Category Archives: Solar Activity

On October 13, 2012 the UK’s Daily Mail posted:  “Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it”.  My posting of several months ago (July 19, 2012) How Many Years Of No Global Warming Are Required To Disprove CO2 As The Primary Factor In Global Warming? reported this pause.  The Daily Mail’s posting is worth a read as it contains interviews with the head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit,  Dr. Phil Jones and Professor Judith Curry from Georgia Tech. 

“Some climate scientists, such as Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions.

Others disagreed.  Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.

Even Prof Jones admitted that he and his colleagues did not understand the impact of ‘natural variability’ – factors such as long-term ocean temperature cycles and changes in the output of the sun. However, he said he was still convinced that the current decade would end up significantly warmer than the previous two.”

Professor Curry’s statement about computer models is spot on.  Jones, however, is not about to give up the source of his income (climate research money) which requires that he and his colleagues continue to alarm and frighten people.

Several other excerpts from the Mail’s posting:

 “Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who found himself at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ scandal over leaked emails three years ago, would not normally be expected to agree with her. Yet on two important points, he did.

The data does suggest a plateau, he admitted, and without a major El Nino event – the sudden, dramatic warming of the southern Pacific which takes place unpredictably and always has a huge effect on global weather – ‘it could go on for a while’.

Like Prof Curry, Prof Jones also admitted that the climate models were imperfect: ‘We don’t fully understand how to input things like changes in the oceans, and because we don’t fully understand it you could say that natural variability is now working to suppress the warming. We don’t know what natural variability is doing.’

Yet he insisted that 15 or 16 years is not a significant period: pauses of such length had always been expected, he said.

Yet in 2009, when the plateau was already becoming apparent and being discussed by scientists, he told a colleague in one of the Climategate emails: ‘Bottom line: the “no upward trend” has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’

But although that point has now been passed, he said that he hadn’t changed his mind about the models’ gloomy predictions: ‘I still think that the current decade which began in 2010 will be warmer by about 0.17 degrees than the previous one, which was warmer than the Nineties.’

Only if that did not happen would he seriously begin to wonder whether something more profound might be happening. In other words, though five years ago he seemed to be saying that 15 years without warming would make him ‘worried’, that period has now become 20 years.”

The author of the posting, David Rose makes the following comment:

 “Yet it has steadily become apparent since the 2008 crash that both the statistics and the modelling are extremely unreliable. To plan the future around them makes about as much sense as choosing a wedding date three months’ hence on the basis of a long-term weather forecast.”

Solar Cycle 24 is indicating the least active Sun in the past 100 years.  Most solar scientists predict that Solar Cycle 25 will be even weaker than Cycle 24.  What does this mean?  Such performance in the past has resulted in “solar minimums” that coincided with significantly lower global temperatures. The correlation of solar activity (often indicated by number and size of the sunspots) and global temperatures has been very good over the centuries. 

To read more of the Daily Mail posting: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released–chart-prove-it.html#ixzz29U2Gb6uW

To read my posting “How Many Years Of No Global Warming Are Required To Disprove CO2 As The Primary Factor In Global Warming?” click here:https://cbdakota.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/how-many-years-of-no-global-warming-are-required-to-disprove-co2-as-the-primary-factor-in-global-warming/

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