Now It's the Unsettled Science of Climate Change

Or can we settle on the conclusion that climate change is cyclical?

There are people (IPCC) who have been telling us for over 25 years that the world is warming in an unprecedented manner and that it is due to the human burning of fossil fuels which adds the heat trapping gas, carbon dioxide(CO2), to our atmosphere. We are told that if we do not stop doing this the planet will become an uninhabitable place except possibly for Antarctica.

Lately, however, Mother Nature appears to have changed course and there are another bunch of scientists suggesting that the world has entered a cooling phase due to low solar activity and the ‘flip’ of something called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation(PDO). The PDO has a warm phase and a cool phase. It has recently entered its cool phase with a change in the north Pacific Ocean circulation pattern.

We have scientists warning about heat stroke at the turn of the century while Mother Nature was freezing cattle in the fields this past winter. Phds are no longer being issued with a direct line to the truth or a guarantee of infallibility.

Meanwhile, in a demonstration of how good our data about the climate has become we read of a study that tells us global precipitation is increasing, decreasing or not changing depending on which dataset you consult. Does this inspire confidence that our climatologists can give us an accurate picture of where our climate is going? That was a facetious and rhetorical question.

Temperature data are in more agreement as the five datasets used to keep tabs on the Global Mean Temperature(GMT) are reporting that Mother Nature has stopped raising the the GMT and all of them have a negative trend over at least the least 5 to ten years. The RSS satellite dataset reports no warming for 17+ years. The land based datasets(HADCRUT, NASA/GISS and NOAA/NCDC) have been criticised for poor station siting and biased results. In an attempt to rectify the poor siting a state of the art Climate Reference Network (USCRN) was set up and began recording in January 2005. With a little less than a decade of data the trend from this most modern and accurate network supports the declining trend in temperatures at least for the US. If all nations were to establish such a network we would have a lot more confidence in the reliability of our land based temperature data.

Solar scientists,because of the close correlation of the sun’s activity with Earth’s temperature, are forecasting a return to colder conditions as the current weak solar cycle 24 slides toward its minimum in 5 or 6 years. This seems to be showing up in our admittedly poor temperature data both in land based and the more accurate but shorter duration satellite datasets.  

Our climate is cyclical and has nothing to do with the content of the atmosphere. Blizzards don’t discriminate against low CO2 atmospheres. They have occurred in the past when CO2 was lower and they were white then too. Tornadoes in the US have been at record lows for the last two years so perhaps we can thank increased CO2 for their dearth in recent years. Tornadoes occurred in the past when CO2 was lower and destroyed people and property in their path then just as they do now. There are more of us and more of our stuff for them to hit now so it is good they are afraid of increased CO2.

From the settled science of global warming to the unsettling prospect of global cooling, climate change is a natural cycle. We did not boil away in the past with CO2 levels many times higher than those of today throughout most of the last 550 million years. No runaway global warming. The planet did become a freezer several times in the past when ice sheets a couple of miles thick descended upon a large part of the Northern Hemisphere. And we cycle out into warmer times.

Is the science now settled? We live in a naturally cyclical climate and CO2 has nothing to do with it.  As one twitter user suggested: CO2 makes ‘killer tomatoes’ not ‘killer tornadoes’.

We owe CO2 an apology.