HANNAFORD: Singapore Airliner falls, that's climate change too... maybe

It seems that whatever happens these days, you can make a climate change story out of it.Reporting cattle? Talk about bovine flatulence and how people who eat steak are melting the glaciers.Endangered species? Blame climate change. Of course, it might be just habitat loss, which may have nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with regrettable Third World farming practices. But, as the reporter you will not be challenged. The force is with you. As my friend and colleague Cory Morgan points out in an article scheduled to appear Sunday, some people just want all the news to be bad, all the time. (Look for it — MORGAN: Climate alarmists hope the drought never ends)So now that some poor chap dies (of a heart attack) when an airliner hits rough air, we are told right on cue that high altitude clear-air turbulence may also be a product of an atmosphere warmed by too much carbon dioxide. Grave warning follows.That’s what a team at the University of Reading is saying, anyway. And they may be right. But having read the abstract, even the research team is looking to future possibilities, rather than present realities: “Clear-air turbulence (CAT) is hazardous to aircraft and is ‘projected’ to intensify in response to future climate change.”Ah, ‘projected,’ then. Like, maybe. Possibly. Perhaps.The Federal Aviation Authority defines Clear Air Turbulence as “sudden severe turbulence occurring in cloudless regions that causes violent buffeting of aircraft…. particularly between the core of a jet stream and the surrounding air.” Time will tell but to some degree, time has already told. Pilots know full well what fun it can be and it’s going to take a lot of global warming to make it any more dangerous than it was for this B-52, in 1964, with its vertical stabilizer ripped off by the same kind of forces that afflicted the unfortunate Singapore Airlines flight..Anyway as a reporter, you’ve done your job. Something happened, and you got the climate-change angle.The problem here is that true understanding of climate change is hindered by two things.One is that rather than enquiring into the causes of climate change, research is predominantly directed into proving that humanity is causing it. That is because governments have decided to reflect a public consensus that favours human carbon-generating activity as the single trigger for 'rising carbon dioxide' levels. If as a scientist you wish to explore an alternative explanation, funding from 'official' sources that people are prepared to accept as credible, will be hard if not impossible to get.It would certainly be in the public interest to know and factor in the contribution made to climate change by volcanoes, solar activity, the position of the Earth relative to the Sun, and fully understand how the last 30,000 years have seen such dramatic changes in ambient temperature that sea levels have fallen and risen more than 300 feet in that time.Once we know how these obvious line items factor into climate change, we could also study to what degree if any plate tectonics influence temperatures. The second is that no matter how much money is poured into the most objective and even-handed research, the matter may be too complex to make prediction possible — there are a lot of moving parts. Or as one wag put it to me, like trying to reassemble a pig from the sausages made from it. As the International Panel on Climate Change state, "In climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible."A surprising admission, given the weight given to everything else the IPCC says. That, and the authority assumed in its name by politicians wanting to ban meat, reserve land to protect endangered species or give airline passengers who already need a stiff drink in the departure lounge prior to boarding, something else to worry about.