Thousands of strange blue lakes are appearing in Antarctica, and it’s bad news
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
When a person has no data, they have to make assumptions. Good science is not based on assumptions.
The climate brouhaha is a good example of confirmation bias/echo chamber effects:
"But the problem with this, otherwise natural course of action, is that it ends up creating an echo chamber of like minds, and their zombies. It ends up killing, at least within that network, dissenting views. Ultimately, what will be accepted as truth within that small network may not necessarily be the plain truth, but a relative truth. For those living within the confines of the echo chamber however, this relative truth, which to some may even be a plain lie, will be the unvarnished truth. That, is called confirmation bias. And that, is what led to that fan protest, which made some Arsenal fans the laughing stock of the world on a frosty spring day in 2016."
- Echo chambers and confirmation bias, https://medium.com/@chxta/echo-chambers-and-confirmation-bia...
It's like how Ancel Keys engineered The Great Saturated Fat Freakout in the 1950's. There was no basis to his claims that dietary saturated fat was a great villain that needed to be avoided at all costs, but the Machine picked up his theory and ran with it. Saturated fats have now been vindicated of the charges leveled against them, but most of the 'experts' are still confused.
I think the El Niño / La Niña oscillation is probably caused by cycles in underwater volcanic activity. Wikipedia says "Mechanisms that cause the oscillation remain under study."
While you're right that there are many variables we haven't considered, and that correlation is not causation, there certainly does seem to be a strong causal link between industrialisation and climate change.
Of course, we could be wrong, and implement all these climate change laws that do nothing to stop ice melt, but if that's the case, what's the downside? We get clean air, more sustainable power sources, etc. There's very little reason not to push for better climate regulations.
Efforts should be entirely focused on making "carbon" energy sources obsolete. Making energy more expensive for poor people is a counter-productive endeavor, and doesn't fix the problem.
Improved super-capacitors and breakthrough cheap energy storage technologies would be good enough to begin to phase out the current energy status-quo. Eventually someone will certainly come up with a breakthrough technology that will destroy the current energy paradigm.
Firefly Energy [1] came up with a good-enough Lead Acid battery - "the energy of NiMH, for the cost of lead", fully recyclable with existing infrastructure, etc. Their batteries would have been perfectly useful for low-range electric vehicles like Postal delivery trucks (20-miles/day) and home energy storage (solar panels, shifting power use to off-peak, etc).
But they ramped up for production in the midst of the housing collapse (2006-ish?), and ran out of money. The government only gave money to "advanced chemistry" battery technologies. Firefly Energy had to declare bankruptcy, last I read an Indian company bought the IP... and it's gone nowhere.
> CO2 is something we can control. If it isn't the whole answer, then we're screwed anyway.
A friend has told me of the 'Maunder minimum' [2] phenomenon, and that our Sun might be preparing to reduce its output for 30-45 years. If that happens, all efforts to suppress CO2 will be for naught.
It is better to focus on the desired outcome than on the present problem.
Edit OTOH I dp appreciate your mentioning various usful technologies like these batteries, but they are drops in the ocean so far. I hope they help, but they need to be on top of a fast reduction in carbon outfput, and given this year's figures we may be in for a terribly bumpy ride anyway.