Fred Pearce of New Scientist has put the cat among the penguins with a recent piece about global warming.

 He quotes climate modeller Mojib Latif telling the UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that we could be entering a decade, or maybe two decades, of global cooling.
 
I have no opinion about the truth or otherwise of man-made global warming: I used to be equivocal but now I really don’t know what to think. (This paragraph is inserted to prevent the climate change ideologues classifying me as a denier, which is close to being a wife-beater in the modern catechism.)
 
But I do know that if the world cools for the next twenty years it is going to be a political impossibility to get the changes in human behaviour needed to control climate change. People won’t vote for a hair shirt to save their immortal souls: only to save their lives, or their children’s.
 
Bear in mind that average annual global temperatures have shifted little for the past decade (see the graph below, from the UK Met Office). That is why climate campaigners have stopped saying that it’s been the hottest year on record and have started saying it’s been the hottest decade.
      
      
 
Global warming is not incompatible with periods of cooling, since short-term trends can overwhelm the long term rise. The graph shows the long-term trend is up, the short-term trend flat or declining. But if this flat patch lasts another decade or two, sceptics are going to have a field day.
 
Some have questioned whether Pearce quoted Dr Latib correctly. But that hardly matters, as he is on record in published papers saying the same thing. And a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters by Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee also suggests that a shift has occurred in the climate’s behaviour.
 
Climate change is hard to forecast on a decadal scale, the point Dr Latib was making in his Geneva talk. “In many ways we know more about what will happen in the 2050s than next year” Pearce quotes Vicky Pope of the UK Met Office saying.
 
Be that as it may, it’s clear that if Dr Latib is right, arguing the case for fundamental changes in lifestyle is going to become harder, as if it wasn’t hard enough already. Is that a heretical thing to say?  I hope not, because I can’t bear the thought of being monstered by George Monbiot.
 
Nobody minds the campaigners proclaiming the truth of the science behind man-made global warming. But I do slightly resent the way they seem to believe they own it.