The earth hasn't warmed any in the last decade, a trend that is likely to continue:

When the United Nations World Meteorological Organization recently reported that global temperatures had not risen since 1998, the explanation given by WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud was that the cool spell was the effect of the Pacific Ocean's La Nina current, "part of what we call 'variability.' "

Well, oops, the Earth will do it again. According to a report by German researchers published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, shifting Atlantic ocean currents will cool parts of North America and Europe over the next decade as well.

Climate science is in its infancy, and pretty much every proposition is controversial. The earth's climate is hugely complicated, and important aspects of it are poorly understood. In the last few years, our ability to study ocean temperatures has greatly improved:

Understanding the ocean's effect on climate took a quantum leap forward in 2003 when the first of 3,000 new automated ocean buoys were deployed, a significant improvement over earlier buoys that took their measurements mostly at the ocean's surface.

The new buoys, known as Argos, drift along the world's oceans at a depth of about 6,000 feet constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity, and speed of ocean currents. Every 10 days or so a bladder inflates, bringing them to the surface as they take their readings at various depths.

Once on the surface, they transmit their readings to satellites that retransmit them to land-based computers.

The Argos buoys have disappointed global warming alarmists in that they have failed to detect any signs of imminent climate change. As Dr. Josh Willis noted in an interview with National Public Radio, "there has been a very slight cooling" over the buoy's five years of observation.

The computer models that predict global warming are ridiculously primitive. They still can't recreate the past accurately, let alone predict the future. As Howard Hayden, professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, says, they take "garbage in" and spit "gospel out."

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Posted by John at 7:44 PM  |    |