As Matthew Wielicki observes, there is something a bit perverse in documenting a dramatic decrease in cloud cover over Europe over 40 years, as the EU’s “Copernicus Climate Change Service” has done, then conclude that the detected warming that followed the big hot yellow thing in the sky landing more of its rays on the place was definitely not caused by it. Of course correlation is not causation, and climate is complicated. But it suggests an attachment to the CO2 paradigm that is more dogmatic than empirical. Which is how scientific theories die, not how they prosper. Even if they do get all the money.

Among the many fatuities in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, he snidely quoted socialist novelist and reformer Upton Sinclair that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” It is a surprisingly widespread view including the formulation by Sinclair’s hated contemporary industrialist and financier J.P. Morgan that “A man always has two reasons for the things he does – a good one and the real one.” Unfortunately in the common or garden variety version of this claim, the assumption is that it applies universally but only to everyone else. Which is fatally subversive to all rational discourse because it implies all difference of opinion is down to motive not verifiable facts, thus you cannot argue with people, only bribe them.

It is admittedly relevant that the “Copernicus Climate Change Service” is paid to believe in climate change and, indeed, the salaries of its staff depend also on blaming humans for it. It is a conflict of interest and it does matter. But the real issue, as we argued in a video “The End of Alarmism“ last summer, is whether the theory is sufficiently robust that occasional anomalies, while puzzling and even irritating, are not dangerous or fatal to its core precepts, or whether it has become so rickety and ad hoc that a few more inconvenient truths will bring it down in a clattering heap. Including, as we quoted the Manhattan Contrarian in last week’s Newsletter, “The failure of global tropospheric temperatures to closely track the rise in atmospheric CO2.”

So we point to the ongoing decline in cloud cover as a genuine scientific issue requiring debate rooted in data and scientific reasoning. When people with financial interests in declaring CO₂ to be the cause of all climate change dismiss the solar heating angle we will endeavour not to rule out their claims just because of their conflicted motives, we will simply ask for proof, ideally in the form of a testable prediction.

P.S. Speaking of Al Gore and the collapse of alarmism, in December Matt Ridley suggested that:

“Perhaps Gore might now regret his exaggerated preachings of hellfire and damnation. In his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, for which he jointly won a Nobel Prize, he predicted a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet “in the near future” – out by around 19 feet and nine inches. In 2009, he said there was a 75 percent chance all the ice in the Arctic Ocean would disappear by 2014. In that year there was 5 million square kilometers of the stuff at its lowest point – about the same as in 2009; this year there was 4.7 million square kilometers. At the film’s showing at the Sundance Festival, Gore said that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases were taken within ten years, the world would reach a point of no return. Yet here we are, 19 years later.”

And Al Gore is still worth around $300 million due to his entrepreneurial exploitation of that crisis. So it’s kind of hard to get through to him.