It’s a breakthrough of sorts that science has concluded humanity can’t be blamed for all the changes taking place in the world’s climate.

For some time now we’ve been bombarded in the news with the assertion that the Arctic ice cap is melting and polar bears are drowning because we’re burning too much fuel and generating too much carbon dioxide. But now there’s the report in the science journal Nature that contradicts at least part of that notion. It says a natural cause may account for “much of the Arctic warming,” as the Associated Press reported in a story in last Thursday’s paper.

The researchers — and others as well — have been quick to add that while natural processes seem to play a role, man-made warming has contributed as well.

This sounds a little on the lame side, though, considering that there were periods in recent history, but long before the petroleum age, when the Arctic Ocean was free enough of ice in the summer to allow navigation across the top of North America.

The implication of the new study is that the climate changes over not-so-long periods, and sometimes it gets warmer in the high latitudes and sometimes colder based on natural shifts in atmospheric circulation, and man is not the only or even the main cause.

That’s what the so-called warming skeptics have thought all along, and yet they get shouted down as blockheads and “deniers” when they dare to speak up. (hh)