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70% of climate change due to El Nino/La Nina2 min read

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At least that’s what a NASA scientist told Congress Tuesday.

The lead investigator for one of NASA’s flagship Earth Observing Observatories said:

On this issue, it can be shown with a simple climate model that small cloud fluctuations assumed to occur with two modes of natural climate variability – the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon (Southern Oscillation), and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation – can explain 70% of the warming trend since 1900, as well as the nature of that trend: warming until the 1940s, no warming until the 1970s, and resumed warming since then.

On his blog, environmental scientist AJ Strata explained what this means in terms of all our efforts to reduce our “carbon footprint.”

Say they reduced the CO2 25%. Say the CO2 is the driver for the remaining 30% of Global Warming (which it cannot be, but let’s just be only half as ridiculous as the IPCC), then all that effort would only impact 7.5% of the forces driving the global climate. The other 92.5% would roll on, impervious to the effort.

He goes on to assert that that CO2 actually only accounts for 10% of the climate change equation, which would mean that if we did all the things needed to cut our CO2 emissions by 25% that would result in a less than 1% impact on the forces controlling our climate.

With our economy already struggling, how worse would it be if we enacted the measures that those like Al Gore have suggested, raising taxes (including the gas tax), increasing regulations forcing businesses to lay off even more workers, increasing our need for goods from China and India since they aren’t being asked (and wouldn’t anyway) to cut their carbon emissions, etc., to deal with a “problem” that may only reduce the supposed danger by less than 1%?