The IPCC Cools Off
Monday, May 12, 2008
Many of you know my friend Tom Moriarty. He's been a long time critic of the human caused global warming theory. He's also been slowly wooing me into the "denier" camp (a "denier" is what Al Gore calls someone who doesn't believe in AGW).
This year's comparatively dramatic cooling is not the impetus for this article. Instead I'm responding to a recent paper in Nature which in essence is predicting cooling over the next ten years due to a weakening of the Gulf Stream. This alone is not that big a deal IMO, except for the realization/discovery that the climate models which the IPCC have used to make their dire predictions did not incorporate such affects. The possible weakening of the Gulf Stream is not new phenomenon. Climatologists have known about what it would mean for a long time (it probably lengthened the last ice age) so for this fairly well understood phenomenon to not be incorporated into the IPCC models is a real surprise to me.
For safety's sake I will say I'm uncommitted until the day I die, but wherever the truth lies (no pun intended) I continue to maintain that Al Gore's scarlet lettering is wholly uncalled for.