Beginning of a mini-30 Year Ice Age At Hand?

The Daily Mail and the Telegraph and London Times are all much more Global Warming Skeptics than the politicized broadsheets like The Independent, The Guardian, and the laughing-stock BBC. These last resemble the clueless witless brain-dead US thundering herds of low-IQ, highly lazy "journalists" who remind me of the old Dylan song, "you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing."

The Mail is full of actual practicing journalists, some of whom are reading one of

the most prominent of the scientists ... Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.
Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.
He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.
Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.
'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.
‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’
As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance.
Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.
The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view. On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ – a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.
Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years.
As a result, the jetstream – the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain – is currently running not over the English Channel but the Strait of Gibraltar.

A composite photograph released last year to highlight the issue of melting ice and global warming
However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts – what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs).
For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.
But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.
'They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.
'We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’
Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.

Pictures of the snow in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, last week show the city is the coldest it has been since 1970
But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.
Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.
For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.

I personally remember the stories in the seventies that the advent of a new ice age was beginning and the last year i lived through a winter in Milwaukee WI, there was an accumulation of over 110 inches of snow, a new city record, back in the late sixties!

Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.
‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’
He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing.
For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible – as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’
Prof Tsonis said: ‘Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.’
Like Prof Latif, Prof Tsonis is not a climate change ‘denier’. There is, he said, a measure of additional ‘background’ warming due to human activity and greenhouse gases that runs across the MDO cycles.

'This isn't just a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while'
But he added: ‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount.
'These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’
Prof Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with ‘hate emails’.
He added: ‘People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.’
He said he also received hate mail from climate change sceptics, accusing him of not going far enough to attack the theory of man-made warming.

Sounds like on climate issues and their associated taxation implications, it is almost impossible to please ANYBODY!

The work of Profs Latif, Tsonis and their teams raises a crucial question: If some of the late 20th Century warming was caused not by carbon dioxide but by MDOs, then how much?
Tsonis did not give a figure; Latif suggested it could be anything between ten and 50 per cent.
Other critics of the warming orthodoxy say the role played by MDOs is even greater.
William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect.

Dr David Viner stands by his claim that snow will become an 'increasingly rare event'
According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’
But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact.
In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.
Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.
'This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’
The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion.

Anyone familiar with the British Council knows that it is a formerly highly-respected overseas agency fallen into the hands of disreputable leftist agitprop groups. The Voodoo Doctor Viner will be preaching the sort of sci fi gibberish that characterizes New Age looniness---something like Deepak Chopra blaming the USA for the Muslim terrorist attacks on hotels in Mumbai.

Al Gore got a D+ in the Divinity School science course he took---although a Harvard undergrad, this mentally-challenged hysteric couldn't get into Law School, although his daddy was a sitting US Senator! He is a fit leader for a scam that aims to tax us all for breathing.