The best-known authority on the PDO is Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Geology at Western Washington University (call me biased, but it’s so often geologists, whose line of work requires them to take the long view, who are the strongest sceptics of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Given the clear correlation between the PDO and global atmospheric temperature trends, and given also that the PDO has been in a cooling phase since 1998 and based on past behaviour probably will continue to do so for some decades, it makes sense to infer that global temperatures, having also peaked in 1998, are likely to mirror this cooling. When the Pacific Ocean gets warmer, so does the atmosphere. It covers one-third of our planet’s surface area, and merely the top few metres of it represents a heat sink many thousands of times greater than the earth’s atmosphere as a whole. The Pacific Ocean is by far the world’s largest body of water. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. You see, it just so happens that global temperature changes over the 20th Century have paralleled the PDO with uncanny accuracy. Yes, yes, that’s well and good Ozboy, fascinating science and all, but so bloody what? The current cooling phase is complicated by the concurrent La Niña event, which has the effect of cooling the Pacific Ocean in the equatorial latitudes. Current PDO cooling phase, evident since 1998
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