Did scientists bring forth the recent global cooling discovery to cover their own butts?

Question

If you haven't heard the recent news check these links.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/04/30/eaclimate130.xml

Recently German scientists released this information.

The next 10 years there will be a global cooling, yet man made global warming will continue after.

So did they say this to get people to continue going "green" when the temperatures go down and people begin to lose faith ?

Are they saying this so they can keep the "green" industry booming?

Did it ever occur to them that the Earth goes through continuous cycles of high and lows?

How can they predict this, when weather scientists can't even predict the weather/temperature a few days from now?

How do we know the recent warming trend wasn't just another cycle and not man made?

At first I really was open to the idea that there was man made global warming now I'm 100% sure its a scam to fill the pocket books of greedy politicians and scientists.

Answer 1

As a meteorologist for over twenty years,  I am dubious of people calling themselves climate scientists,  because many times they are not climatologists or meteorologists.   It is bad science and an overreaction to the natural ebb and flow of surface temperatures.

So when you hear people say that they are getting a lot of snow, they use that as evidence of a cooling period or it is hotter than normal for a few days,  they think it is global warming.    The IPCC has a political bent to it and they even go out of their way to bash people like Dr William of the National Hurricane Center.   This is the guy who makes the Hurricane Forecasts each year.

The founder of the Weather Channel is dubious of the Climate Change/Global Warming bunch as well.   Also Dr Singer has spoken at the Global Warming Conferences each year and he is an expert in this field and says there is a warming going on but also suggests that it is just a trend.

Weather science is a fluid and always changing thing and to make forecasts based upon incomplete or theoretical data is vulnerable to a high degree of error.  

I would hope that teachers stop teaching the imminent threats of global disaster caused by man as fact and give the children a chance to hear both sides of this debate.

Answer 2

This global cooling that the paper mentions is expected to last no more than a decade.  This will be too little time to actually reverse the trend and make global warming stop in the long run.  I hear what you are saying about funding, etc.  There is a lot of incentive for scientists to pander to prevailing attitudes, especially after the government has become set on its views.  They are more likely to get grant money if their projects seem to jive with the prevailing attitudes.  As you mention it's a very powerful economic motivator.

It may seem like they are covering their butts, but in actuality it doesn't change the long-term forecast that temps are expected to rise.  It's just a possible slowdown in the overall trend, and the scientists doing this research will readily admit this.  In fact, I think the overall warming will likely win out and we'll continue to see warming (even if at a slower rate if the research proves correct) for the argument I'm making in the next paragraph.

This phenomenon, based on a 60-70 year cycle of ocean water temps may in fact not even cause a net cooling if the warming trend based on greenhouse gases continues.  The arctic pack ice is much less than it was, so the arctic oceans may very well continue to warm because the ice free ocean reflect much less sunlight during the summer.  Also, there is a mechanism going on that is pushing the arctic ice pack south past the east coast of Greenland.  This is a wind-driven process.  What this will do is either cause upwelling of slightly 'warmer' water from the deep near the north pole, or transport slightly warmer water through other inlets into the Arctic ocean from regions farther south.  I think it will take a fairly long period of cooling to make the ice pack expand again.  

This transport of ice southward will likely have little impact because it's not going to make it very far south, like towards Europe.  The cycle of the ocean transport system (a huge freight train of global ocean currents) has time scales on thousands of years, so any change of heat transported to the near-polar regions will be negligible.  This should continue to melt the ice as it moves south and so I don't believe the farther south ice will have any effect on Europe.

In any event, I think your suspicions are warranted, but honestly I think the media is misrepresenting, or spinning these findings into ratings.  This particular temporary cooling trend, if it has any effect at all in the short-term, won't change anything in the long-term.

Answer 3

We know that greenhouse gases will raise the average temperature of the Earth, there is no way around that.

As a climate scientist believe me there are much better ways of filling our pocketbooks.  If you think that the scientists of the IPCC are getting rich off of their work, you are completely mistaken.  These are people that are giving of time they would rather spend doing other things because they believe it is one of the most important problems in the world.  Nobody knows exactly how things are going to work out, the question is do you really want to run an Earth-sized experiment when the consequences could be disastrous for mankind and other living things.