Why do we pretend to understand climate change?

For years the global warming lobby has acted as if there was only one thing which drives climate change: man-made carbon emissions. This is the basis of all the mathematical models that have tried to predict the climate 100 years and more into the future. The IPCC report treats Earth’s climate as if it can be controlled like a thermostat: if we cut carbon emissions by such a percentage we will limit the rise in global temperatures to 2C and so on.

It ought to be obvious that this is nonsense: Earth has undergone huge changes in climate, many of which such as the onset of ice ages have occurred incredibly rapidly – and all before mankind started burning fossil fuels. We don’t understand why these ice ages occurred, nor why Earth seems to have warmed up for a few centuries during the Middle Ages so why does anyone preclude the possibility that the recent global warming has a natural cause?

We should be sceptical too of the theory that the sunspot cycle drives Earth’s climate. Accurate temperature records only go back a century or so. Neither do we have a great deal of data on sunspots before 1611. While climate scientists naturally know more about the climate than the rest of us do the truth is that they too know next to nothing.