Long Term Temperature Predictions

The bottom line is that we do not know what the planet's current temperature is, although satellite-mounted instruments and Argo autonomous floats are giving us a better picture than we had before.

We do not know what the planet's temperature was 100 years ago with any meaningful precision.

We have no way of telling whether Earth will be warmer or cooler at the beginning of Solar Cycle 25 (SC24 is just sputtering to a start now and it is reasonable to guess Earth will be slightly warmer in the midst of the roughly 11 year cycle, although there is no guarantee).

And we're making policy on this kind of uncertainty?

Carbon Dioxide Not to Blame for Warming

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write.

Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO2 is the cause of climate change.

Record Cold in 2007

In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed. According to Eugenio Hackbart, chief meteorologist of the MetSul Weather Center in Brazil, "a brutal cold wave brought record low temperatures, widespread frost, snow, and major energy disruption." In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country's 24 provinces. In August, Chile's agriculture minister lamented "the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years," which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.

Latin Americans weren't the only ones shivering.

University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that "unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007." Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand's vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.

Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years.

In November 2007, the weather forecast for the western United States for the upcoming winter and spring was to be "warmer than normal, and drier than normal." In fact, the weather for the western United States was significantly colder than normal and much, much wetter than normal. In addition, the cold, wet spring weather lasted far longer than normal and ended only in mid-June 2008. How could the highly educated, and experienced experts in the field have been so wrong?

The weather "experts" got caught up in the politics of weather and the constant brainwashing about "global warming" and just knew the world would continue to heat up. Not only was the western United States colder and wetter, neither did the rest of the world warm either. In fact global temperatures have not risen since 1999.