MARK POPE: Are you ready for some climate change? [OPINION]

Are you ready for some climate change?

It’s been a particularly harsh winter here in south Louisiana.  I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for some good old fashioned climate change.  Time to start seeing those dying plants come back to life.  More sunshine.  Shoot, I’m even looking forward to a bit of perspiration on my brow.

I’m not going deep into the weeds about the climate change “scientists” who portend their gloom and doom scenarios about the future of humankind destroying the planet.  Most of my family, friends, and associates in Lafayette do not like cold weather.  I do like cold weather.  It provides a break from the oppressive heat which we experience for nearly half of any given year.  But remember that worldwide, many more people die each year from cold weather rather than from hot weather.

The truly frustrating thing about all the climate change claptrap is the lack of honesty employed by the doomsday scientists.  We are told that calamitous conditions are coming to a city near you if we don’t change our evil ways.  Stop using fossil fuels and start riding our bicycles to work.  Stop eating meat.  Stop building roads.  And the list goes on.  The problem with all the prescriptions for solving our climate change ills is that many, many of the other factors for a changing climate are conveniently left out. And dishonestly so.

In assessing climate change, where is the mention that there have been drastic climate swings during the entire 4.6 billion years that the Earth has existed?  Where is the mention of the changing dynamics of the Sun, and its effect on the Earth?  Where is the mention of the Earth’s axis in relation to the Sun?  Where is the mention of the Earth’s changing magnetism?  Where is the mention of deep ocean currents?  All these factors, and more are left out so the unscrupulous climate change scientists can simplify a complicated formula and continue to paint a gloom-and-doom picture about Earth’s climate change.  And yes, follow the money, because billions of dollars continue flowing to scientists who are oh-so-good at creating gloom and doom with their computer modeling of climate change.

I read a newspaper article on Sunday which stated that La Nina – which is partly responsible for the drought and high temperatures in the southwestern U.S. – is expected to fade away in the next few months.  In its place will be ENSO, which stands for “El Nino – Southern Oscillation.”  According to the article, ENSO is marked by either unusually warm or unusually cool sea water in the central Pacific Ocean, which can affect weather in the U.S. and around the world.  Don’t you love it, ENSO is based on either unusually warm OR unusually cool sea water.  Whether resulting from ENSO is said to be in between the type of weather which results from El Nino and La Nina.  This is frustrating for long-range forecasters, according to a climatologist from NASA’s  Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Difficulty in forecasting the weather comes as no surprise to most of us who regularly see that even local meteorologists cannot predict weather patterns very far into the future.

Good news, though, based on ENSO – the climate outlook for the southern U.S. is for dry, warm weather.  Cooler, wetter weather is predicted for the northern U.S.  Spring can’t come soon enough.  Like I said, I’m ready for some climate change.

-Mark Pope