Climate change may have been at the top of the mind of City councillors but not for a rising number of Americans. More surprisingly, media interests appear to be asking questions that they refused to ask just a few years ago. (http://news.investors.com/print/ibd-editorials/031814-693773-media-demand-to-read-hockey-stick-creator-michael-mann-emails.aspx.)

Indeed, with average global temperatures no higher than they were in 1997, one has ask why Canadian politicians are still wallowing in the delusion that the theory of man-made global warming (AGW) has any credibility?

The warming predicted by the IPCC was based entirely on computer models that failed to see the cyclical turn from warming to a flat to cooling temperature trend after 1998. When a climate change theory fails that badly, there is no credible reason to keep expecting it to be validated at some indefinite time in the future. It should, instead, be discarded in favour of the alternate hypothesis – the Earth’s climate is overwhelmingly controlled by natural forces, mainly solar and oceanic cycles. Reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is thus a costly and futile way to control the climate.

Dr. Don Easterbrook of Washington State University predicted in 2000 that the global climate would soon enter a period of cooling similar to that of the last global cooling from the early 1940s to the late 1970s. He indicated that if current weakening solar outputs continue for much longer there is a likelihood that the climate could revert back to Little Ice Age conditions this century, a prediction already made by some Russian and German solar scientists. (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/climate-scientist-who-got-it-right-predicts-20-more-years-global.)

Note that Dr. Easterbrook did not need to know anything about the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to make his correct forecast.

In light of the above, Red Deer City council has embarked on a money-wasting exercise that is obviously predicated on the foolish belief that the global climate will continue warming to much higher levels.

No consideration is being given to the possibility that the world’s climate is now entering a new cyclical period of global cooling despite the fact that there has been other such cycles over recent centuries. Clearly, any attempt to counter the effects of warming when cooling is occurring will be counterproductive. That’s just more of our tax dollars being thrown down the drain.

Patrick Carroll (retired meteorologist)

Red Deer