Coventry climate change funeral march, featuring Jim Hansen. Fortunately, only a few hundred participated. Perhaps even the British are growing tired of Hansen’s alarmism?

James Hansen has promised to join the greatest US civil disobedience ever that will take place at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington D.C on March 2d. The event, known as the Capitol Climate Action (CCA), is said to be the largest mass mobilization on global warming in the country’s history.

“The Capitol Climate Action comes not a moment too soon. For more than thirty years, scientists, environmentalists and people from all walks of life have urged our leaders to take action to stop global warming; and that action has yet to come,” said James Hansen. “The world is waiting for the Obama administration and Congress to lead the way forward on this defining issue of our time. They need to start by getting coal out of Congress.”

The question is, what does NASA say about James Hansen’s deep engagement in climate action?

The Huffington Post continues promoting the AGW hypothesis. This time in an article signed by Jerry Cope, designer, filmmaker and eco activist. Jerry Cope is thrilled now that Obama has been installed in the White House. Finally, there will be some action on global warming. And the need is urgent!

“Seemingly every day now, a new scientific study or paper is published (peer reviewed) with ever more alarming results as climate forcing mechanisms kick in far sooner than previously anticipated. Scenarios predicting an ice-free North Pole by 2025 have been fed into the shredder as the lack of ice-cover and subsequent loss of solar reflectivity lead to faster ever accelerating melting. The consensus now has the top of the world ice-free by 2015. Polar bears are now drowning and starving. At the bottom of the world, Antarctica is also heating dramatically and losing mass. How soon the Western ice-sheet will collapse is no longer an esoteric question. Sea level rise as estimated by the IPCC of 60cm by the end of the century is now revised to 1.4 meters. Fully 75% of the people alive on the planet today will have to deal with the consequences of global warming. It is no longer a problem just for future generations.”

How about that? Starving, drowning polar bears. Haven’t seen any of these lately.

If you scroll down the page, though, you will find another interesting article by Jarl R. Ahlbeck, a D.Sc. and lecturer at Abo Akademi University, Finland. His claim is that there hasn’t been any significant global warming since 1995. To prove it, he shows two temperature graphs, one from Hadley and one from NASA.

Wednesday’s Seattle Times article, ”UW Study Examines Decline of Snowpack” begins as follows,

“Maybe the snow in the Cascade Mountains isn’t in such immediate peril from global warming after all.

Despite previous studies suggesting a warmer climate is already taking a bite out of Washington’s snowpack, there’s no clear evidence that human-induced climate change has caused a drop in 20th century snow levels, according to a new study by University of Washington scientists.”

The study findings (note: the study has not yet been peer-reviewed) have already become part of a scientific debate with an unusually political tone. A leading scientist on the other side of the debate (presumably an AGW-supporter) said the latest analysis speculates about the future and offers little new about the past. Well, almost the same is applicable to IPCC’s reports. Aren’t they just loose speculations about the future with no empirical evidence whatsoever?

We’ve been warned that the North Pole will be ice-free this summer. But according to the latest ICESat thickness estimates, it appears that the first-year sea ice in the Arctic Ocean so far this season is comparable in thickness to what it was in 2006 and 2007. Why is that?

The NSIDC says that sparse snow cover over the Arctic Ocean last winter resulted in less insulation from the bitterly cold air, resulting in faster, first-year ice growth. Snow was unable to accumulate last autumn since much of the Arctic Ocean was still ice-free, causing the snow to just melt into the open waters. Once the ice formed later in the fall, it accumulated more quickly than normal as there was very little barrier (snow) between the ice and the cold air just above the surface.

And how about that global warming anyway? The recent years’ fall in global temperatures has led to increasing speculation that global warming is over. The AGW-supporters explain that even if global temperatures rise and fall year-on-year this does not mean that global warming has stopped; only that the continuing rise in temperatures due to man made emissions of greenhouse gases is being temporarily masked.

So the first important question we should ask is:

Is the Earth warming?

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has confirmed that an impending phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation will likely bring colder temperatures for as many as the next 20-30 years.

What if the planet is actually entered a cooling phase while the world’s governments do their best to restrain the use of fossil fuels with no viable alternative at hand?

Regardless of the answer to the first question (“yes” or “no”), there are further uncertainties. Question number two is therefore:

If the world indeed is warming, what is the main cause of this warming and can we do anything to control climate change? And should the world be cooling, can we do anything to stop that?

If climate change is something beyond our control, shouldn’t we be doing everything we can to adapt instead of putting our money on useless mitigation measures?

IPCC indicates that the consequences of a global warming will be dire, with floods, droughts, famine and overall misery devastating the lives of all people.

But what if warming actually turns out beneficial? What is it is cooling we should worry about?

That is the third question we need to ask.

The papers are full of reports on shrinking glaciers, collapsing ice-sheets and worried polar bears. But the most important questions, those above, questions that still remain unanswered, have eluded us. So let’s get back to the basics of climate discussion instead of losing ourselves among thousands of fairly vague implications of what might or might not happen.