Unlike the economy, which as I just posted on can change on pretty short time scales, true climate changes only occur over very long periods–decades or centuries. The Earth’s climate is very, very complex. There are external drivers like solar radiation and orbital dynamics. There are global factors like the alignment of the continents and ocean currents. There are many intermediating factors and feedback mechanisms like number and type of clouds and amount of vegetative cover. And there are human influences. We have substantially impacted the globe, modifying water flows, creating immense cities that generate large amounts of heat, changing land use from forests to agriculture.
For obvious ideological reasons, the anti-growth nuts seized on the supposed role of CO2 in controlling climate, and the fact that use of fossil fuels results in large CO2 releases, to attempt to eliminate the use of those fuels and frankly, to regress economies and living standards across the country. We should be very clear about this–the use of abundant and cheap fossil fuels–coal, oil, natural gas, peat–is the primary factor responsible for the rapid economic growth over the last two and half centuries that allowed for a phenomenal change in living standards. Why we would abandon those energy sources is a complete mystery to me, and the experience of Germany and the UK in pursuing such a course should be a huge warning sign to every other developed country.
This post at Watts Up With That does a good job of exploring a number of the factors that should be considered in understanding climate variability and trends. What has always been clear to me is that the extensive use of climate models is inappropriate in setting policy, because these models have repeatedly been shown to be incapable of producing results consistent with real life measurements. Part of the problem is that the models are created by persons with an ideological bias who program the models with assumptions that create warming, and presto, the models give you warming. Climate has always been variable on time scales over hundreds of thousands of years down to a few decades. While I don’t doubt that humans could affect that variability, it isn’t clear to me that our activities are the driver of any changes currently in process. (WUWT Post)
