CBS: At least 20 congressmen went to Copenhagen on taxpayer dime

30 Years of Global Cooling Are Coming, Leading Scientist Says

From Miami to Maine, Savannah to Seattle, America is caught in an icy grip that one of the U.N.’s top global warming proponents says could mark the beginning of a mini ice age.

From Miami to Maine, Savannah to Seattle, America is caught in an icy grip that one of the U.N.’s top global warming proponents says could mark the beginning of a mini ice age.

Oranges are freezing and millions of tropical fish are dying in Florida, and it could be just the beginning of a decades-long deep freeze, says Professor Mojib Latif, one of the world’s leading climate modelers.

Latif thinks the cold snap Americans have been suffering through is only the beginning. He says we’re in for 30 years of cooler temperatures — a mini ice age, he calls it, basing his theory on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the world’s oceans.

Latif, a professor at the Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University and an author of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, believes the lengthy cold weather is merely a pause — a 30-years-long blip — in the larger cycle of global warming, which postulates that temperatures will rise rapidly over the coming years.

At a U.N. conference in September, Latif said that changes in ocean currents known as the North Atlantic Oscillation could dominate over manmade global warming for the next few decades. Latif said the fluctuations in these currents could also be responsible for much of the rise in global temperatures seen over the past 30 years.

Latif is a key member of the UN’s climate research arm, which has long promoted the concept of global warming. He told the Daily Mail that “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 percent.”

According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, the warming of the Earth since 1900 is due to natural oceanic cycles, and not man-made greenhouse gases. The agency also reports that Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007.

Many parts of the world have been suffering through record-setting snowfalls and arctic temperatures. The Midwest saw wind chills as low as 49 degrees below zero last week, while Europe saw snows so heavy that Eurostar train service and air travel were canceled across much of the continent. In Asia, Beijing was hit by its heaviest snowfall in 60 years.

DerKrieger on January 11, 2010 at 9:47 PM