A study done by at least 20 scientists — including astrophysicist Willie Soon — has found that the methods used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may be fatally flawed and greatly underestimate the power of the Sun in the observed warming of the Earth.
The study calls into question the IPCC’s assertion that most of the warming seen since the 1950s is caused by mankind’s emissions of trace atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. In essence, the study is a debunking of a 2022 paper by Dr. Mark Richardson and Dr. Rasmus Benestad that purports to debunk a 2021 study that found that the IPCC reports depend upon temperature data that is contaminated with far too much urban temperature bias.
Richardson and Benestad snarkily noted that perhaps the 2021 study placed too much emphasis on solar activity instead of possible human causes.
“Doing humans first gives a solar effect near 0 %. If your conclusions depend on the order in which you enter numbers into a computer, maybe you should check your methods,” the two authors suggest.
Soon and his colleagues point out that 98 percent of the Earth’s surface is unaffected by urban temperature biases. Therefore using so many stations set in urban places tends to show a warmer temperature than it should.
Additionally, the 2021 study found that the IPCC relies on only one estimate of solar activity, even though there are many different ones. Many of those different estimates of solar activity suggest that any observed warming could definitely fall within natural variability and is not necessarily caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
The new study concludes that there is not yet enough evidence to conclude that the observed warming is definitively caused by man.
From the study:
Since 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has heavily relied on the comparison between global climate model hindcasts and global surface temperature (ST) estimates for concluding that post-1950s global warming is mostly human-caused….
We compiled 16 TSI [Total Solar Irradiance] and five ST data sets and found by altering the choice of TSI or ST, one could (prematurely) conclude anything from the warming being “mostly human-caused” to “mostly natural.”
Soon believes that the IPCC begins with the assertion that mankind is causing the warming, and essentially ignores any findings to the contrary.
“If the IPCC had paid more attention to open-minded scientific inquiry than trying to force a premature ‘scientific consensus’, then the scientific community would be a lot closer to having genuinely resolved the causes of climate change,” Soon said. “Hopefully, our new analysis and datasets can help other scientists to get back to doing real climate science.”
Co-author Ronan Connolly had a similar observation:
In scientific investigations, it is important to avoid beginning your analysis with your conclusions decided in advance. Otherwise you might end up with a false sense of confidence in your findings. It seems that the IPCC was too quick to jump to their conclusions.
One can be forgiven for thinking that it all sounds like some sort of scientific rumble, with the lab-coated equivalents of the Bloods and the Crips hurling insults at each other. Unfortunately, in this case one gang has the majority of the funding and a vast political movement — globalism — loudly on its side. The other side is only trying to do science the way it was intended — with data supported by experimentation.
“Dr. Soon and his colleagues’ paper shows that the IPCC ignores data sets that undermine the climate alarm narrative it is pushing,” Dr. H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy of the Heartland Institute, told The New American.
“Their research suggests that solar activity could be playing a larger role in the Earth’s present warming cycle than the IPCC acknowledges and that it calls into question how much confidence we can have in the claim that human greenhouse gas emissions are definitely driving most of the recent warming.”
One side is pushing a political agenda; the other is answering the erroneous claims of politicians. One side is insisting that we spend, literally, trillions of dollars on mitigation efforts, while the other side would have us pump the brakes on economy-killing and ultimately useless efforts to control global warming — since we obviously have no control over the Sun.
