After all the vitriol over anthropomorphic (man-made) “Global Warming”, it was a significant change when the organizations which had been most prominent in trying to bring it to public attention switched terminology to Climate Change instead:
Last week a UK tribunal ruled that belief in manmade global warming had the same status as a religious conviction, such as transubstantiation. True believers in the hypothesis will need mountains of faith in the years ahead.
The New Scientist has given weight to the prediction that the planet is in for a cool 20 years — defying the computer models and contemporary climate theory. It’s “bad timing”, admits the magazine’s environmental correspondent, Fred Pearce.
Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, quoted by the magazine, attributes much of the recent warming to naturally occurring ocean cycles. Scientific study of the periodic ocean climate variability is in its infancy; for example the PDO or Pacific Decadal Oscillation, was only described in the late 1990s. It’s the Leibniz team which predicted a forthcoming cooling earlier this year — causing a bullying outbreak at the BBC.
Much of the resistance to the “orthodoxy” of global warming was caused by the strong suspicion that this was merely an excuse for greater government control over business and further restrictions on individuals for a nebulous goal. It certainly didn’t help that any extreme or unusual weather was automatically “caused by global warming” according to the vast majority of media reports.
If global warming/climate change was actually being caused (or increased) by human activity, the proposals to “fix” the problem almost always seemed to impose far greater costs than the problem itself. Activists saying that the west pretty much had to give up most of their modern comforts (and their industrial base) in order to “save the planet” did their cause more harm than good.
Some data seemed to support the global warming theory, while other data seemed to contradict it. Rather than following traditional scientific methodology, too many scientists forgot their basic training and tried conducting media science (where peer review and providing raw data to support your findings are not required or expected). By saying that the problem was “too urgent” to be slowed down by following normal procedure, they undermined their own cause. By exaggerating the likely results if global warming was actually happening, they stopped being scientists at all and instead became political activists.
The confidence that higher atmospheric CO2 levels will result in significant long-term increases in temperature is founded on knock-on effects, or positive feedbacks, amplifying the CO2 effect. Large positive feedbacks imply “runaway” global warming — aka Thermageddon.
But even the basics are fiercely contested. Does a warmer climate mean more or fewer clouds, and do these trap even more heat, or act as a sunshade, cooling it back down again? Clouds are so poorly understood, you can take your pick. So if the climate isn’t getting warmer, the theory requires the view that the energy must be “hiding” somewhere, mostly likely in oceanic heat sinks.
But neither the feedbacks, nor the oceans, are currently being kind to contemporary climate theory.
