Seeing the environmental forest

James Taylor of the Heartland Institute had a piece on Forbes back in May that escaped my attention when it first came out.  Titled " Updated NASA Data: Global Warming Not Causing Any Polar Ice Retreat ", it focused on the single premise that since 2012, total polar sea ice was above the average since 1979.  Taylor then jumped to the erroneous conclusions that a) polar sea ice was not retreating and b) global warming will be entirely beneficial to humans.  His arguments are familiar, as I dealt with them before when a Newsmax article featured them back in 2014 .  He's recycling old talking points, so this post is going to echo the one I wrote a year ago.

Recent media reports have claimed that a drop in solar activity will lead to a mini-Ice Age within the next 15 years.  Unfortunately, even press reports from science-related media such as Science Daily , have been riddled with errors. Let's get the biggest one out of the way first.  Zharkova et al. ( 2015 ) did not predict a new Little Ice Age (LIA).  What they did was use principle component analysis to detect and model magnetic waves within the sun.  They found that there were two such waves, each with an 11-year cycle, that either interfered with each other when sunspot activity was low or magnified each other when sunspot activity was high.  They then ran their statistical model ahead to make a prediction for the next solar cycle and found that their model predicts that the waves should cancel each other out, resulting in their subsequent prediction that solar activity should drop to levels not seen since the Maunder Minimum.  That bit about the Maund...

One of the talking points I see (and hear) time and again here is the question "If the world's getting hotter, why is it cold here?", "here" usually referring to the eastern United States.  Another variation goes "Global warming can't be happening because US temperatures haven't risen in _____ years."  Yes, it's the good old "It's cold in my backyard so the planet can't be warming up" argument. Here's why it's dead wrong.