I could not have upset the soft-left, soft-green middle classes more if I had crept in their kitchens and snuck genetically modified tomatoes in their paninis. Why did I make the film The Great Global Warming Swindle? The head of science programs at Britain's Channel 4, Hamish Mykura (who has a PhD in environmental science), asked me to. He suspected the global warming alarm was not based on solid science. So did his predecessor, Sara Ramsden, who was also eager to make a film in this area. I was an experienced science documentary producer used to handling complex subjects.
So what was our conclusion, after months of research that involved talking to hundreds of scientists and wading through mountains of science papers? It's all codswallop. The notion of man-made global warming started life as a wild, eccentric theory and, despite throwing billions of dollars at it, scientists have failed to stand it up. Man-made global warming is unmitigated nonsense.
This is not the first time scientists have talked rubbish. Absurd theories come and go in science all the time. A few years ago an ostensible consensus of scientists said one-third of the British population were about to pop their clogs because they had eaten dodgy hamburgers (the mad cow disease scare). Many scientists build whole careers talking out of their hats. But usually it goes unnoticed. There is no real harm done. But global warming theory is different. It cannot be ignored. It is intruding into our lives to an extraordinary extent, shaping domestic and international policy in profound ways.
I urge readers to look at the evidence themselves....
Who should you believe? There is nothing for it but to be grown up about it and look at the evidence yourself. Here's some to get you going: the two graphs on this page, published in Geophysical Research Letters Volume 32, 2005 by a leading astrophysicist from Harvard University. The one below compares temperature change in the Arctic during the 20th century with levels of CO2. The one on the top compares the same temperature record to variations in solar activity as recorded, independently, by scientists from NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The question posed by the astrophysicist is a simple one. What is driving the Earth's climate? Is it CO2 or is it the sun?
Read it all here
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3 comments:
The question that immediately sprang to my mind was, in the top graph, why does the total solar irradiance (dark black line) of this graph vastly disagree with the widely accepted solar irradiance graph of the last 30 years. That graph very much follows the 11-year Schwabe cycles, and shows a very regular rise and ebb of solar irradiance. The troughs are around 1365.5 W/m2 and the peaks around 1366.5 W/m2. Compared to your graph, where the irradiance is shifted and magnified between 1370.5 W/m2 and 1372.5 W/m2 in the same time period.
So, my main question would be, where did this data set come from, and what transformations/smoothing was done to get to its current state?
A follow-up is, what is the data like after 2000? Obviously, 2000 was around a peak for the solar cycle, and 2005 was around a trough, so that would really be illuminating for this data set and how well it tracked with the Arctic temperature.
Never mind on the original reference. I found it. The paper is "Variable solar irradiance as a plausible agent for multidecadal variations in the Arctic-wide surface air temperature record of the past 130 years" by Willie Soon from the August Geophysical Research Letters of 2005. I wondered at the time why he didn't mention the name of the Harvard professor that wrote the paper. Now that I know it was Soon, I guess I don't have to wonder about that point either. In 2003, he and Sallie Baliunas got nailed misinterpreting data from other scientists:
"A few months afterward, 13 of the authors of the papers Baliunas and Soon cited refuted her interpretation of their work. There were three main objections: Soon and Baliunas used data reflective of changes in moisture, rather than temperature; they failed to distinguish between regional and hemispheric temperature anomalies; and they reconstructed past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving decadal trends. More recently, Osborn and Briffa repeated the Baliunas and Soon study but restricted themselves to records that were validated as temperature proxies."
With that, I can also answer question #2. From Soon's Paper,
"The annual TSI data are the composite record constructed by Hoyt and Schatten utilizing all five historical proxies of solar irradiance including sunspot cycle amplitude, sunspot cycle length, solar equatorial rotation rate, fraction of penumbral spots, and decay rate of the 11-year sunspot cycle." The data was further run through a gapped wavelet transform to compensate for data collection gaps in the proxy data.
It would have been nice if Soon had also included a graph line showing the actual measurements of the annual TSI since 1979, but I guess the smaller measured variations of TSI wouldn't support his theory nearly as well as the more inaccurate proxy reconstructions, so they were left out.
Of course, the IPCC deals directly with temperature forcings due to solar irradiance and other factors. I highy recommend their work.
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