete defiance of the IPCC!
What else did we “know” in 1998 that has since proven untrue?
- NOAA has recently told us there’s no link between the temperatures we’ve had recently and the extreme weather that we’ve always suffered.
- There are more and healthier polar bears than the Inuit have ever seen in the past.
- Land areas of 90 percent of the Pacific atolls are either stable or growing.
- Greenland’s ice mass has added 150 billion tons of ice this year compared to the 1981-2010 average.
- Our moderate warming, far from killing humans, is saving millions of human lives each year. Cold normally kills about 18 million people due to cold-induced heart attacks and other cold-weather events in an average current year.
A record of failures like the IPCC’s could get a football coach fired in mid-season.