Al Gore, the poster-boy for global warming, has taken some flak lately for the $500 million dollar sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera. Now that Gore and his business partners are suing Al Jazeera for allegedly withholding funds from the sale, the media is questioning why Gore would even consider taking such a large sum of money from a company that is owned by the oil-rich Qatar royal family when he has accused Big Oil of contributing to his pet cause, global warming.

SF Gate calls the lawsuit “The height of hypocrisy” since Gore doesn’t seem to mind pocketing the Middle Eastern oil money while continuing to push his global warming agenda. Gore’s doomsday claims, however, are losing steam as a growing number of scientists are stepping forward with evidence to support that Gore’s climate change claims might really be the money making scheme many have accused them of being.

According to the Washington Times, NASA’s Langley Research Center atmospheric scientist, Norman Loeb, recently presented a talk on “The recent pause in global warming.” Loeb referred to the slow-down of the Earth’s surface warming over the past 15 years as the “global warming hiatus.”

NASA’s explanation? “Global warming may be on vacation.”

Inquisitr reported recently that Dr. Leslie Woodcock, a former NASA scientist, has also joined the growing list of scientists calling global warming “nonsense.”

There have been many theories on the global warming hiatus, including air pollution, volcanoes, and sunspots, but scientists are yet to explain the slowdown in warming.

Xinhua News reported on Friday that a United States and Chinese scientific team is now saying that the massive slowdown is due to a movement of heat from the shallow surface waters of the oceans to deep regions of the Atlantic and Southern Oceans.

“Every week there’s a new explanation of the hiatus,” said Ka-Kit Tung, University of Washington professor and corresponding author of the report. “We looked at observations in the ocean to try to find the underlying cause.”

The data collected by the American and Chinese scientists showed the increased warming of the deep regions of the Atlantic and Southern Oceans around 1999 – the same time as the rapid surface warming seen in the last half of the 20th century stopped.

Tung says that the data was a surprise, but “quite convincing.”

Researchers also found historical data of a “hiatus” between 1945 and 1975, which lead people to predict the start of another ice age. There are also records proving that the 40 – 70-year cycle of global warming and cooling go back thousands of years. Researchers concluded that each phase lasts about 30 years.

So what does all of this mean for Al Gore’s global warming/climate change claims? Since the current cooler phase has so far lasted about 15 years, if Gore can just hang for another 15 years maybe, people might start taking him seriously.

Photo courtesy of Huffington Post