By Onar Åm
What do Morocco, Algeria, Madrid, Madeira, New York, Chicago, Paris, and Moscow all have in common? They have all experienced record levels of snow and cold this winter. Snow in Sahara is rare but this winter it happened for the second year in a row.
If you listen to some climate pundits in the media, they will tell you this is evidence of “climate change” and “just what we predicted.” Those of us who were not born yesterday, however, remember the dire predictions in the early 2000s about how snow would be a thing of the past.
Other climate pundits recognize how thoroughly unconvincing this argument sounds, so they instead say that weather is not climate. That’s undoubtedly true, and a far better line. One snowfall does not a winter make.
However, multiple record-breaking snowstorms and freeze spells in entirely different corners of the world several years in a row is something else altogether. It suggests that something funky is going on with the climate, and global warming doesn’t fit the bill.
What then could be the explanation? For about twenty years, there has been a scientific debate about the underlying cause of climate change. The CO2 camp has dominated, but a growing minority has advocated the sun as the main culprit.
Nearly two decades ago, solar scientists predicted that there would be a prolonged lull in solar activity starting from around 2017-2019 that may well last for up to four decades. The last time a similar solar low occurred was a period called The Little Ice Age, which had cool summers and freezing winters.
It may be just a coincidence, but the arrival of unusually cold and snowy winters coincides uncannily with the solar predictions.
Another factor that has contributed to the growing popularity of the solar theory is the fact that the global warming camp’s promised doom and gloom continue to elude detection. On June 23 it will be thirty years – nearly a third of a century – since Dr. James Hansen scared the living daylights out of the Democrats during his congressional testimony about the pending climate catastrophe by the end the twenty-first century.
According to those predictions, we should now be nearly one-third of the way to Hell. An ever-growing number of climate scientists find those gloomy projections to be increasingly more implausible.
The scientific debate is not over. On the contrary; it is growing in intensity. Fortunately, we are about to enter a unique natural experiment which will falsify one of the competing theories.
If global warming picks up speed in the next decade, the sun probably plays only a minute role in climate change. If, however, global warming continues its lackluster crawl, the disaster theories must be scrapped.
There is even a chance that we may be entering a period of prolonged global cooling. We will know very soon. One thing is sure: if this happens on President Donald Trump’s watch, he will make sure that everyone will know about it. If so, put on a warm coat and bring out the popcorn.
