Libertarian musings from just inside the M25.

Courtesy of James Delingpole, it appears that the next battle in the war between those who lend credence to the climate change hypothesis and those who do not has just begun. The Russians have produced a paper (linked document is in Russian, for those of a pan-European persuasion) that essentially quantifies the way in which the disgraced CRU scientists manipulated Siberian data to serve their ideological rather than investigative purposes.

Now, I remain resoundingly sceptical of both sides of the climate change debate (although, in the eyes of ‘true believers’, this automatically makes me as bad as a – ridiculously – so-called ‘climate sceptic’). My basic problem is that the theory of anthropogenic glocal warming (AGW to the blogosphere) rests on less original research and consequently a much narrower group of data sets than other scientific or economic theories (such as the various Phillips curves plotting the  inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment, for example, or the developments of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity). Moreover, this data is at best weakly conclusive and then only through the use of controversial interpretation methods, and as such suffers from a decided lack of the sort of academic and pragmatic rigour that characterises research into the other major fields today (curing cancer, AIDS &c).

On the other hand, the arguments from the ‘sceptic’ camp have the fundamental flaw that they are effectively trying to prove a negative – a difficult practice at the best of times. Instead of trying to prove that, for example, the earth is cooling rather than warming, the doubters are essentially left to fight over the extent to which their opponents’ data is inconclusive. So more often than not, many overcompensate by adopting rhetoric that is just as blinkered as that of the most ardent green lobbyists, which seriously impairs the ability of either side to engage in rational debate on the issue.

But all this is really just a prelude to the main point of the article, which (despite its wording) is much more a serious point of inquiry than some smirking excuse for triumphalism. The BBC informs us that southern England is due a bout of heavy snowfall, which would be pretty much the first time since 1994 or 1995 that December has brought snow to any part of the UK south of Scotland. My question is thus: Why, if the planet as a whole is supposed to be warming, should any part of it (especially one as relatively cold in global terms) buck the trend and be cooling as a result of the same climatic processes? All the explanations I have been given so far effectively amount to the sentiment expressed by the manager in the following Nationwide commercial:

I really would be interested in seeing a well-argued explanation (complete with technical terms, not just soundbites) for this phenomenon, because the two I have currently (‘believers’: “oh don’t worry your little head about it, leave that to the SCIENTISTS”; ‘sceptics’: “you see, YOU SEE, they’re wrong, it’s a conspiracy”) just don’t cut it as far as I’m concerned…

UPDATE: [H/T to Alex C-D] The NY Times has an interesting bit on how the current cold spell is pretty much entirely attributable to the La Niña weather pattern in the Pacific. It’s a start, I agree – but two things still bother me. El Niño and La Niña have long been observed but never, as far as I can tell, properly explained – so using them as a variable in the great climate equation strikes me as somewhat presumptuous. Also, the piece mentions ‘long-term mean’ temperatures several times, which the NASA literature I was linked to state as being constructed using the data recorded since records began in 1961. This, I think, is the climate lobby’s greatest problem – scientists have less than 50 years’ worth of vaguely reliable data, which may be enough to extrapolate a mini-trend for a few decades, but not really suitable for any longer-term predictions. Basically, we just can’t be sure – and I am certainly not a betting man where the planet is concerned.