Diary: The BBC Discovers Global Cooling

Well, here we go again. The BBC published a story entitled "Whatever happened to Global Warming?" The article points out that global temperatures have not risen in the last 11 years despite increases in the levels of CO2. The inference is that we humans can't be the source of global warming. Instead, global warming is the result of natural cycles.

The article quotes two primary sources. Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, ascribes climate change to "solar charged particles." The article doesn't say exactly what the relationship is but asserts that if true "this could revolutionise the whole subject."

A longer segment of the article references the work of Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University. His theory is that recent climate change has been the result of warming and cooling cycles in the oceans. The most significant of these -- the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) -- has been warm and now it is getting cool.

For those who are skeptical about the impact of human activities on climate change this is considered to be smoking gun material. The once-despised BBC is now an unimpeachable source. As far as they are concerned it is end of story. And if you read their accounts you would think the BBC story did indeed end there.

But this was only the first half of the article. The second half - the fair and balanced part - went on to quote those scientists who say yes, we are in a bit of a cooling period but it will end at some point and the long-term warming trend will resume.

The UK's weather service, the Met Office, thinks warming will resume next year. Others put it off a bit longer. Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) thinks the cooling period may last another decade or two. But he emphasizes that the warming trend will resume.

So who is right? Well, time will tell. My common sense still says that if the greenhouse effect is real then all that CO2 we pumped into the atmosphere over the last 200 years or so has to be doing something. My common sense also tells me that climate is very complex, still poorly understood, and that it is no big surprise that other factors may serve to offset the warming effect of the CO2.

So this story is really a bit of old news, but it will still have an impact. Those who would rather preserve the status quo or who would like to have those funds spent on other more immediate needs use stories like the one in the BBC to justify delay and half-measures.

Given how things are going in Copenhagen, it looks like they will have their way.

This story first appeared in PlanetRestart.org