Climate change again

Climate change has been in the news again recently.  The Express notes that La Nina is in force in the Pacific and will gradually strengthen as the year ends leading to another potentially bitterly cold winter. The Telegraph reported in June that there may be a “little ice age’ in store based on astronomers’ belief that the next sun spot cycle will be less intensive than normal or fail to happen.

I remember reading about this in the New Scientist quite some time ago now. One of their conclusions seemed to be that this would give us some breathing space to sort out our carbon emissions. Reading comments on any climate related story however, causes me to despair for that scientific and logical hope. The main sentiment seems to be that warming is a government plot but, if not, this gives us more opportunity to ignore the issue.

Joanna Haigh professor of atmospheric physics at Imperial College London, cautions that "Even if the predictions are correct, the effect of global warming will outstrip the sun’s ability to cool even in the coldest scenario. And in any case, the cooling effect is only ever temporary. When the sun’s activity returns to normal, the greenhouse gases won't have gone away."

Whilst on the subject of skeptics, the results from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project are out. This was set up by climate skeptic, physicist Richard Muller following the email hacking scandal. As Real Climate reports the intention was to, ‘create a new, independent compilation and assessment of global land surface temperature trends using new statistical methods and a wider range of source data. Expectations that the work would put teeth in accusations against CRU and GISTEMP led to a lot of early press, and an invitation to Muller to testify before Congress.’ The BBC reports that, ‘The project received funds from sources that back organisations lobbying against action on climate change.’

The big news from this study is that actually the earth is getting warmer or, as Mother Jones reports, ‘But Muller's congressional testimony last March didn't go according to plan. He told them a preliminary analysis suggested that the three main climate models in use today—each of which uses a different estimating technique, and each of which has potential flaws—are all pretty accurate: Global temperatures have gone up considerably over the past century, and the increase has accelerated over the past few decades. Yesterday, BEST confirmed these results and others in its first set of published papers about land temperatures.’ The graph below shows how well the figures match:

And yet, the comments don't change. There's a lot I might blame the government for but imagining climate change is not one of them. Sigh.