Editorials

Global warming never has managed to catch on as a really hot topic with most Americans and now it seems to have cooled even more.

The energy price crisis and supply debate might be reasons it has lost some traction, but reports that there actually has been global cooling rather than warming recently could be a factor, too.

Cooling temperatures early in 2008 sent much of the United States into a deep freeze in the early months. A June 10 snow blanketed the campus of Washington State University in Pullman, Wash., calling to mind the infamous "Year Without a Summer" in 1816, when occasional snow hit the U.S. well into summer.

March through May spring temperatures were reported to be the 36th coldest since records began in the 1800s.

Another report said the overall global temperature has been gradually decreasing since 1998, which was the warmest year since the end of the Little Ice Age a little more than 100 years ago.

Natural variations in climate, driven by shifting ocean currents, could lead to another decade of cooling global temperatures, according to a peer-reviewed study in the scientific journal Nature

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The cooling temperatures would add to an ongoing cooling trend for the past decade.

Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, and at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, believe the average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America will cool slightly over the next decade while the tropical Pacific will remain the same, Bonner R. Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, wrote in Environment & Climate News.

Their study appeared in the April 20 issue of Nature.

Noel Keenlyside, the study's lead author, sees the planet's climate as being influenced both by natural variations and human-induced causes. Noting the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted a warming of 0.3 degrees C by 2015, Keenlyside said the forecasted rise could be offset by cooler waters in the North Atlantic.

"Our prediction is there will be no warming until 2015, but it will pick up after that," he said.

If the Keenlyside study is correct, the ongoing cooling will have lasted for roughly 20 years by the time it ends. Global temperatures also cooled between 1945 and 1977, a period of 30 years.

A point people might remember in regard to this, and all other studies and global temperature predictions, is that it is another computer-model-driven exercise, which some skeptics consider to be of questionable scientific value.

There also is a problem of consistency in other predictions on the results of global warming.

For instance, people have been reading for years that global warming was the cause of greater tornado and hurricane activity.

Two new studies by forecasters who previously claimed global warming would cause hurricanes now conclude it is likely to reduce the number of hurricanes that occur each year.

Something that has been more firmly established is there actually has been a cooling trend in temperatures during the past decade, and as these things have gone it might continue that way for a few more years.

People likely will continue to hear reports of new studies concluding that global warming will get back on the anticipated track sometime soon.

But don't expect very many of them to get highly excited about such predictions as long as the recorded figures continue to reflect an actual cooling mode in global temperatures at this juncture.

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