they should concentrate on expanding coal mining etc now we are entering a global cooling period.
We are? (Looking out the window at the missing snow)
The warming hasn't been dramatic, and neither will any cooling be.
Everyone is by now accepting that we have at least a "pause" in warming. The conventional thinking is it warming will resume shortly. But it's perfectly possible that it's actually a maximum and cooling will set in for a period -- or permanently.
Anyone who bothers to go and look at the actual data can see a pretty obvious pattern. e.g.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:60This is the latest series combining sea surface temperatures from the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office and land surface temperatures from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia.
i.e. *the* standard data source
I applied smoothing by averaging 5 years to make the trends more obvious.
Namely:
- warming from 1850 to 1880
- cooling from 1880 to 1910
- warming from 1910 to 1945
- slight cooling from 1945 to 1975
- warming from 1975 to 1998
- the "pause" or maybe slight cooling from 1998 to the present, except for a big spike due to last year's El Nino
The observant will notice that each phase has been roughly 30 years long. If the pattern continues we can expect the Earth to cool until about 2030.
The warming periods are, so far, stronger than the cooling periods, in keeping with overall warming since the Little Ice Age around the 16th to 19th centuries.
The 1975 to 1998 warming period is not significantly different in nature to the 1910 to 1945 warming period.
Feel free to select other series.