Although we have been enmeshed in a long debate over global warming and climate change, there has been no warming for over 16 years. (1)

Then there’s the issue of sea level change. Global warming and climate change are usually thought to mean that world sea levels will rise, perhaps disastrously. But according to US government scientific experts, in recent times (2010 and 2011, to be precise) phenomena driven by human carbon emissions have actually caused world sea levels to fall. According to a statement issued by the US National Science Foundation: For an 18-month period beginning in 2010, the oceans mysteriously dropped by about seven millimeters. (3)

But this isn’t new. Sadly, the networks’ bias on climate change has been happening for decades. Many publications now claiming the world is on the brink of a global warming disaster said the same thing about an impending ice age in the 1970s. Several major ones, including The New York Times, Time magazine, and Newsweek, have reported on three or even four different climate shifts since 1895. (2)

Yet you wouldn’t know this from most networks. Recent years’ slowdown in global warming was completely ignored by networks in 92 climate change stories in 2013. (2)

The Arctic, we are told, is the canary in the climate coal mine. No place on the planet is supposed to warm faster. As global warming takes hold, we are really supposed to see it at the Earth’s poles. If that’s true, then we should really be opening up our minds to the real possibility of a cooling planet because summer times at the North Pole are cooling. Arctic summers can be examined going back to 1958 using data from the Danish Meteorological Institute. It turns out the 3 coldest Arctic summers have all occurred in the last 5 years. Not even the summers of the 1960s were colder. Not only is the North Pole chilling out, but so is the South Pole, which has been setting record highs for sea ice extent. (4)

Some scientists have reported that we are perhaps headed towards a mini ice age. Back in 2011 US solar physicists announced that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth—far from facing a global warming problem—is actually headed into a mini ice age. The announcement came form scientists at the US National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the US Air Force Research Laboratory. Three different analyses of the Sun’s recent behavior all indicated that a period of unusually low solar activity may be about to begin. (5)

Fred Dardick reported in 2011, “We are in the midst of the convergence of three major solar, ocean, and atmospheric cycles, all heading in the direction of global cooling. Last year the Southern Hemisphere experienced its coldest winter in 50 years and Europe just went through two particularly cold winters in a row; the cooling has just begun. The likelihood of a repeat of the great frost of 1709 is growing every day.” (6) This frost was in the time of the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) and for periods on either side of it, many European rivers which are ice-free today—including the Thames—routinely froze over, allowing ice skating and even for armies to march across them in some cases.

What’s happened since 2011?

The effects of weak solar activity have been notable. The United Kingdom just suffered through a winter with temperatures 5 to 10 degrees C below normal, and German meteorologists report that 2013 has been the coldest year in 208 years. (1)

North Pole temperatures in 2013 have fallen below freezing way in advance of where they normally do this year. This is the coldest ever recorded by the Danish Meteorological Institute since they started looking at this in the late 1950s.

According to the Solar Influences Data Analysis Center (SIDC) in Brussels, the ‘official’ solar sunspot number (SSN) last month was 57.0. Thus it reached only 57% of the mean value of cycles 1 to 23 in the corresponding time period. If you calculate using the entire cycle 24, then we get an activity level that is only about 45% of the mean value. As Pierre Gosselin reports, “You have to go back all the way to 1827 (cycle 7) to fine a comparatively small activity like what we’ve seen since 2009.” (7)

However, in spite of all these question marks, an unreleased draft of the UN’s IPCC next major climate report states that scientists are more certain than ever that man’s actions are warming the planet—even as the report struggles to explain a slow-down in warming. As Jay Lehr has noted, “Climate change has been politically motivated, not a response to actual global warming, and the IPCC is a frontal example of this.” (1)

And the media diehard alarmist are reaching even deeper into their bag of tricks. The September 2013 National Geographic cover shows the Statue of Liberty covered in 65 m (214 ft) of water—this is 80 times more than even the highest expected sea level rise in the upcoming IPCC report.

References