Is climate change taking a break?

Deutsche Welle, 18 April 2013

The cold start into spring has made people in parts of Europe wonder if the climate is really warming. Global temperatures have not been rising in recent years. Is the earth cooling instead of warming?

Looking at the average temperature over five years during the last 15 years, global temperatures might appear to be flattening out.

"Over the last decade there has been very little new warming," says Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. The development is not unexpected, he told DW: "We are confident that human emissions of greenhouse gases have caused a large component of the warming over the last 150 years, but at the same time we do not expect every year to be warmer than the last. There are reasons why temperatures may remain flat for a decade and continue to warm later on." Hawkins cites periods in the 1960s and 1970s when temperatures were actually cooling.

The current flattening out of the temperature curve could be due to natural fluctuation:

"The earth's system undergoes variability on decadal time scales, which causes heat to be mixed into the deeper ocean. We think that's what's going on at the moment. Some of the heat is being mixed down into the deep ocean, where we do not observe it as well, so the surface is not heating up as much as it might have done."

Countries like China need power
for development

Another possible reason Hawkins mentions is the increased burning of coal in countries like China and India. The particulates produced help reflect solar radiation back into space, and so cool the planet. He stresses it is not yet possible to say whether the current slow-down in temperature rise is being caused by natural variability or is human-induced.

Too short a time to tell

Peter Lemke is head of Climate Science at Germany's Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine studies (AWI). He warns against taking a short five-year average as an indicator of how the climate is developing:

"When it comes to climate processes, we always look at 30 year periods", he told DW. "And for the last 30 years there is a clear upward trend." Using a shorter time span means that one single year can distort the picture. If, for instance, 1998, an exceptionally hot year, is taken as the start or end of a five-year period, the trend would appear to be rising or falling, accordingly. Lemke says temperatures have indeed risen in the last 15 years - if you look at the overall development and not at shorter intervals within the time span. "2010 was the warmest year from a global perspective," says Lemke. "2005 was not far behind it. Since 1978, temperatures have not been within the normal range but considerably above it." "Normal" means an average measured over a 30-year period.

 Global temperatures continue to rise

But certainty that global warming is happening does not mean certainty over its effect, says Lemke: "The question is: how sensitive is our climate system to the rise in the CO2 concentration? And what will it mean in terms of precipitation, temperature rise or ice melt? That is a complicated issue."

But this very issue is the crucial one for those who have to take decisions about preparing for and adapting to climate change. A whole range of different models estimate the likely temperature rise in the next 100 years as somewhere between 1.5 and 6 degrees Celsius. The next IPPC report, due to be published in 2014, is unlikely to be able to solve the problem of this wide range of estimates and methods, says Lemke. Nevertheless, he says the current slow-down of the warming rate is no reason to stop worrying about climate change.

British scientist Hawkins thinks there may be a "slight downwards nudge" in the IPCC estimates of climate sensitivity. Nevertheless, he says, "we are still predicting a large warming over coming decades. It may be that we have slightly more time than we did before, which is obviously a good thing, but the impacts are still projected to occur. "

Climate warming = colder winters?

The long winter and cold spring which might give people in western Europe the impression the earth is cooling rather than warming have been caused by a stable area of high pressure over Scandinavia - a weather phenomenon rather than climate change. AWI climate chief Lemke stresses that seen from a global point of view, the winter was warmer than usual.

 It's a climate paradox that melting
ice could mean colder winters

"The interesting thing is that some climate studies indicate that a stable area of high pressure over Scandinavia like this one could occur more often when the pack ice in the Arctic has been significantly reduced in the previous summer and autumn", Lemke explains. This lack of ice means the ocean warms up and releases the warmth into the atmosphere in the autumn. That disturbs the usual circulation patterns, so that we get the area of high pressure, and that it is more stable than usual." In 2012, Arctic sea ice coverage reached a record low. The long period of cold spring weather would seem to confirm the theory expressed by Vladimir Petoukhov from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. When he published his paper in late 2010, his comment was "hard winters do not contradict our image of global warming. On the contrary, they complete the picture. "

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Is global warming causing harsher winters?

THE RELATIONSHIP TO GAIA - April 2010 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll)

New Mini Ice Age

"The weather you have today, and all the alarming attributes of it, is a scenario of what was scheduled to happen on Earth anyway. I review again that the weather changes you are seeing prophesied by myself, 21 years ago, are not a surprise. The changes are not caused by the pollutants you put in the air. You call it global warming and that's a nice phrase, and perhaps that will get you to put less pollutants in the air – a very good thing. But what you are seeing in the weather shift today was not caused by Humans putting things into the air. It would have happened anyway in about 300 years."

"We've called this process the water cycle, since it's all about water, not about air. The water is the predominant attribute of Gaia and of the weather cycle you're seeing. More predominant is the temperature of it. The cycle is ice to water and water to ice, and has been repeated on this planet over and over and over. It is not new. It is not exceptional. It is not frightening. But it's a cycle that modern humanity has not seen before, and it's a long cycle that is beyond the life span of a Human Being. Therefore, it tends to be overlooked or not seen at all !"

"In the days of the Lemurians, the water level of the Pacific Ocean was almost 400 feet lower, and that's only 50,000 years ago. [Kryon invites science to check this out – the water level at that time.] That was a water cycle working, and the reason it was lower was due to so much of the water being stored as ice. Today you're going through another water cycle that will eventually lead to cooling. The last one was in the 1400s."

"Science sees that at about 1650. As mentioned, they are so slow there is no remembrance that a Human has of them except in past writings and in the rings of the trees. The time span of the changes is so great that environmental record keeping does not exist in the form that it does today. But you can still look at the rings of the trees and at the striations of the rocks and can generally figure out that a few hundred years ago, you had a mini-ice age. Now you're going to have another one." 

“2011 and Beyond” - What you are seeing, and why - Jan 16, 2010 (Kryon channeled by Lee Carroll) (Text version)

“… So now we've refreshed that which we have said before, a review. You are in the middle of a cycle that will bring cooling to the planet. It is not a heat cycle, but rather a cooling cycle. But it always starts with a short heat cycle. It has been here before. It will come again. It is a long cycle - one generation plus five years. That's how long it's going to last. It starts with the melting of the ice caps, which is far more than any of you have seen in your lifetime or those of your ancestors. It is a cycle whose repetition is thousands of years long, but one that has not yet been recorded to the books of Human record. But it's definitely been recorded in the cores of the ice and in the rings of the trees.

Thousands of years old, it is, and it happens in a cyclical way. It's about water. It starts with that which is the melting of the ice caps to a particular degree, which has a profound effect on the planet in all ways. You can't have that happen without seeing life change as well as Gaia change and you've seeing it already. What happens when you take that which is heavy on the poles [ice] and you melt it? It then becomes cold water added to that which is a very, very gentle and finite balance of temperature in the seas of the planet (1). The first thing that happens is a redistribution of the weight of water on the thin crust of the earth from ice at the poles to new water in the seas. The results become earthquakes and volcanoes, and you're seeing them, aren't you? You are having earthquakes in places that are not supposed to have earthquakes. Volcanoes are coming to life in a way that you've not seen before on a regular basis. There will be more. Expect them.

Is it too much to ask of a Human Being that if you live by a volcano that you know might erupt, maybe you ought to move? Yet there will be those who say, "It hasn't erupted in my lifetime or my parents' lifetime or my grandparents' lifetime; therefore, it won't." You may have a surprise, for all things are changing. That is what is happening to Gaia. ….“

"Recalibration of Knowledge" – Jan 14, 2012 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll) - (Subjects: Channelling, God-Creator, Benevolent Design, New Energy, Shift of Human Consciousness, (Old) Souls, Reincarnation, Gaia, Old Energies (Africa,Terrorists, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela ... ), Weather, Rejuvenation, Akash, Nicolas Tesla / Einstein, Cold Fusion, Magnetics, Lemuria, Atomic Structure (Electrons, Particles, Polarity, Self Balancing, Magnetism, Higgs Boson), Entanglement, "Life is necessary for a Universe to exist and not the other way around", DNA, Humans (Baby getting ready, First Breath, Stem Cells, Embryonic Stem Cells, Rejuvenation), Global Unity, ... etc.) - (Text Version) 

"...The Weather... Again

My partner has been "against the grain" in the past years, giving you what I have channelled about the weather. Is it global warming? No. Is it going to get better? No. This is a two-generation cycle. There will continue to be earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and storms. This is a recalibration of life in the ocean, and humanity must go through this in any way they can. This is a cycle, a known and expected one, but since you haven't gone through it in modern times, it's not well understood yet. ..."