Tipsters Getting Cooler on Temps

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Time to stock up on fur coats and felt boots, at least according to Russian scientist, Oleg Sorokhtin, who claims the earth is at the peak of one of its passing warm spells and likely to enter a period of cooling.   It is certainly fashionable to speculate on climate change, though the consensus is generally that it is going to get dramatically warmer – not colder.

At the beginning of last year, the UK Meteorological Office predicted 2007 would be the warmest year ever, beating the current global record set in 1998, but that wasn’t to be.  Global data have not been analysed yet, but 2007 is likely to go down as only about the sixth warmest on record. 

Interestingly, the UK Met Office is now predicting 2008 will be the coolest so far this century, but unlike Dr Sorokhtin, they predict long term global mean temperatures will continue to warm.

Across the world, climate institutes measure temperature in all sorts of different ways and forecasts future temperatures based on climate models. 

The US National Climate Data Center has mean monthly and absolute temperatures for the northern and southern hemispheres, for the land and sea, for the surface of the earth as well as for the lower and upper troposphere. 

The lower troposphere is the atmosphere from a couple of hundred to more than 1,000 metres above the surface of the earth and its temperature has been measured by satellites since 1979. 

In the past three years this data, which is generally provided as a monthly mean, shows a clear cooling trend. 

According to global warming theories the troposphere should warm more than surface temperatures.  This hasn’t been the case – though levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide keep rising.

In Australia, according to Bureau of Meteorology surface temperature measurements, we had our sixth warmest year on record in 2007.  Temperatures were 0.67 degrees Celsius above normal.

This is quite a small amount considering daily temperatures often vary by more than 10 degrees. 

Indeed whether mean surface temperatures warm or cool in 2008, it is reasonable to assume the annual average difference will be by only a fraction of a degree’s Celsius up or down.  

Of more significance is whether or not the recent heavy rains in northern NSW and Queensland continues and spreads down the Murray Darling Basin.  But, as with global temperatures, there is no consensus on future rainfall – we can only speculate.

Published in The Land

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