Global Cooling Over Next Decade

In a news article in the upcoming issue of Science, Richard Kerr reports that Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, and colleagues discovered that it is likely the globe will experience cooling over the next decade or so as changes in ocean currents affect the climate, but that they expect anthropgenic warming to continue afterwards. The part of this article that really caught my eye, though, was the Keenlyside et al actually used initial conditions of the oceans to make their predictions while, as the author pointed out, long-term forecasters don't bother with initial conditions. Don't bother? How can the field that discovered the importance of initial conditions and laid the initial groundwork for chaos theory not take initial conditions into consideration? We know that even the tiniest variation will result in wildly different outcomes -- especially over the long term. In light of what Edward Lorenz (who recently died, may he RIP) discovered, how can anyone who expects to be taken seriously when making forecasts of climate not take initial conditions into consideration? Worse, how can anyone take them seriously?

My guess too is that they ignore plenty of relevant factors, like sunspot activity, which is at the lowest levels in 400 years -- since what was called "The Little Ice Age."