This winter has been brutal in many places of the world, colder and harsher than normal.

We have seen it in the U.S., and you probably saw the freezing weather in China that brought their trains to a standstill and had people trapped in stations for days on end. The arctic ice, which was supposedly melting at a rapid rate, has now thickened considerably.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

Contrary to my facetious title, we don’t need more global warming, and this winter is just one more data point in what must be a long-term analysis of information, something that goes for scientists on either side of the global warming debate.

I made a post a few months ago challenging the accuracy of computer simulations in predicting the weather, something that the IPCC touted heavily in their investigation.

I pointed out that there are so many complex factors involved in simulating the weather that it is very difficult to know whether the simplifications and abstractions made in creating the simulation didn’t cause the results to diverge radically from the reality being modelled.

And now scientists are talking about that:

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

“We missed what was right in front of our eyes,” says Prof. Russell. It’s not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

Even though these scientists support my proposition, who is to say that they are now modeling all the important factors in the correct way to accurately simulate the weather? They may be missing something big, too, or be weighting the inputs incorrectly. More work and sane, rational discussion are needed before passing legislation that tries to solve what may not end up being a problem at all.

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