Climate change: last chance saloon?
By Richard North - January 4, 2022
When the winter snows come, it is a tough time for warmists. They have a hard enough time keeping the alarm levels high. Too much of the white stuff sows seeds of doubt in the great unwashed, making it harder to convince them that Armageddon is just around the corner.
And boy, has it just snowed in Washington DC, caught in the biggest mid-Atlantic snowstorm in years, which has kicked off the first week of 2022. According to local reports, the capital was expected to have had more snow than Chicago and Denver this season.
Strangely, it has even done President Biden some good. As Air Force One landed back in Washington DC in the midst of blinding wind and snow, his exit from the aircraft was caught on video, leading people to think he looked like a “badass”.
Soon enough, the snow is expected to reach the UK, the first instalment of what might be a brutal winter, making it even harder for the warmists to sell their nihilistic agenda.
Some of this might explain the almost frenetic nature of recent climate change propaganda, culminating in the sort of piece we saw in last Sunday’s Observer which sought to link the centuries-old process of east coast erosion with the “climate crisis”.
Milking the rising sea-level meme for all it’s worth, it warns that areas of the UK are at risk of being underwater by 2050, although it does concede that the predictions “are based on highly complex, and disputed, modelling”.
One can almost sense the desperation as the paper calls in aid the Thwaites Glacier, telling us that its potential for collapse is such that it makes flooding in the UK “rapidly more plausible”, using Peter Davis from British Antarctic Survey to perpetuate the half-truth that the glacier is “being melted from below by warm ocean waters”, with no mention of the geothermic activity.
But it’s the BBC which sneaked out close to the end of last year an analysis which suggests that not all is well with the climate worshippers as the shine wears off the CoP26 eco-fest.
The analysis warns that the potential failure of Biden to get his “Build Back Better” act through Congress would significantly impact the ability of the US to meet the tough climate targets to which the White House has committed, damaging “the relatively unified approach to climate change on display among world leaders at CoP26”.
This and other tensions may slow down the progression to the cultists’ wet dream of “net zero” at a time when real world events are crowding in, driving a sense of urgency which almost gives the CoP the tenor of the last chance saloon.
Essentially, if the warmists don’t get unalterable commitments in place within a very short period (no more than a couple of years), the chances are they never will. Mother Nature is no longer playing ball.
A clue to this comes from the hallowed Met Office website (no bastion of “denier” sentiment) which offers a graph showing the UK mean temperature trend from 1880 to the current day.
While the trend does show overall warming over the period (of just short of 1.5 deg C), with a significant uptick from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, there has been no significant warming since the year 2000, despite a rise in CO2 levels of nearly 50ppm.
This has been picked up by journalist Chris Morrison, on the dreaded “denier” site Daily Sceptic, who has the temerity to quote Met Office data in order to make his case.
He also happens to note that, across the planet, warming ran out of steam some time ago. Both surface and satellite data, Morrison writes, show no warming for over seven years. In the UK, last year was 0.34°C colder than 2020 and the coldest year since 2015. The 2010s were colder than the 2000s. Furthermore, in central England – which has the longest instrumental temperature record, the year was as cool as 1733 and 1779.
This sort of inconvenient data, he asserts, has led the Met Office and most of the legacy media to focus on individual weather events, rather than general trends.
Thus, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of publicity about the record-breaking warmth over the New Year, with precious little reference to records for cold and snow being shattered all over the world, as far separated as Scandinavia and Japan, Turkey and China.
We also had the absurdity of that Telegraph journalist citing a record high temperature on Kodiak Island in Alaska, without mentioning that record lows were being experienced on the mainland.
Nor does he happen to mention that the Arctic Ocean ice extent was the second highest in 18 years at the end of 2021 – now close to 13 million square kilometres.
But why the warmists are in serious trouble is in the explanation for these weather extremes, which lies in the behaviour of the northern hemisphere jet stream, influenced by the polar vortex.
This is by no means a contentious phenomenon, although rarely mentioned by enthusiasts for blaming anthropogenic warning. This may have something to do with the fact that the character of the vortex is heavily influence by solar activity (and not at all by CO2 levels).
And, as the heretic on this site points out, we are currently experiencing a solar minimum, when “blocking” persistence increases in weather patterns, which become locked in place at high and intermediate latitudes for prolonged periods.
Instead of the more usual zonal flow for the jet stream (from west to east), it reverts to more of a meridional flow (extending in a north-south direction), with extremes of temperature each side. Thus, the western seaboard in the United States can be gripped by Arctic weather, all the way down to northern California, while central and eastern states can be baking in unseasonable warmth.
Given the cyclical nature of solar activity – and its relative predictability – the indications are that we are headed for another cooling period on the scale of the Maunder Minimum which triggered the little ice-age, at its most intense between 1570 and 1680 – with devastating social effects.
Deliciously – from the point of view of its effect on the warmist cult – the next low may correspond roughly with 2050, lasting to the turn of the century and beyond – just the period when “net zero” is supposed to take effect, to stave off runaway global heating.
Since, if this projection is correct, we can see a steady decline in mean temperatures from now onwards, one can see why the warmists are so keen to get their globalist agenda in place.
If they leave it too late, people may be beyond persuasion as they struggle through the succession of brutal winters that are to come, desperate for energy that has been made unaffordable by green stupidity, and the venal media, all too keen to give succour to the moronic tendency, dismissing real concerns over the prostitution of science as conspiracy theories.