Global Climate Models May Have Overestimated Man’s Influence

With record snows and low temperatures across the planet, climatologists have begun scrambling to adjust their global climate models to reflect what may actually be happening in reality.   Reported in the National Post, two climatologists explained why their models may have been far off.

 According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

“We missed what was right in front of our eyes,” says Prof. Russell. It’s not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as “a drop in the bucket.” Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to “stock up on fur coats.”

Blaming humanity for global climate change is like blaming someone who sneezes for an approaching hurricane.  We hate to admit it, but we are at the mercy of the Earth’s environment and not the other way around.  Scientists around the world should follow the example of these climatologists and make the public aware that our environment is much more complex than we thought.  They should finally admit that modern computer models predicting global warming are just not going to be accurate in most cases because there are simply too many variables affecting the weather.   We have only been accurately monitoring the weather for only about two centuries of the 4.5 billion years of our planet’s existence.   Measuring that tiniest of fractions of the Earth’s lifetime, there is just no way of knowing what the typical climate of our planet.

 Thanks to the Drudge Report for pointing out this article.