by J. Vinos and A. May, Sep 22, 2022 in ClimateEtc.
“On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands climate change.” J. Vinós, paraphrasing Richard Feynman’s words about quantum mechanics.
7.1 Introduction
This plain-language summary has been written at the request of some readers of our series of articles on the Winter Gatekeeper hypothesis:
- (I) The search for a solar signal
- (II) Solar activity unexplained/ignored effects on climate
- (III) Meridional transport
- (IV) The climate shift of 1997
- (V) A role for the sun in climate change
- (VI) Meridional transport as the main climate change driver
Climate is extremely complex, and people, including scientists, have a natural tendency to look for simple explanations. The Occam’s Razor principle is a good first approach but climate change cannot have a simple answer. Over the past seven years, one of the authors of this series (JV) has been laboriously reading many thousands of scientific articles and analyzing hundreds of climate datasets trying to understand how Earth’s climate changes naturally. This is a first step to understanding the human impact on climate change. The outcome of this work is the book “Climate of the Past, Present and Future.” It is a graduate-student level academic book that discusses many controversial issues about natural climate change over the past 800,000 years. In this book, a new hypothesis on natural climate change is presented. It relates changes in the strength of the meridional (poleward) transport of energy with climatic changes that have taken place, both in the past and recently.
The book can be downloaded here (open access) Vinos-CPPF(2022)