Why climate is unlikely to be changing

Humans walk at about three miles an hour, and run at around five. It is the shape and musculature of the human body that determines this. We are neither gazelles nor snails. If we went back a hundred or two hundred years to a busy street, we would see folk walking and running at the same speed as today. There are few who would argue with this.

In a century or two’s time people will be walking and running at the same speed as today, which is also the speed they have always done. But although humans are no faster, records are being broken every four years for the speed people move at the Olympic and/or Commonwealth Games. So are we as a species averagely moving faster?

Record-breaking is artificially generated and separate from normal behaviour. It is an industry unto itself. Record-busters are given sponsorship and endowments to endorse products in the name of business. The media courts local heroes spotlighting their countries for the eyes of the world, which boosts that country’s economy.

In the drive for the record, input variables continually change making previous same events incomparable. Athletes have lighter, less wind-resistant clothing, special diets, new supplements, faster tracks and computer-fashioned footwear. Each has a psychologist, diet and fitness coach, strategy planner and computer analyst, dedicated to breaking some previous record.

With new variables every four years at a new location, fastest speeds creep forward by the nanosecond. The record-breaker captures our collective imagination, thrust forward by frantic media. Consider the language. Records are not gently replaced – they are slashed, obliterated, and smashed.

No one will one day sprint at 95mph. We are not built to do that. Most records are broken by ever-smaller fractions, a function of advanced stopwatches. Perhaps one day “shattered” will mean by 0.0000005sec.

Now compare climate, controlled by distance from the equator determining angle and strength of the sun’s rays. Canberra and Cape Reinga, each at same latitudes have same average annual maximums of 20°C. Perth, Broken Hill and Taree, at shared latitudes have overall average maximums of 24°C.

Broken Hill is 1000ft above sealevel and Perth and Taree on (opposite) coasts have all similar climates because of latitude. Temperatures may skyrocket one summer or plunge one winter. It evens out. It does not matter how many trees are planted, wind turbines or solar panels installed, nor how many Greenpeace bumper stickers there are, ‘average’ means shared.

Climate hype mirrors competitive sport.

The public have been fed the media frenzy of records broken in national temperatures, rainfall amounts, hurricanes or droughts. People now think it has never been this warm or this cold. It is always ‘worst ever’, ‘worst since records began’ or ‘worst in living memory’, but only of tiny fractions of a degree.

Weather records exist for the qualification for more funding for research leading to revenue-gathering, new taxes and eco-laws to “protect the environment” against “more extreme” conditions. The public get their perception of climate change only from published announcements of temperature records being smashed.

It is a swindle. The climate was the same 100 years ago and it is just the record-breaking industry running at full steam, making us think something frighteningly strange is happening with the natural world, completely independent of the business world. It is conveniently ignored that if it is a hottest May in 45 years it also means May 45 years ago was hotter.

Measured catchments may today be larger, temperature gauges relocated, technology updated, more or less trees may shade or expose, more asphalt reflects, and nearby increased traffic generates heat and wind. Successive teams of measurers bring different biases of interpretation.

In the 450 thousand million year geological history of the planet ‘extremes’ collected over barely a century is meaningless. Discussion of more extremes is just more meaningless. Extreme comes from the Greek word eskhatos meaning outermost and last. You cannot get further out than outermost, nor more last than last.

Tropical storms, tornadoes, floods, drought, have occurred a zillion times and aren’t permanently on the rise. Even if they were, overall wouldn’t floods exactly cancel out droughts and heat-waves balance snowfalls? If +n is added to –n the result is 0. Wouldn’t this mean zero change?

So we are not so much breaking records, as that rhetoric about it is record-high. It is also selective. What doesn't fit pre-agreement by media and moguls with money gets manipulated or not even measured. The public seldom hear about evidence that contradicts, like Antarctic ice now expanding.

It is no coincidence that record alarmism matches intensification of digital technology available since the 1990s. A 0.4°C temperature rise can be called a new record. Most readers only see ‘record’ not realising a 0.4°C rise is within natural fluctuation levels anyway Besides, pre-1990 glass thermometers couldn’t accurately read tenths.

Revolution of measurement brings revolutionary measurements. More weather statistics of extremes make their occurrence seem more frequent. Nature is balanced and self-regulatory. There is no absolute up, down, great or small, worse or better. At all times we are at a point in a cycle. It may seem to impressionable younger folk we are having more hotter, colder, wetter and drier weather but they are not old enough to make comparisons.

For the same lack of comparison we imagine we can run faster at night. But leg muscles don’t work better in the dark. It is perception of difference that drives our lives. We love saying we were there when, because we love stories that have us in them. If it was a fact that people are getting smarter with each generation then we should as a species be getting wiser. But we are not. There are just as many old fools as ever there used to be. Some have successfully petrified youngsters that climate is changing. Oh? So why always for the worse?

Ken Ring of www.predictweather.com is the author of Weather Almanac for NZ for 2013