With respect to climate change, we have often heard the refrain “The Science is Settled!” screeched anytime you attempt to disagree with the alarmist dogma.  But a recent series of publications in arguably prestigious journals have underscored the truism in science that it is never settled.

On Monday, March 15, an article[1] was published in Nature Geoscience (one of the journals in the stable of Nature journals) that argued “the sequence of recent [central] European summer droughts since 2015 ce is unprecedented in the past 2,110 years” and was “probably caused by anthropogenic warming and associated changes in the position of the summer jet stream.”  The Guardian[2] picked up on these findings and touted in their headline “Recent European Droughts:  Worst in 2,000 Years.”

But on Friday of that same week (March 19), another article[3] was published in another Nature journal – Communications Earth & Environment – which concluded “central Europe has experienced much longer and severe droughts [in AD 1400-1480 and AD 1770-1840] than the ones observed during the 21st century” and that megadroughts were caused by winter blocking over the British Isles, reduced solar forcing, and explosive volcanism.  They conclude that the “recent drought events (e.g., 2003, 2015, and 2018), are within the range of natural variability and they are not unprecedented over the last millennium.”

How can it be that two papers, published within the same calendar week in two respected journals, come to conclusions that are diametrically opposite?  Welcome to the world of science where “The Science is Never Settled.”  Despite what the alarmists want you to believe, climate science is still an ongoing debate and we certainly do not have all of the answers.

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[1] Büntgen, U., Urban, O., Krusic, P.J. et al. Recent European drought extremes beyond Common Era background variability. Nat. Geosci. (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00698-0

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/15/climate-crisis-recent-european-droughts-worst-in-2000-years

[3] Ionita, M., Dima, M., Nagavciuc, V. et al. Past megadroughts in central Europe were longer, more severe and less warm than modern droughts. Commun Earth Environ 2, 61 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00130-w

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.