Brrrrr: Global Warming Science “Settled”?

With frigid weather discomforting millions and resulting in deaths worldwide, Britain’s Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer last week that the science of global warming was “settled.” Meanwhile, U.S. governments from local to federal continue to push CO2 controls, and global warming advocates stand fast by their predictions of Arctic ice disappearance and other catastrophes.
Yet this article, “The Mini Ice Age Starts Here”, has extensive reason to dispute such continued alarmism, including:

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

…They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

New methods have been developed for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000 ft. below the surface, where ocean warming and cooling cycles start. The research team that developed these methods predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September. On Sunday, the head of the team said:

“A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.

“They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.

“The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.”

With Tiananmen Square covered in snow in its coldest temperatures since 1970, perhaps the Chinese government can lead the way in calling a halt to the absurd hubris of man-made global warming. But, then again, so long as the U.S. government promises $100 billion per year in guilt money payments to less developed countries—which funding and attendant regulations on CO2 and energy policy concurrently brings more of the U.S. economy and its citizens under bureaucratic control—what incentive is there?

HT: Robert Higgs