NPR: Cooling Temperatures? Must be Instrument Error!

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NPR: Cooling Temperatures? Must be Instrument Error!

Thursday, March 20th, 2008 | Environment |

NPR - The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat:

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

Right. Now that the temperatures are the lowest since 2001 according to NOAA, there must be something wrong with the instruments. Huh. That’s odd. They were working fine back when the temperatures were going up.

Related - Here’s a story ripped from the headlines. Ripped from the headlines of 1922:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

Lots more examples of early 20th century warming at the link. It’s almost as if sometimes it’s hotter and sometimes it’s colder. I call this my Theory of Sometimes It’s Hotter and Sometimes It’s Colder.

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