Something is up with the climate. For decades, climatologists have tracked and agonized over global warming, allegedly caused by rising emissions of greenhouse gases as humans burned ever greater amounts of fossil fuels. Yet, in the last 15 years the world has seen no clear signs of warming. The average global temperature in 2013 will likely be little higher than that of 1998.
I’ve always been somewhat skeptical about global warming, or rather, the computer models of its truest-blue believers. I doubt any of them took account of all factors in the complex equation creating climate change. No one seems to know all the myriad related factors, so I don’t buy specific projections on exactly when and how man-made emissions might impact the planet.
Actually, static temperatures look to me potentially far more worrisome than the concept of global warming. Undoubtedly greenhouse gases are pouring into the atmosphere, yet average global temperatures are not rising. Whatever holds them back by definition would be pretty strong and maybe pretty scary.
Logically, I see two possibilities. Perhaps the current climate models, though far from perfect, are generally on target, and the 15-year stretch of static temperatures reflects an as-yet-unknown short-term anomaly. If so, all trends projected to result from global warming eventually could play out, including rising seas, increased droughts and worsening storms. This would be bad, but probably not catastrophic. Barring the resource scarcity that could render the discussion moot, we could calculate minimum needs via cost-benefits analysis and decrease fossil fuel usage to meet the challenge, a point neglected by Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
A second much more forbidding possibility could be that while greenhouse gases continue to warm the earth, natural counter forces, far more difficult to deal with, overwhelm them.
Spencer Weart of the American Institute of Physics recently concluded, “By the start of the twenty-first century, it was clear the connection between global temperature and greenhouse gas levels was a major geological force…” verifying through its own striking natural record and wholly independent methods and data, the processes by which computer models had predicted severe, rapid global warming.
The human race has previously witnessed far more severe climate changes than any foreseen by even the most drastic greenhouse warming models.
As Neil Shubin notes in The Universe Within, climate records from ice core studies illustrate the possibility of rapid, dramatic climate changes. He writes: “The record from pollen, oxygen atoms, and other markers implies a climate that converted from warm to cold on a dime. Global mean temperatures changed 15 degrees in as little as a decade (emphasis added),” a staggering observation considering the extent to which global temperature shifts of just 2 or 3 degrees can alter coastlines, arable lands, and deserts.
We know that terrestrial climate is cyclical. Over hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years, the earth has endured and survived many violent temperature swings. In the early nineteenth century, Swiss-born Louis Agassiz observed indentations in the earth to James Croll of Scotland. Croll then theorized that ice ages might have been caused by analogies to seasonal factors, that changes in the earth’s tilt relative to the sun could produce long periods of more or less intense heat reaching the earth.
Scientists commonly call long-term ice ages Milankovitch cycles after Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovic, who established that the earth had regularly experienced several multi-thousand-year warming and cooling periods. More recently, Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey at the University of Chicago and Denmark’s brilliant, late glaciologist Willi Dansgaard validated Milankovic’s theory. Today scientists all concur: ice age cycles have occurred fairly regularly.
We now sit well within an interglacial period, between ice ages. An excellent blog, “Climate Change and the Oceans,” by NASA affiliates notes, “In fact the present interglacial …has already lasted longer than any of the 3 previous interglacials.” Given the 20,000 to 100,000 years of the typical ice ages and interglacial periods, humanity generally gets a very long time to adapt. Since the late 1970s climate warming has amounted to less than half a degree. And since 1900, warming has totaled less than 1 degree. Even the most extreme, pessimistic global warming models project no more than a 2- or 3-degree rise in temperatures by 2100.
Suppose that the sun, however, or more precisely the relationship between the sun and the earth, controls average global temperatures. A temperature change of 15 or even 10 degrees (Centigrade) in a decade would utterly dwarf anything projected by global warming gurus, and an event history already recorded several times over.
The static temperatures of the last 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gases, suggest that we may soon face a sharp turn towards a colder climate.
If so, besides buying a warmer overcoat, what can investors do? Any big climate change, especially if unexpected, would cause all sorts of environmental damage. Insurance companies with large capital bases look best positioned to profit.