There's a very interesting interpretive filter at work.
You hear "cooling oceans"; I hear "shifts in the well-known ocean oscillations".
You hear "temperature errors having to be corrected"; I hear "standard quality control procedures which have only minor effects on the full record".
You hear "glaciers growing"; I hear "standard skeptical rejoinder pointing out that 10% of glaciers globally are advancing, trying to counter the receding trend of the other 90%".
You hear: "multiplying number of true climate-related scientists signing onto the denier list"; I hear "all the same names over and over again, and nobody of significance actually switching sides".
You hear "strong ice-pack in the Arctic"; I hear "all first-year ice during a slightly cooler winter" (and believe me, this one is going to be REAL interesting this August and September)
You hear "continued Pacific storms due to cold offshore water in the NW"; I hear "PDO". (Same for the next one.)
You hear "virtually no sunspots". I hear "it takes a lot more than a slow start to the next cycle to make a Maunder Minimum".
All this serves little to reinforce the notion of continued warming on anywhere near the scale of that predicted by the models from the last few decades.
And I say that it's way too soon to make that statement during a year when La Nina is a significant factor, the PDO shifted, and it's not even summer in the NH yet. This is clearly a pronounced example of year-to-year variability; it takes far more time to determine if a new normal has been established.
However, politics and public opinion move fast, and politicians and media mavens don't have the patience required of the scientific community. So I'm not surprised that there is considerable exploit of this year-to-year variability.
This is a time of moderation not ramped-up so-called “fixes.”
It is rare than anything done hastily is actually done well. I think that rather than base the nation's (and world's) energy adaptations on the state of the global climate, it just makes sense for several reasons (economic, security) to adopt more diversified sources. Many of these have less emissions impact than fossil fuels. And that will accrue an added benefit for the environment. I think economics is pushing the world down that road anyway.
So you agree that perspective plays a large role in this ongoing debate - then you go on to talk about alternative sources (of energy, I assume) while we know full well that the only thing that readily burns and is found easily is carbon.
Even now some are looking at ways to allow natural processes to reduce existing CO2 but with limited success due to environmental pressures and a bit of general trepidation.
For instance there is this article from Europe where a few scientists have modeled the use of iron and its oxides to fertilize the ocean:
[The impact on atmospheric CO2 of iron fertilization induced changes in the ocean’s biological pump
X. Jin1, N. Gruber2,3, H. Frenzel1, S. C. Doney4, and J. C. McWilliams3
1Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP), UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
2Environmental Physics, Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
3IGPP & Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
4Dept. of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA 02543-1543, USA
Abstract. Using numerical simulations, we quantify the impact of changes in the ocean’s biological pump on the air-sea balance of CO2 by fertilizing a small surface patch in the high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll region of the eastern tropical Pacific with iron. Decade-long fertilization experiments are conducted in a basin-scale, eddy-permitting coupled physical/biogeochemical/ecological model. In contrast to previous studies, we find that most of the dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) removed from the euphotic zone by the enhanced biological export is replaced by uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere. Atmospheric uptake efficiencies, the ratio of the perturbation in air-sea CO2 flux to the perturbation in export flux across 100 m, integrated over 10 years, are 0.75 to 0.93 in our patch size-scale experiments. The atmospheric uptake efficiency is insensitive to the duration of the experiment. The primary factor controlling the atmospheric uptake efficiency is the vertical distribution of the enhanced biological production and export. Iron fertilization at the surface tends to induce production anomalies primarily near the surface, leading to high efficiencies. In contrast, mechanisms that induce deep production anomalies (e.g. altered light availability) tend to have a low uptake efficiency, since most of the removed DIC is replaced by lateral and vertical transport and mixing. Despite high atmospheric uptake efficiencies, patch-scale iron fertilization of the ocean’s biological pump tends to remove little CO2 from the atmosphere over the decadal timescale considered here.]
What do you think of this approach?