…about climate change. In a paper, Atmospheric controls on northeast Pacific temperature variability and change, 1900–2012, released last Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, roughly translated for us laymen by the AP, authors Jim Johnstone, at the time of his research with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, and Nathan Mantua, research scientist with the NOAA Fisheries Service in Santa Cruz, CA, found that northeast Pacific (that’s abeam the US) ocean warming since 1900 correlates better with naturally occurring wind pattern changes than with any pattern of human greenhouse gas injection into the atmosphere. According to Johnstone,

What we found was the somewhat surprising degree to which the winds can explain all the wiggles in the temperature curve. So clearly, there are other factors stronger than the greenhouse forcing that is affecting those temperatures[.]

Also damaging to the climate panic-mongers’ case were these facts:

[O]ne steep ocean warming period from 1920 to 1940 predates the big increases in greenhouse gases, and an ocean cooling period from 1998 to 2013 came while global average temperatures were at or near all-time highs.

Of course the climate pseudo-science folks demur.

They pointed out that the study sees a correlation but did not do the rigorous statistical and computer analysis to show that the cause of the wind changes were natural—the kind of analysis done when scientists attribute weather extremes to global warming.

This would be the same computer analysis—computer modeling—that has found itself unable to predict, simultaneously, the past and the present, and which predictions of the future have been wildly variable and heavily dependent on the specific values assigned to a myriad of model inputs.

The abstract is here; the full article is behind the PNAS‘ login wall.