A climate of confusion over global warming

OPINION:

Pity those policy professionals in attendance at the United Nations’ most recent climate change conference. Not only has Microsoft co-founder and globalist Bill Gates backed away from the climate catastrophe alarmism that gave purpose to their splashy conference in Brazil, but influential attendees who have been empowered by the fearmongering also are finding that one of the gold standard initiatives of environmentalism apparently is worsening the global warming phenomenon they vow to halt. Unfolding is a climate of confusion.

Under a jarring, Nov. 5 headline, “The chilling effect of air pollution,” the University of Washington reports that a study appearing in the scientific journal Nature Communications has found that environmental efforts to return the atmosphere to its natural, pristine state are contributing to atmospheric warming.

Focusing on the Northeastern Pacific and Atlantic oceans, researchers observe a decades-spanning correlation between a decline in cloud cover, which reflects solar radiation back into space, and a rise in Earth temperatures. A small, 2.8% decrease in the reflectivity of the cloud cover per decade, scientists have found, has coincided with accelerated sea surface warming from 2002 to 2023.

Most of the decline, they conclude, is the result of a reduction in airborne aerosols, including those nasty emissions resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels. “This paper is a substantial contribution to the evidence that reductions in particulate air pollutants are contributing to accelerated warming,” Sarah Doherty, principal research scientist at the UW Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies, told UW News. “Oops” doesn’t quite capture the pain of such a paradox.

The study could be greeted with only scant praise at COP 30, an abbreviation for the 30th annual meeting of the United Nations Conference of the Parties. Running through Nov. 21, the gathering has brought thousands of activists from around the world to strategize on the means of accomplishing their goal of preventing global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. In practical terms, success includes the collection of $1.3 trillion annually by 2035 from developed nations to pay for climate-friendly projects in developing countries.

A year has passed since Donald Trump, who has called the entire human-caused climate change orthodoxy a “hoax,” cast a dark cloud over last year’s confab in Azerbaijan with his reelection as U.S. president. His refusal to join this year’s party in Brazil was hardly unexpected, and the current conferees could only gnash their teeth in reaction to fresh evidence that the Trump position could be valid.

Knowing full well that the potential damage that research such as the University of Washington’s study could wreak on accepted global warming orthodoxy, Ms. Doherty is quoted as saying, “It is clearly a good thing that we have been reducing particle pollution in the atmosphere.”

Indeed, human health benefits from breathing air free from particulate matter that causes respiratory illnesses. Who would voluntarily elect to turn back the clock to the pre-pollution-control era, when major U.S. cities were commonly draped in summer smog?

Accordingly, with the United Nations branding the phenomenon of global temperature fluctuations an existential threat to humankind, other methods of beclouding the skies are receiving current consideration.

“Marine cloud brightening,” the technique of spraying seawater into the air to help reflect incoming sunlight, is one such method. Experimentation with other forms of cloud seeding, such as silver iodide, potassium iodide and dry ice dispersed by airplane, is also ongoing.

However, Florida and Montana this year have opted to err on the side of caution and ban cloud seeding and other “geoengineering” practices. Their concern is not born out of science-denying superstition but rather the possibility of unintended climatic consequences. Clean air, after all, is not so cool.

On the eve of COP 30, the aforementioned Mr. Gates backtracked on his long-standing investment of personal reputation and wealth into the climate catastrophe narrative. Instead of concentrating on tamping down global temperatures, he urged world leaders to refocus their attention on fostering improvements to human health and prosperity.

With the U.N. insistence that global warming be regarded as the planet’s paramount peril, and with evidence indicating that long-established clean air practices are inadvertently confounding its accepted temperature reducing strategies, suspicions arise that when assuring humanity its trillions of dollars for cooling the sun’s effect will be well-spent, the global body is, in a manner of speaking, shining us on.

Moreover, if the scientific masterminds at the United Nations concede no correlation between the millennia-spanning cycles of heat produced by that enormous, fiery ball in the sky and fluctuations in global temperatures, then they must otherwise convince commonsense Americans, including Mr. Trump, that their confusing, climate-cooling strategies are not little more than hot air.

• Frank Perley is a former senior editor and editorial writer for Opinion at The Washington Times.