A prominent climate scientist says the earth actually faces a global cooling crisis on the eve of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) release of its latest climate change report.
David Archibald, an Australian scientist and visiting fellow at the The Institute of World Politics (IWP) in Washington, D.C., said during an IWP presentation Wednesday that contrary to a perceived consensus among the scientific community, the planet’s climate is not warming. Global temperatures have essentially remained flat in the last thirty years, he said.
While temperatures have increased by a modest 0.8 degrees Celsius in the last 150 years, that rise is unremarkable compared to previous increases in earth’s history, he said. Temperature spikes have occurred for hundreds of thousands of years and were slightly higher in the Roman Empire and Medieval periods, he added, according to a Swedish study and data from ice cores in Vostok, Antarctica.
Additionally, about 80 percent of the warming that has occurred can be attributed to water vapor compared to about 10 percent for carbon dioxide, said Archibald. The IPCC’s report, scheduled for release Friday, is expected to state with 95 percent certainty that greenhouse-gas emissions generated by humans are responsible for 20th century warming.
"The IPCC models have failed," Archibald said, adding that meetings like the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark are "hilarious."
Archibald, credited as the first scientist to develop a method for using solar sunspot cycles to predict temperatures, instead said solar activity suggests global temperatures will cancel out previous warming and fall 2 to 3 degrees Celsius by 2040.
That could wreak havoc on the world’s food supply by potentially reducing global grain production by 400 million tonnes—mirroring the skyrocketing crop costs and 200,000 European deaths sparked by the 1816 eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia.
"There will be at least one consolation. Phil Jones, Michael Mann, James Hansen and Al Gore will all, most likely, still be around to see their entire religious belief system collapsing around their ears," wrote James Delingpole, a writer for the Telegraph, in a post last year on Archibald’s work.
See slides from Archibald’s presentation here.