More Evidence for Global Cooling

Nope. The science isn't settled.

Findings of a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee show that there are natural climate swerves, or switches, that take place every so often. Most importantly, we don't understand them very well yet, so it is nearly impossible to separate what is natural climate change from what is human-caused.

Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.

"Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate," researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.

Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other. Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift.

"In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century," Tsonis said. "The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001.

"The most recent climate shift probably occurred at about the year 2000."

A good question for an objective thinker: How do we know whether to raise or lower carbon emissions, if doing so artificially might contribute to an ultra-cooling or heating result?

A better question: Do we take any remedial action at all considering the major players in climate change involve the sun, the earth's rotation, and natural processes like ocean currents, natural carbon "breathing" by the planet itself, volcanism and, possibly, the effect of cosmic rays on cloud formation?

"But if we don't understand what is natural, I don't think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand -- first the natural variability of climate -- and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural," Tsonis said.

Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.

If anyone attempts to answer our questions by telling you they are irrelevant, or that we cannot afford to dwell on them while we lose valuable time to "save the planet," then you know that they are merely trying to panic us into ceding control of our thermostats, our wallets and control of our government so that they may gain political and economic power.

Go tell 'em to cool it. Apparently the planet is.