The past two years have been a bit of a downer for climate change realists and supporters of oil and gas production on the prairies. This has especially been the case for those of us who consume a lot of legacy media content. It seems like virtually every news story on the weather and weather-related events, whether they involve actual disasters, inconveniences or merely novelties, is punctuated with the claim that it is due to climate change.
The fact that here on the prairies we have been having cooler than normal spring weather the past few years has been lost in the hype over summer time heat waves and fires. The media and environmentally woke have decided heat waves and smoke are the global norm—that we will never again have a cool, relatively smoke-free summer.
Take heart devotees of rationality and common sense. Never is a long time. And two years of high summer temperatures do not amount to a climate trend.
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A residential area destroyed by the wildfires is shown in Enterprise, Northwest Territories on Wednesday October 11, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson.
It is helpful to recall that the predictions of climate scientists about the pace of global warming associated with increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been wildly inaccurate in the recent past. This was the case from 2000 to 2012 when global warming stopped. While GHG emissions grew significantly during this period, the global temperature remained stubbornly static. Climate scientists have been scrambling ever since to explain why. It turns out science cannot predict the effect of increasing CO2 emissions on global temperatures with flawless accuracy.
The warming hiatus of the early 2000s clearly had nothing to do with humanity slashing its GHG emissions. From 2000 to 2012, human generated CO2 emissions grew by approximately 100 million tonnes.
Scientists often use 1750 as the start year for calculating increases in average annual global temperatures. The 18th century date approximates the launch of the Industrial Revolution, when we began using fossil fuels in a big way. Climate scientists estimate that the level of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere was 280 ppm parts per million in 1750. Since then the level of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere has substantially increased. Atmospheric concentrations rose to 417 ppm by 2022 which presumably contributed to a total global temperature increase of 1.36 degrees Celsius since 1750. That translates into a one degree Celsius increase in the world’s temperature for each additional 206 ppm increase in atmospheric concentrations of CO2. As of 2022, CO2 made up 0.04 % of the Earth’s atmosphere.
From the 1750s until 2000 the computer models used by most climate scientists matched what was actually happening. There was a strong correlation between temperature increases and higher concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere. But, between 2000 and 2012 the relationship evaporated.
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All sorts of hypotheses have been floated to explain why temperatures didn’t do what science expected. The most popular idea is that the world’s oceans absorbed the warming. There is evidence to suggest this might have been the case. Even if that explanation is correct, why did the oceans only start having this effect in the early 2000s and cease doing so after 2012? Another theory is that the models did not accurately depict the reflectivity of white clouds, which are assumed to reflect solar radiation away from the planet. Those questions prompt additional, yet to be answered, questions about whether there are similar yet to be identified flaws affecting the accuracy of predictions being made today.
An article in the Science and Technology section of The Economist back in 2013, wisely cautioned that a decade of flat temperatures didn’t mean the problem of global warming was going away. And it probably hasn’t. By the same token it doesn’t mean we’ll be having beach weather in October for the next several years—maybe—maybe not. In climate change science one or two years of higher temperatures does not mean the next ten years will equally be as warm. Climate is a long-term concept, often assessed in terms of 30 year reference periods.
What makes the recent spate of broken temperature records particularly annoying for climate realists is their effect on the conventional news media, the public and public policy. Some climate change alarmists are no doubt celebrating a “we told you so” moment. At the same time, many of them are panicking because they believe the heat waves experienced in 2024 will be even more severe over coming years, maybe forever. Realists, on the other hand, worry that all the hand wringing will lead to all sorts of rash and irrational policy decisions.
The legacy news media nurtures climate anxiety. A recurrent theme in sensationalized weather and climate stories is “Be afraid, be very afraid.” Even the generally unflappable geopolitical journalist, Gwynne Dyer, claims there is now cause for alarm. Dyer is spooked by the fact that over the past year the global average temperature exceeded the pre-industrial temperature by 1.5 degrees.
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The IPCC has long held that if warming could be held to 1.5 degrees or less, we could avoid many of its negative impacts. The ultimate goal is to ensure that warming does not exceed the 2.5-3.0 degrees threshold, after which point the feedback effects of warming could push us into runaway warming territory. Dyer thinks it is plausible that the temperature increases experienced this past year might never go down. He is especially miffed that the IPCC (and climate science in general) does not recognize a one year anomaly as the new normal. As noted above, that won’t happen unless the anomaly becomes a trend lasting for up to three decades. Interestingly, Dyer, like many other climate alarmed journalists, has proudly claimed his climate concerns are founded on objective science. But when it comes to his anxious call for immediate radical action on global emissions reduction, he is content to reject the scientific methodology used to identify significant shifts in the global climate.
Media reporting on the annual Arctic sea ice melt is another example of conventional wisdom failing to reflect reality. NASA began recording daily ice melt data using satellites in 1981. The scale of the annual sea ice melt for 2023-2024 does not reflect the global temperature increase over those two years. In September each year the annual melt period ends and ocean ice cover starts increasing, so we already know the maximum area of the Arctic Ocean that became ice free for 2024. It turns out this past summer’s ice melt was not the 43 year melt record. It was the year with the 7th highest level of ice melt in 43 years. The record for the largest area of sea ice melting in the Arctic Ocean was set in 2012 during the warming hiatus. Go figure.
It is a pretty safe bet we can expect journalists wedded to climate alarm orthodoxy to be writing stories about starving polar bears treading water due to a lack of sea ice in 2024. For those who have drunk the Kool-Aid there is often no need to provide the relevant supporting data. Years ago the environmental movement made polar bears the poster children for the adverse effects of global warming. The biases held by suitably woke reporters will encourage them to automatically assume that if 2024 is setting temperature records, the Arctic must be nearly ice free. In reality, for this year like most, Hudson Bay wasn’t entirely ice free until early July, and until mid-June the sea ice held on longer than normal on the west side to the Bay (the area renowned as the world’s largest polar bear denning site).
Clearly, the climate does not always behave in ways that conform to the expectations of journalists or climate scientists. Similarly, GHG emissions concentrations do not always correspond to global temperature predictions.
If you live on the prairies and are thinking about selling the farm and moving to Pebble Beach don’t do it just because conventional wisdom claims we are in the midst of a planetary melt-down. For all anyone knows the next warming hiatus could be just around the corner. If your neighbor is experiencing a high degree of climate change anxiety, you might ask if he’s interested in selling.
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