PROVIDENCE, Rhode
Island, May 21, 2008 – We've had an
unusually cool, wet spring this year here in the Northeast. It's almost
Memorial Day, but when I went out to get donuts this morning, I put on a
jacket. It's been very cool at night, and it was only a couple of days ago that
I finally put our quartz heater, known to the cats as "the Warm Thing" or "the
Electric Beach," away in the closet for the season. Although some warm weather
is in the forecast for next weekend, that's as it should be -- it's almost
June, after all.
What, I hear you asking, is so remarkable about that? Well, nothing really --
except that it highlights the fact that climate and weather patterns are complex
phenomena. Yet it's next to impossible to pick up a newspaper and fail to find an
article on climate change -- and most of the time, the author assumes that (a)
the climate is changing, and that (b) carbon dioxide emissions are the main (if
not the only) cause of the change.
As regular readers know by now, I do not subscribe to this conventional wisdom.
I am concerned about the Earth's climate and the possibility that we might be
changing it by burning gas, oil, and coal, and putting a lot of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere -- but I don't accept the idea that climate change is a done
deal. And it seems that many climate researchers are starting to think things
are more complex than Al Gore and his "Inconvenient Truth" faithful, with their
hybrid cars and carbon offsets, would have it.
Climate
alarmism has led to a lot of pointless, feel-good initiatives.
For the past couple of years now, a weekly newsletter that appears in my e-mail
has been suggesting that the warm weather we experienced during the past 20-30
years or so was indicative not of long-term global warming, but rather, of a
shorter-term phenomenon that is not well understood: Pacific Decadal Oscillation
(PDO), which is a cyclical pattern of sea-surface temperatures, under which the
ocean tends to alternate between warm and cool over periods of roughly 20-30
years.
The newsletter that called this to my attention? It's written by one of my
favorite stock-market guys, who also appears on a couple of TV stock shows. For
a PDO primer, see
the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory's page on the subject.
PDO has a wide-ranging influence on global climate and weather. And it may well
be responsible for a lot of the apparent global-warming trend we've experienced
over the past 20-30 years. The Pacific was in a warm phase from roughly the
mid-1970s until 1999 or so; since then, it has apparently started to cool down.
Although it's too early to tell for certain, it may be that Pacific temperatures
are headed downward for the next few decades. The cool, damp spring we've
experienced here in New England -- with buds appearing later than usual, lilacs
blooming later, and jackets worn well into May -- could well be a result of this
trend.
Crisis? What crisis?
A cool PDO cycle would also mean that for the next 20 or 30 years, we're likely
to see few (if any) anecdotal signs of "global warming," in the form of big heat
waves, nasty hurricane seasons, and droughts -- the type of events that have led
to the current alarmist state of the body politic. This alarmist condition has
led to bad policy decisions from Congress, such as our disastrous corn-based
ethanol subsidy program, which has cost taxpayers and consumers billions of
dollars, while contributing to inflation and high food prices that have made it
hard for hungry people in poor countries to get the food they need. Climate
alarmism has also led to a lot of pointless, feel-good "Green" initiatives. As
we saw during the '70s "energy crisis" (which was not a crisis at all, but
rather an economic disruption caused by the Nixon and Carter Administrations'
misguided price-control policies), the news media are full of suggestions as to
how to save tiny amounts of fuel -- while our overall wasteful consumer society
makes no real change in the way we do things.
If we get two or three cooler decades, the headlong rush into misguided "Green"
policies will no doubt subside. Meanwhile, we'll have plenty of time to do more
climate research, develop technological solutions that provide real -- instead
of just symbolic feel-good -- reductions in CO2 emissions, and smart ways to use
less energy.
The other likely result of a cool PDO cycle might be that the overall level of
climate hysteria will drop. As I've argued before, the real "inconvenient truth"
is that we do not know for certain what the long-term climate trends are -- and
we know even less about what, if anything, is causing the changes we think we're
seeing. Nobody knows exactly what causes PDO. There are some theories about
variations in solar output playing a role, but it's likely that PDO, like global
climate
itself, is a complex phenomenon that cannot be attributed to a single cause.
The other "inconvenient" thing is that we humans are probably not in a position
to do much about PDO, just as we are not the masters of global climate. The
forces responsible for Ice Ages and periods of deglaciation are largely due to
astronomy -- the Earth's orbit varies over time, and its axis-tilt is not
constant. These factors, not human activity, are what cause glaciers to advance
across continents, stay awhile, then gradually retreat back toward the poles.
Stay tuned over the next 20 or 30 years or so. It'll be interesting to see what
Al Gore and his followers are saying in, say, 2025, if global temperatures
aren't any higher than they were in 2000, sea level hasn't budged, and polar
bears are prospering (as they are right now -- despite having been declared a
"Threatened Species" by the courts, their actual population in Canada has gone
up, not down, in recent years). With climate-change hysteria at a fever
pitch over the past few years, a cooling-off period would be most welcome.
Feedback? Fire off a
letter to the editor, and we'll post
it on the letters page. Letters may
be edited for clarity or length. Also, you may have to endure some
friendly abuse from the editor, should he disagree with you.