There seems to be increasing anxiety among climate activists, including those climate scientists who have been doing politics rather than science, that their ruse is being exposed.

The UN's World Meteorological Organization called the conference in order to draft a global plan for providing "climate services" to the world: that is, to deliver climate predictions useful to everyone from farmers worried about the next rainy season to doctors trying to predict malaria epidemics and builders of dams, roads and other infrastructure who need to assess the risk of floods and droughts 30 years hence.

But some of the climate scientists gathered in Geneva to discuss how this might be done admitted that, on such timescales, natural variability is at least as important as the long-term climate changes from global warming. . .

[Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany] predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans. The cooling would be down to cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. "But how much? The jury is still out," he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a colder phase. . .

Latif said NAO cycles also explained the recent recovery of the Sahel region of Africa from the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. James Murphy, head of climate prediction at the Met Office, agreed and linked the NAO to Indian monsoons, Atlantic hurricanes and sea ice in the Arctic. "The oceans are key to decadal natural variability," he said.

Another favourite climate nostrum was upturned when Pope warned that the dramatic Arctic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming. Preliminary reports suggest there has been much less melting this year than in 2007 or 2008.

In candid mood, climate scientists avoided blaming nature for their faltering predictions, however. "Model biases are also still a serious problem. We have a long way to go to get them right. They are hurting our forecasts," said Tim Stockdale of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK.

The world may badly want reliable forecasts of future climate. But such predictions are proving as elusive as the perfect weather forecast.

The ruse isn't that climate change is false, a hoax as some claim. The ruse is that climate scientists understand what is happening and can predict futures. Climate scientists are the macroeconomists of science. Faced with a large, complex system that they understand only in the vaguest way they slid over into superstition and went political, choosing advocacy and persuasion over inquiry and illumination, and in doing so have made climate science a smutty joke.

And it is all for nothing. The result of all that strident advocacy has been nonsense policies that squandered huge amounts of time and resources while doing nothing useful. Worse, society is becoming increasingly numb to the issue, having been diddled repeatedly but never getting satisfaction.

Consider some possible scenarios. The emissions reduction efforts of past decades have been revealed as a hoax, and so geoengineering options are becoming increasingly respectable. Activists are warming to such ideas since they hold some promise of enabling their true objective of a massive bureaucracy and job security for bureaucrats. Then the natural variability that has been minimized or ignored since it doesn't advance the political narrative takes a cold turn, as may be happening now, and the combined effects of natural and anthropogenic cooling results in a string of disasters that cripple societies and harm many people. The net effect of tinkering with poorly understood systems is negative by any measure.

Six years ago, almost to the day, things looked much as they do now. Hack The Spew.

The carbon cycle, which is a continuous exchange of carbon in its various forms (CO2, methane etc.) between air, land and seas, is a complex system we only have the dimmest understanding of at present.

Each aspect of the cycle is a complex system in itself. Atmospheric chemistry - the reactions between carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen compounds - is hideously complex and varies markedly with changes in everything from relative concentrations to cyclical cosmic ray bombardment. Biological uptake - the temporary or permanent sequestration of carbon by life forms - is even more complex. Worse, we only have the dimmest understandings of how any of it works, what life forms actually fix the carbon and how their activity is affected by cyclical changes. . .

Though it would take a library of books to document what we know and an army of scholars to comprehend it all the most important fact of them all is that we only have the vaguest glimmerings of the entities and their relationships in this complex planetary system of complex systems. It is sheer hubris for politicians to make any claims at all about intentional control of climate change. We have no idea what the consequences of elevated atmospheric CO2 will be. We have no idea whether it is fossil fuel burning, disturbance of soil for agriculture, or some other unsuspected human behavior that has caused increased CO2 concentrations.

We can't trust our measurements of global temperature. Even if we had reliable temperature data we don't understand natural climate cycles related to cyclical ocean current oscillations such as ENSO and PDO (as well as NAO, AO etc. etc.). Some of these oscillations occur over years, some over decades and it is likely that some occur over centuries but we haven't yet identified them since we are just beginners. There are atmospheric oscillations similar to ocean oscillations that cause large changes in the path of high altitude, high speed air flows (jet streams). The planet as a whole oscillates on its axis. The sun oscillates in many ways, has its own weather cycles which affect its planets in myriad ways. The solar system oscillates as it orbits the galactic core. Which of these factors are important? How important? Are the trends we think we see really trends or are they rises and falls that are part of long wave oscillations?

It's silly to think that we know what the result of global acts will be. But that is not license to do as we wish with no thought for consequences. Spewing various smokes and stinks into the air is never something we should do when avoidable. Plowing up the land, spewing into rivers and setting off nuclear explosions should also be avoided. They are destructive acts done in bad taste. They fail aesthetic, ethical and biological constraint tests in ways we can immediately perceive whether they perturb major systems such as climate or not.

We need better energy systems, better agronomic systems, better materials and methods for shelter and transportation. This has always been so and will always be so. Progress on these requirements will do more to reduce the threats of climate change - whatever they may be and whenever they become dire - than all of the political machinations and blundering interventions. We should not be wasting our limited resources and attention as we have been, or misusing humanity's modest genius for political objectives when we have so many real issues to work.