Climate change: unsettled science

By Richard North - January 3, 2023

With the record cold in the pre-Christmas period and the unprecedented snow storms the other side of the Atlantic quietly forgotten, it’s only taken two days into January for the Guardian to parade the headline: “‘Extreme event’: warm January weather breaks records across Europe”.

The paper is telling us that “weather records have been falling across Europe at a disconcerting rate in the last few days”, calling on meteorologist Scott Duncan to describe the temperatures across Europe as “staggering”.

“We had a very warm new year last year but this blows that out of the water”, Duncan says: “We observed longstanding records broken by large margins across several countries”.

Interestingly, Duncan doesn’t come right out and say, “it woz climate change wot dun it”, cautiously stating that causes are “difficult to ascertain”, with La Niña and anomalous warmth in sea surfaces playing a role.

Nevertheless, he allows the inference by adding: “None of the above here is new though, so what took extreme to record-smashing status? Our warming atmosphere and oceans are ultimately making records easier to break”.

Seemingly insufficient for a newspaper committed to promoting the “climate emergency” cult, it also turns to prof Bill McGuire who, the paper says, has written about the consequences of climate breakdown. Obligingly, he warns that the high temperatures are “a portent of worse to come”.

Warming to his theme, so to speak, he tells us: “The most worrying thing about this is that – such is the speed of global heating – it simply isn’t a surprise any longer”.

Then, taking a line that would make David Viner proud, he adds: “It is a small glimpse of a future that will see winter reduced to a couple of months of dreary, damp, and mild weather, with little in the way of frost, ice or snow”.

Oddly, though, it is The Times that leads in the climate emergency stakes, with a headline, “Europe basks in record heat on New Year’s Day”, and an unequivocal sub-heading which declares: “But weather experts warn that exceptional January temperatures are down to climate change”.

Alex Burkill, a meteorologist at the Met Office, is thus enlisted to say that while the heat had been made possible by the weather conditions, it was highly likely it was linked to rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

“There’s no denying that our climate is changing”, he says. “The fact that this event has broken records by so much indicates that climate change almost certainly played some part in how warm it’s been”.

Then we have Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. Cementing in the narrative, he tells us: “The record-breaking across Europe over the new year was made more likely to happen by human-caused climate change, just as climate change is now making every heatwave more likely and hotter”.

However, what neither the Guardian nor The Times are telling us is that much of Japan remains snowbound, that Siberia continues to generate record lows and, as of Monday, the northeast United States and parts of Canada were still gripped by extreme cold and record snowfall.

Yet the proximate cause of this east-west split in extreme weather events has nothing directly to do with climate change, whether anthropogenic or any other variety. What we are seeing here is a phenomenon related to the jet stream, known as meridional flow, about which I have written earlier.

As that jet stream adopts a wavy pattern, alternately reaching further north and south than normal, polar air is drawn southwards in some segments while tropical air is dragged much further north than usual in others, giving rise to the weather extremes we are currently experiencing.

As such, this is not evidence of either heating or cooling – merely that warm and cold air is being distributed in a different and (relatively) unusual way.

When it comes to the climate models so loved by the warmists, the gurus have been somewhat caught out as the earlier predictions had the jet streams retreating north and south, allowing warmer airstreams into areas normally blocked off to them. The possibility of meridional flows was never factored in.

Now, of course, since this phenomenon is (and has been) dominating weather patterns, the race is on to prove that climate change is the cause of the disrupted pattern, allowing the cultists to claim that the savagely cold weather being experienced is, after all, a function of global warning.

Just before Christmas, the Guardian had a stab at this in its coverage of the US “bomb cyclone”, arguing that: “Although meteorologists are wary of assigning any individual weather event to climate change, a wobble in the jet stream induced by climate change conforms to previous extreme weather events, both hot and cold”.

And yet, contrary to the prevailing warmist mantra, the science is far from settled. Although we see wild claims, such as the idea that a noted Yale scientist has offered a theory to “prove” the link – something no self-respecting scientists would claim – other studies are far more circumspect.

Even the Holy Scriptures published in the warmist journal Carbon Brief had to acknowledge that their precious models suggested there was “no link” between the jet stream features observed and climate change.

In a more recent paper, it was admitted that the question of whether the extreme weather patterns induced by shifts in the jet streams was “less than straightforward”.

A major weakness, it was decided, was that there is currently “no comprehensive theory” capturing the different processes involved, making it more difficult to monitor and track changes in extreme weather events. No clear trends in the causation of such events have been seen.

Then, a recently published textbook, produced by the Department of Meteorology at Reading University, agrees that the interactions between the jet stream patterns and the weather events, “are not yet fully understood, which presents challenges to both weather forecasting and climate projections”.

On the other hand, there are suggestions that jet stream patterns are influenced by sunspot patterns and the strength of cosmic winds, in the context that we are going through a cycle of low solar activity – although even some of the assumptions there are questionable.

Either way, neither the media nor anyone else has any sound foundation for asserting that the extreme weather events noted – both warm and cold – have any causal relationship with climate change.

Even the egregious Michael Mann admits that there remains “an active debate within the scientific community”, and that, “climate models are not yet capturing all of the underlying physics that may be relevant to how climate change is impacting the behaviour of the jet stream”.

Future studies, it is acknowledged, will still be needed in the coming years to unravel the mystery of the complex chain reactions.

Once again, therefore, we are poorly served by a media which continues to demonstrate its inability to address responsibly any controversial or complex scientific issues. Instead, it insists on spreading more ignorance than light, poisoning a discussion which has serious policy implications.