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Video: No Global Warming in the Last 10 Years?

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crosspatch9/07/2009 6:12:24 pm PDT

What you are seeing is the result of the PDO going positive around 1976. The satellite data is only since 1979. The PDO has roughly a 60 year cycle. You need 60 years of data to show one cycle of the PDO (which warms Arctic waters).

On a longer time scale you are seeing the recover from the Little Ice Age. The LIA was the coldest period seen in the past several thousand years. We started recovering from it around 1850 or so. Temperatures have still not recovered to the levels they were before the LIA, and they might not.

Over the past 2000 years we have been in a general cooling trend. The Roman Warm Period was warmer than the Medieval Warm Period. The Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the Modern Warm Period. The Modern Warm Period seems to have peaked in 1933.

But within those longer cycles is a shorter 60 year (roughly) PDO cycle. You can’t learn anything from looking at only 30 years of data. It isn’t even one full PDO cycle.

Simply speaking, the “global warming” we have been seeing is nothing unprecedented, unique, or alarming. It is pretty much the same warming we see coming out of every cold period and we just came out of the coldest one since the Younger Dryas. The overall trend of the past 2000 years is still one of cooling temperatures, not warming.