>>>>>Global Ocean Temperatures "Plunge"<<<<<

Global ocean temperatures "plunge"

from data gathered by the National Climatic Data Center ^ | 12/17/07 | Dangus

In 2000, when scientists declared that the Earth's temperature was rising, much anxiety ensued, even though the increase was only half of a degree over sixty years. In just the past year, however, the Earth's temperature has reversed, yielding back one-half of that increase.

The past month's (November's) global oceanic data from the National Climatic Data Center has now been released, and the Earth's oceans surface is .2548 degrees warmer than the 1880-2007 average. That's down from .5250 last year and .5597 roughly a decade ago.

There have been drops of roughly a couple tenths of a degree previously, in spite of the general warming trend. But such drops, blamed on "La Ninas," have occured immediately following temperature spikes. What makes this current La Nina unusual is that the current temperature drop follows an imperceptibly small temperature spike.

As a result, the cold snap is pulling down even the six-year running average of temperatures.

This does not mean that the warming trend has necessarily reversed itself; there have, indeed been declines in running averages even longer than that during this decline. In fact, a cooling trend lasted from the 1940s through the 1970s.

However, unable to justify drastic temperatures with fears of the temperature rising a single degree or less next century, the global-warming doomsday-preachers have been asserting that the surge in global warming in the late 1990s indicated an acceleration of global warming.

The notion of such an acceleration seems difficult to reconcile with the new data: The world's oceans were warmer during warm spells of the 1940s.

[link to ncdc.noaa.gov]