Why Climate Change is Hard

Auntie Beeb has an item out on climate change. The BBC Web article can be found here.

The headline is "What happened to global warming?"

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

Before anyone jumps on me for being a criminal "global warming denier," let us read the article together.

There is information on both sides of this discussion.

When I think about scientific truth I recall a quip I heard on a TV morning news show about 30 years ago. The speaker basically said that 85% of what we knew to be scientifically true in 1900 we now knew to be wrong. In my uneducated mind science is not a series of rocks of truth in a river, but the river itself, always flowing around those rocks, which are what we know about nature.

So, back to the article.  Per the BBC, solar scientist Piers Corbyn, from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, sees the sun as more of a factor than previously considered.

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

Then, there is the oceans, and in particular, the Pacific Ocean.

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.
Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."

But, meanwhile, back at the UK MET office:

The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.
. . .
In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.

What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.

I say the jury is still out on this.

On the other hand, that is no reason not to be thinking about it. We do, however, need some priorities in our concerns, with food and water for everyone being first, then meaningful♠ work for those who are not in the food producing network and then improving health care.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Meaningful in the sense the people doing it don't see it as just digging holes and then filling them back in.