A beloved nephew, Jason, sent me an email with some conventional climate change graphs. He suspected I considered the issue nonsense. So I sent him the numeric data I had collected in spreadsheet form for US satellites going back to 1978.
Then I emailed my friend who had done most of the work in creating the data and running statistical tests on them with me, Josh. We both agreed that there was no warming of the earth from 1978 to 1996 when the average temperature of the planet was 56F. In the period from mid-1996 to early 1998 the temperature jumped anomalously 0.2F and has remained steady from 1999 until now at 56.2F.
Josh concluded that some long term rise in temperature was possible but trivial. I concluded there was no long term trend, just a one year anomaly.
So, with the email from my nephew Jason I asked my friend Josh to help me make a graph of the two summaries of the satellite data. It is shown here on top.
In looking at many new sources of data in trying to understand the 1997-8 anomaly (found by my museum curator daughter) I was sent an interesting chart used to keep track of El Nino and La Nina, MEI. That is added on the bottom.
You can see the satellite charts and the MEI on this page. It looks like the Pacific Ocean is the driving force in determining global atmospheric temperature. So what drives the El Nino and La Nina patterns?
There turns out to be a global ocean circulation cycle that creates the El Nino-La Nina patterns and that cycle in turn is most influenced by the eccentricities of the earth orbit and solar activity.
Since the precise interaction of these eccentricities are not yet predictable, we don’t know what will happen in the future but we do know that humans aren’t important in causing it and certainly can’t stop it.