Blakemore quotes Kevin Trenberth with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "Weather is chaotic. It has an infinite amount of variability, and that's just the nature of weather," said Trenberth. "It's the overall pattern that gives you the climate."
Trenberth is the same scientist of Climategate fame who remarked to his colleagues last October:
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.
From those remarks it does not seem Trenberth was heeding his own scientific observations the Blakemore article. Trenberth's Climategate quotes above were part of a discussion he and his colleagues had regarding an October BBC News article by Paul Hudson, "What Happened to Global Warming?" Hudson reported for more than a decade, global temperatures have been decreasing despite rises in man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He said the trend had little to do with solar cycles and a great deal to do with the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO), the cycle of oceanic warming and cooling. Hudson cited research from Western Washington University predicting 30 more years of global cooling due to PDO projections, and at least one top climate modeler with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Mojib Latif, agreed with the findings.
Latif also revealed similar findings at the UN's World Climate Conference in Geneva last summer, as reported by Fred Pearce in the September 9 issue of New Scientist. Latif said cyclical changes in the Atlantic Ocean, called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation (AMO), will mean cooler temperatures globally for the next three decades. He credited NAO and AMO with causing some of the strong warming during the past three decades as well as ending African droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. The head of climate prediction at the UK's National Weather Service (the Met Office), James Murphy, agreed and added the AMO is also a contributing factor in the loss of Arctic sea ice and in the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes and Indian monsoons. "The oceans are key to decadal natural variability," Latif said.
Nevertheless, Blakemore insists man-made global warming is real and says short-term, local weather patterns are no indication of long-term, regional climate. In his article he displays a graph from NOAAs National Climate Data Center showing ever accelerating decadal average global temperatures since 1880 caused by increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, Joseph D'Aleo, a fellow with the American Meteorological Society, published a research paper in the September 2009 Monthly CO2 Report of the Science and Public Policy Institute. In it, he pointed out the inherent errors of data from NOAA.
Many peer-reviewed papers show long-term global temperature trends have been exaggerated by 30 to 50 percent and sometimes much more. Urbanization, land-use changes, bad siting, bad instrumentation, and changes in ocean measurement techniques have adversely affected temperature measurement worldwide. NOAA has made matters worse by abandoning satellite ocean temperature measurement, which provided more complete coverage and was largely free from regional distortions. It is only because of these methodological errors that NOAA and other "global-warming" profiteers have been able to claim that we are in the warmest decade in 100 or even 1,000 years or more.
D'Aleo collected actual global temperature measurements without NOAA's distortions. The result is a graph of the 20th century showing obvious 60-70 year cycles of warming and cooling, with no statistically significant trends outside normal ranges. The temperatures are charted with data of contributing factors such as oceanic cycles and solar irradiance, revealing a striking link between them all. D'Aleo explained that recent warming should be expected since the Earth is in the middle of one of its normal cyclical warming trends, but that the 1930s are by far the hottest decade on record. D'Aleo summed up his research saying, "There is no need to take any action whatsoever ... to mitigate 'global warming,' which is minimal and cyclical."