The year so far looks like a bad one for advocates of anthropogenic global warming. Despite the lack of progress on imposing global restrictions on the emission of carbon dioxide, the Earth has hit a cooling trend. Temperatures have plunged to record lows across the US, freezing crops and threatening a big hike in heating-oil prices in the Northeast. MS-NBC reports on the damage already felt in Georgia and Florida, two states used to having warmer winters:

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How can this be happening if man-emitted CO2 creates a greenhouse effect that amplifies warming? One set of scientists predicted the cold weather this year, and says that AGW hysterics misread multi-decadal oscillations as a permanent trend — and that cooler weather will be the norm for the next 20 to 30 years:

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.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this. …

Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.

He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.

Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘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.

Note that Latif isn’t exactly a total skeptic of AGW, but believes that the warming trends that AGW hysterics exploit were mainly temporary fluctuations. And this winter appears to bear him out.