http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=17&art_id=93053&sid=26678826&con_type=3Now it's ... global freezing
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Forget global warming for now, say some prominent climate scientists. Instead, prepare for a mini Ice Age.
According to experts, the bitter conditions afflicting the Northern Hemisphere - and Hong Kong and the mainland - herald a trend toward cooler weather that may last for 30 years.
This challenge to current climate readings, reported in Britain's Daily Mail, is supported by findings from American and European experts.
Their ideas, based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, come as a blast of cold air to predictions such as the North Pole being likely to have no ice within a few summers.
The ice-cold scientists also dispute climate computer models that point to the Earth's warming since 1900 being fueled by greenhouse gas emissions. Their research shows much warming being caused by oceanic cycles in a warm mode rather than the current cold mode.
Mojib Latif, a leading light on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and head of a research team at Germany's Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures nearly 1,000 meters beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.
Latif and his colleagues started to predict the cooling trend in 2008. "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 percent," he told the Mail. "They have now gone
into reverse."
Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that oscillations move together in a synchronized 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," Tsonis said. "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."
Looks like my ski boots, artic fleece jackets etc will come in handy one day
BB
Topic: Do you still keep your Winter clothes? (Read 798 times)
October 16, 2009, 02:33:47 PM