Sounds like a pamphlet for a holiday destination, but we’re in fact referring to a new scientific paper (Ludecke et al. 2020) that explores the relationship between variations in solar outputs, oscillations in ocean currents, and European temperatures over the interval from 1900 to 2015 (h/t No Tricks Zone). They found the solar cycle only had a weak effect on most regions, but two ocean cycles, the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, exert very strong control over the continent’s climate. So strong, in fact, that in many places there’s no trend left over to explain. So as Kenneth Richard asks, “[AGW proponents] insist the upward TREND is human-caused. But what if we don’t have an upward trend? Is THAT natural?”
It’s a question we ourselves often ponder. When something bad happens, such as a hurricane or a forest fire, the AGW crowd rush in and claim that their theory explains it, implying that climate change is to blame. But what if, as is more often the case, nothing happens? What if we have a long interval with no hurricanes, or a pleasant summer and a mild fall? Well, the theory goes, that’s just nature at work. It’s weather. But how do we know? Perhaps we were in store for non-stop storms and a miserable fall, and climate change turned it into a stretch of balmy, pleasant calm.
Ludecke et al. find that the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) strongly controls European weather in the winter and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) takes over in the Spring and Summer. Together they explain a lot of the cyclical patterns in European regions. For instance, winter in Germany follows the NAO very closely:
while summer in Greece tracks the AMO:
So if there is a hot summer in Athens or a mild winter in Frankfurt, while the newspapers will all shout aha! greenhouse gases at work, this analysis says no, it’s probably the long slow cycles of the oceans.
Even the notion of what causes what is still up for grabs. In the paper on European temperatures, they find that solar variations don’t directly affect European temperatures except in a few locations, but they also note that maybe they affect the ocean cycles which in turn strongly affect temperatures, so it might be down to the sun after all.
If after accounting for the effects of the sun and the sea there were strong upward trends to be explained, we all know what the story would have been. So what’s the story if there’s no trend left to be explained, as in the two examples shown? It’s a long-enough period of study that it gets hard to wave it away as mere “weather”. And it hardly makes sense to say that global warming just happened to pass Germany and Greece by, but ravaged everywhere else.
Perhaps, as we are often wont to say, things are more complicated than the alarmists want to admit.
