As the rain continues to fall here in southern Queensland on a dark and bleak looking Sunday morning I thought it appropriate to read the latest climate reports.
The CSIRO report State of the Climate – 2012 shows climate change is continuing and “the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in 2011 was 390 parts per million – higher than at any time for the past 800,000 years”.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s (BOM) Annual Climate Summary 2011 shows Australia had its “first cooler-than-average year since 2001”, although globally 2011 was the “warmest La Nina year on record”.
The cooler than average year can be explained, according to BOM’s summary, by “heavy rainfall at the start and end of the year and frequent southerly wind flow in the first half of the year”. Below average temperatures were “mostly confined to northern Australia” whilst “southern Australia was warmer than average”.
Isn’t the sun causing climate change?
One popular idea is that solar activity is the reason for much of the earth’s climate change. However, according to Skeptical Science “in the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been going in opposite directions”.
“Neither direct nor indirect solar influences can explain a significant amount of the global warming over the past century, and certainly not over the past 30 years.
“As Ray Pierrehumbert said about solar warming,’That’s a coffin with so many nails in it already that the hard part is finding a place to hammer in a new one’.”