Earth in ‘Greatest Two-Year Cooling Event in a Century’ Shock, by James Delingpole.

Our planet has just experienced the most extreme two-year cooling event in a century. But where have you seen this reported anywhere in the mainstream media?

Here is the simple truth, from the satellites that have observed almost the whole world since 1978:

From the beginning of 2016 to now is one of the biggest drops in global temperature ever recorded by instruments, over 0.6 degrees Celsius. To put that in context, the entire modern global warming which extends back to maybe 1900, is thought to be about 0.8 to 1.0 degrees. The claim in the Delingpole article is for a drop over a two year period, which rules out some of the deeper but sharper drops where there was a warming rebound immediately afterwards.

In the news? Crickets.

Did anyone predict this? Yes, sort of. A couple of people said there would be a cooling from about 2017, including me. I believe my prediction was the most credible, by virtue of having the best reasoning behind it.

I used a spectral method from engineering that no one seems to have thought of applying to climate before, but is the obvious and correct way to search for a link between solar activity and temperatures here on Earth. That method showed a most unexpected feature, a notch in the spectrum at 11 years — which is the average length of a sunspot cycle. No one knew that until I found it.

The implication of the notch is that temperatures on Earth follow the sunspot activity after a delay of about one sunspot cycle. Sunspot cycles vary between 9 and 13 years, and the current one is long, at 13 years. There was a relatively major downturn in solar activity starting around 2004:

Add 13 years to 2004, and you get 2017 as the start of the corresponding fall in surface temperature here on Earth. The graph above is one I published on Joanne’s blog in 2014, where the downturn starting around 2017 was predicted.

The world of climate is dominated by mainstream climate scientists who are fairly certain carbon dioxide is the cause of warming. Even among people who are skeptical of the carbon dioxide theory, the field is crowded, and most people have little technical knowledge but are mostly in it for the politics. So it is difficult to stand out and be noticed, even when you have something novel and correct to say.

The notch delay theory made the predictions of a downturn in 2017 first in 2014, and then again in 2016. See here, here, and here.

Global temperatures will come off the current plateau into a sustained and significant cooling, beginning 2017 or maybe as late as 2021. The cooling will be about 0.3 °C in the 2020s, taking the planet back to the global temperature that prevailed in the 1980s. This was signaled (though not caused) by a fall in underlying solar radiation starting in 2004, one of the three largest falls since 1610 when records started. There is a delay of one sunspot cycle, currently 13 years (2004+13 = 2017).

By the way, it was not increasing carbon dioxide that caused most of the recent global warming. There is a mistake in all the climate models, dating back several decades and due to a poor assumption. It is this error that makes carbon dioxide appear to be a potent warming agent, but the climate models overestimate its warming effect by a factor of five to ten. The whole global warming “crisis” is really about that one subtle error. Book coming soon.

If the notch-delay solar theory is correct, the temperatures will now trend downward for the next decade. If there is no downtrend starting around 2017 – 2020, then it is wrong.

By the way, no government funds Joanne and me — we get funding only from individual private donations. If you think this work is important and want it to continue, please consider donating to us here.

Back to Delingpole:

Meanwhile a study by Judith Curry and Nic Lewis – also largely unreported by the mainstream media – confirms what skeptics have been saying for years: that the computer models used by the alarmist establishment to predict global warming are running too hot. According to Investors Business Daily: In the study, authors Nic Lewis and Judith Curry looked at actual temperature records and compared them with climate change computer models. What they found is that the planet has shown itself to be far less sensitive to increases in CO2 than the climate models say. As a result, they say, the planet will warm less than the models predict, even if we continue pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. As Lewis explains: “Our results imply that, for any future emissions scenario, future warming is likely to be substantially lower than the central computer model-simulated level projected by the (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and highly unlikely to exceed that level.

hat-tip Charles