What did happen to Global Warming???

According to the BBC Climate Correspondent - who may be out of a job if he can't drum up some pro-GW news - it ain't happening:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Could it be the Sun???? Well, maybe....

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Or maybe it's that Pacific Decadal Oscillation - which I was told a few years ago was as mythical as the Easter Bunny:

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."

So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.

They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature.

Sounds natural.

And then there is this:

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Of course, the pro-GW scientists predict a continuing warming trend after 2025, a prediction that we should take to the bank inasmuch as they completely missed this cooling trend.

It would be far more impressive if the pro-GW scientists were able to make a prediction that actually happened. As the author of the BBC article notes:

2) Did the models predict that temperatures would level off?

None of the climate models suggested that global temperatures would not rise any further for at least another 10 years, which is what we have observed. The Hadley Centre model does incorporate ocean cycles. But that doesn't alter the fact that the models did not predict this. So the question must be, will it/has it captured the negative PDO that some scientists say will last for the next 20 odd years - and if it hasn't, why hasn't it? I also know that the Met Office are currently conducting research into why temperatures have levelled off/fallen from their peak.

I'm sure that the models have been revised so that they now "predict" the cooling period we've actually experienced.