As the largest snowfall of the winter hits the eastern U.S., politicians and interest groups will claim the latest weather is proof of their position in the climate debate, but a prominent climatologist says this is nothing more than the latest development in a cooling cycle that started over a decade ago and could continue into 2040.
Climate-change activists regularly assert that volatile weather events are on the rise due to human activity that impacts our climate, while skeptics point to the snow and cold snaps as further proof the earth is not running a fever.
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Dr. Tim Ball taught climatology for many years at the University of Winnipeg and is the author of the newly released book, "The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science." He told WND it's foolhardy to draw conclusions on overall climate trends based on one weather system or even one winter, but he believes the harsher winter is part of a cooling cycle.
"What happens as the cooling begins, the jet stream moves from west to east in very large waves, but the amplitude, that is the north-south orientation of those waves, increases. It's called a meridional pattern of weather, and that's why you see the record colds that you had in the U.S. recently, but also record warms," Ball explained.
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"Look at eastern Australia as an example, or Siberia earlier in the winter. So if you imagine these waves where you've got cold air pushing toward the equator in one area, you've also got warmer air pushing further toward the poles in other areas. That's why you've got this increasing variability of the weather," said Ball, who noted that history tells us exactly what these conditions mean.
"If you look at the historic record, and I mean going over 10,000 years, this pattern occurs as the earth starts its cooling down process. And that's what's going to happen," he said. "We're going to be in this cooling until at least 2040."
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Listen to WND's interview with Dr. Tim Ball below:
The cooling started 10 years earlier near the South Pole, according to Ball, who said the growth in Antarctic ice is why we witnessed the research vessel and its rescue ship trapped in ice in the middle of summer in the southern hemisphere.
Ball said the cooling for us will not only continue for nearly 30 more years, but the depths of the cooling cycle could mean we experience some historic chills.
"There's a debate about how much cooling will occur, but it's related to the changes in the sun, the sunspot cycles," Ball explained. "That's the predominant control of long-term temperature patterns. The scientists that I've been working with a lot, we think, as I said, that's it's going to continue cooling until 2040, certainly getting to cooler temperatures than we experienced around 1800 or 1820 and possibly get as cold as it was back in what's called the 'Little Ice Age' when you had three feet of ice on the Thames in England in 1683."
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Looking at that historic record is critical to understanding how climate naturally changes over time, says Ball, and he contends trying to define climate or even policy on recent weather events is disingenuous.
"The difference is the difference between weather and climate. Weather is what you experience if go and stand outside right now. It's the combination of thousands of variables, everything from cosmic radiation in deep space to geothermal heat off the bottom of the oceans," he said.
"Climate is the average weather in a region or the change in the average weather over time. That's what I've been studying all my career is climate change and how it changes over time. You cannot say any one particular event is due to climate change. The only way you can do that is step back and look at the trend," said Ball, who argued that many scientists today are simply misusing historic climate data to suit their political ends.
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"It depends what starting point you pick on the temperature record or the precipitation record and then the ending point. You can prove anything you want from the record by selecting the time period that you want to look at," Ball said.
"For example, since 1900, the world warmed up to 1940. It cooled down to 1980. It warmed up to 1998, and now it's cooling down again. You could pick any one of those periods and say, 'Oh look, it's warming or it's cooling' and then say it's going to keep on going and it's the end of the world, which of course is what they've done with the recent warming from 1980 up to 2000," he said.
After years of contending there was an unrelenting rise in global temperature, climate-change activists now contend that extreme heat, extreme cold or active hurricane and tornado seasons all mean human activity is making our climate more volatile. Ball said good science flatly proves those claims false.
"Actually, the number of tornadoes is dramatically down. The number of hurricanes, particularly the ones coming ashore in the U.S., is significantly down. So, their arguments are completely wrong," he said.
"The supposed increase in storminess is scientifically wrong because the storms occur along the boundary between the cold polar air and the warmer tropical air, which is essentially across the central U.S., between 30-50 degrees of latitude. If you decrease that temperature difference across that boundary, which is called the polar front, then you get fewer storms, not more," he said.
"The official argument is that the polar regions are going to warm up more than the tropical regions, which actually would reduce the number of storms, but they're claiming it will increase it," he said. "It's just another example of climate science being used for a political agenda."
