10 Years without Global Warming and Counting

In 2001 Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus Geology, Western Washington University presented a paper in Boston at the national Geological Society of America meeting Saying that we were going into a 30 year cooling cycle.

Dr Easterbrook said,

"You should have seen the stunned look on people’s faces. We’d just had the 1998 warm peak and people were astonished. I said, look at the data and forget CO2."

His paper correlated 30 year warming and cooling cycles with solar activity and was confident that upcoming cooling cycle is inevitable. Read an interview with him here.

Dr. Easterbrook clarifies this chart as follows,

“The projected warming from ~2040 to ~2070 is NOT driven by CO2, it’s merely a continuation of warm/cool cycles over the past 500 years, long before man-made CO2 could have been a factor. We’ve been warming up from the Little Ice Age at rate of about 1 degree or so per century and the 2040-70 projection is simply a continuation of non-AGW cycles.

An interesting question is the similarity between what we are seeing now with sun spots and global temperature and the drop into the Little Ice Age from the Medieval Warm Period. Could we be about to repeat that? Only time will tell–We might see a more pronounced cool period like the 1880 to 1910 cool cycle (when many temp records were set) or a milder cooling like the 1945-1977 cool cycle. In any case, the setting up of the cool phase of the PDO seems to suggest cooler times ahead, not the catastrophic warming predicted by IPCC and Al Gore.”

Dr. Easterbrook further notes that NASA says the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) had shifted to its cool phase (Fig. Below) and is right on schedule as predicted by past climate and PDO changes. He emphasizes that this PDO change

"is not an oddity superimposed upon and masking the predicted severe warming by the IPCC."

This PDO cooling phase could last 20-30 years and just reinforces his solar cycle cooling phase.

Now scientists from Germany are saying in Nature (supplemental info) that global warming could take a break in the next decade thanks to a natural shift in ocean circulations.

From AFP - They base the prediction on what they believe is an impending change in the Gulf Stream -- the conveyor belt that transports warm surface water from the tropical Atlantic to the northern Atlantic and returns cold water southwards at depth.

The Gulf Stream will temporarily weaken over the next decade, in line with what has happened regularly in the past, the researchers say.

This will lead to slightly cooler temperatures in the North Atlantic and in North America and Europe, and also help the temperatures in the tropical Pacific to remain stable, they suggest.

Just to be clear the authors state the following,

"We are not stating that anthropogenic [man-made] climate change won't be as bad as previously thought," said Mojib Latif, a professor at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, northern Germany.

"What we are saying is that on top of the warming trend, there is a long-periodic oscillation that will probably lead to a lower temperature increase than we would expect from the current trend during the next years."

They didn't discuss if their model accounts for the fact that there has been no warming for the last 10 years.

So if Dr. Eastbrook's solar cycle theory is correct and the PDO lasts as long as 20-30 years we will have cooling. Now add to that the Atlantic conveyor weakening and this could be a cooling as deep as 1880-1910. We'll know soon enough.

(Article and supplement via Watts Up With That)