The modest, beneficial warming that has been experienced across the world since the end of the Little Ice Age, slightly more than 10 Celsius, has essentially stopped, as can be seen in the following satellite-based temperature record. Indeed, the February 2023 “average temperature” was about the same as the 1991 – 2020 average.

No informed person would call this temperature record “fast-rising” or a “climate emergency,” as proclaimed by the UN, mainstream media and climate activists.

So, what causes climate change, pro-lifers may be asked. Here is how I suggest they respond:

Temperature trends apparently follow in accordance with solar cycles, and indeed, we may be entering a Grand Solar Minimum when the Sun could be at its weakest in the past 300 years. This could result in significant global cooling, something we need to prepare for. The Epoch Times reported on November 23, 2021:

“In an exclusive interview, scientist Valentina Zharkova told The Epoch Times that her 2015 paper predicting the onset of a grand solar minimum between 2020 and 2053 has been borne out, prompting her to warn that temperatures could soon rapidly fall.

“Grand solar minima last for multiple solar cycles, during which the Sun produces less energy and sunspot activity is low. During a previous grand solar minimum, the Maunder minimum between 1645 and 1715, glaciers expanded and the River Thames in England frequently froze over.”

Professor Zharkova has a PhD from the Solar Division of the Main Astronomical Observatory, Kyiv, Ukraine. She is now a Professor in Mathematics at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. In “Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling,” her editorial published on August 4, 2020 in the journal Temperature, which publishes papers related to interactions between living matter and temperature, Professor Zharkova wrote:

“This period [upcoming grand solar minimum in which solar magnetic field and its magnetic activity will be reduced by 70%] has started in the Sun in 2020 and will last until 2053. During this modern grand minimum, one would expect to see a reduction of the average terrestrial temperature by up to 1.0°C, especially, during the periods of solar minima between the cycles 25–26 and 26–27, e.g., in the decade 2031–2043.

“The reduction of a terrestrial temperature during the next 30 years can have important implications for different parts of the planet on growing vegetation, agriculture, food supplies, and heating needs in both Northern and Southern hemispheres. This global cooling during the upcoming grand solar minimum 1 (2020–2053) can offset for three decades any signs of global warming and would require inter-government efforts to tackle problems with heat and food supplies for the whole population of the Earth.”

A common refrain from the climate activists is “1.5 to stay alive.” Indeed, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) advocates that we make greenhouse gas emission reductions adequate to limit global warming to 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC even published a special report in 2018 titled “Global Warming of 1.5oC.”

But this makes no sense. According to the World Meteorological Organization report Provisional State of the Global Climate in 2022, “The global mean temperature in 2022 is currently estimated to be about 1.15 [1.02 to 1.28] °C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.”

So we are only 0.35oC from the dreaded 1.5 oC rise that so frightens climate campaigners. Most normal people can see that an additional three-tenths of a degree rise in a statistically computed “global temperature” is inconsequential.

Finally, determining a temperature rise from pre-industrial levels requires that we know what the temperature was long ago and that we know what it is today. ICSC-Canada board member Dr. John McLean explains that neither criterion is met by the temperature data from HadCRUT that is being used to back up trillion-dollar policy decisions around the world. McLean said,

“Today, about 85% of the world is covered with temperature data. I recently looked closely at the HadCRUT5 data, especially between 1850 and 1900. I wanted to see if the data collection was comparable to recent data. It’s not by a long way. What data we have from back then are from very variable coverage (annual average coverage from about 14.5% to 49%), very different number of weather stations, and it isn’t homogenous around the world but focussed heavily on Europe, the Atlantic Ocean and the voyages from Europe to Indonesia and Hong Kong. And it wasn’t until 1949 that we started to get temperature data from even 50% of the southern hemisphere.

“The newest version of the composite data from weather stations, the CRUTEM5 dataset, has no data for the southern hemisphere – and therefore no global average – until January 1857.  The previous version, CRUTEM4, did have global averages, but in 2018 it was pointed out to the CRU people that there was very little data from the southern hemisphere in the early years after 1850, including that a single weather station provided the only data from January 1850 to June 1852.  Of course, they should have already recognised this and taken action rather than claiming how accurate their global averages were, but, with enough pushing, they’ve finally accepted that coverage of the southern hemisphere was far too small to claim that, when data from both hemispheres were combined, there was sufficient to label the result a global average.

“What’s even more dishonest is claiming that climate models are sufficiently accurate that they can meaningfully work backwards from the scant 1850-1900 data to define what the global average temperatures were in true pre-industrial times [i.e., 1720 – 1800 is the pre-industrial date range suggested by this paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society].

“Therefore, the actual ‘global temperature’ rise since pre-industrial times is really unknown.”

Next up, I will show pro-lifers how to refute climate alarmist claims that today’s weather is unusually extreme, which, like virtually everything else mainstream media tell us about climate change, is completely wrong as well!