The heresy of denial

JohnBUK

So, are you saying George Brown and Millipede were mistaken when they called us all "flat-earthers"?
Bloody hell!

Tom Scott

For the record, this is what the lead author of the study, Professor Joannah Haigh of Imperial College, actually has to say about it: “These results are challenging what we thought we knew about the sun’s effect on our climate. If further studies find the same pattern over a longer period, this could suggest we may have overestimated the sun’s role in warming the planet, rather than underestimating it[...] This does not give comfort to climate change sceptics at all – it may suggest we do not know enough about the sun but casts no aspersions on climate models [which] would still be producing the same results without these solar effects.”

But why listen to Professor Haigh when we have pundits such as Mr Liddle to interpret her results so much more intelligently than she could possibly manage herself?

Bond Boy

Actually if you read the comments accompanying the paper in Nature - as I assume you have - they specifically state that this research provides no evidence whatsoever against global warming: "But no matter how you look at it, the Sun's influence on current climate change is at best a small natural add-on to man-made greenhouse warming. All the evidence is that the vast majority of warming is anthropogenic, it might be that the solar part isn't quite working the way we thought it would, but it is certainly not a seismic rupture of the science.". It's extraordinary that you don't mention this, but then that is the level of your argument, reactionary in the truest sense of the word.

Alexandrovich

You sure do flush 'em out Rodders.

Oedipus Rex

@ Tom Scott & Bond Boy

You do the very thing that you accuse of Rod doing - reacting with selective omissions to his article. He concludes " The latest research certainly doesn’t disprove AGW, which I still suspect to be more likely than not."

And as a 'pundit' I seem to remember that his view is that it is ridiculous that those who do not have the scientific knowledge to form a strong opinion should not, therefore, attack those who take a different view - seems reasonable to me. If pundits such as George Biomoron were less strident, self-righteous and generally obnoxious the climatologists and other scientists would get a better audience.

rod liddle

Yes indeed, Tom and Bond Boy; were either of you capable of reading what I wrote above? It would seem not - or, more to the point, that you decided to ignore those bits of it which you found inconvenient in favour of the usual inchoate rage. Yes, I read the Nature piece. I also read very different interpretations of both that and the original research across the globe. Some insisted, with Tom's bovine stupidity, that it actually reinforced the argument for AGW; others, with equally dumb certitude that it disproved it.

woodbine "hideously warm" willy

The whole climate change bollox has been taken over by a doomsday cult - resistance is useless

scabbard

Climate change? I'm all for it.

I always go against what's trendy.

Lee Jakeman

Is that the George Monbiot of "...every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned" fame?

TomFP

Rod - in this context, "denier" is customarily (so far as I can see) spelt "DENIAR". Dunno why, just is.

VE_Bott

But no matter how you look at it, the Sun's influence on current climate change is at best a small natural add-on to man-made greenhouse warming.

Hmm... seems the Sun's influence on Mr Liddle's journalistic standards is much greater than we thought.

maddy1

@Bond boy
"But no matter how you look at it, the Sun's influence on current climate change is at best a small natural add-on to

I thought the sun was everything to us Aztecs but perhaps it has got its hat on today, hip horray!

Steve

I have to say I enjoyed this story too. There is a strange situation when every and any new report that comes up with a hypothesis or observation that something other than CO2 can affect climate to a large enough degree to be separately observed, that it always has to come with the supplication that this cannot derail the basic theory that CO2 is the most influential climatic factor.
But if it is, then it has a very low sensitivity if you look at the relatively low incline of the recent slope of temperature increase, an increase comparable to the slope of increase at the early 20 th century, as Prof Phil Jones has said.
No Rod, don't listen to the self preserving caveats of Professor Haigh, she also made a claim that the opposite of the effect she has observed must hold - without justification or evidence. Just to keep herself within the faith I assume.

HairyNoddy

"But no matter how you look at it, the Sun's influence on current climate change is at best a small natural add-on to man-made greenhouse warming. All the evidence is that the vast majority of warming is anthropogenic, it might be that the solar part isn't quite working the way we thought it would, but it is certainly not a seismic rupture of the science."

Er - the change in climate which we have seen in the past 20 years is not significant compared to past periods. In those past periods there was little or no pollution or man made CO2 production to peg the blame on. Explain these changes if you can.

Ozzy

Let's hope Al Gore never makes another documentary. An Inconvenient Truth has really struck a chord with some gullible, impressionable minds.

Barry

Don't get too excited - there'll be another "report" next month

normanc

Careful Mr Liddle, my finger is hovering over the red button!

EveryOneAndNoOne

You are missing the point. The problem is CO2, not the Sun. The rise is CO2 has many consequences, such as ocean acidification, air quality etc of which one is global warming.

Stop thinking 'AGW scam', start thing 1000ppm CO2 (MIT believes that we will hit 866ppm by the end of this century) and what that will mean and IF CO2 rise cannot be stopped there? What does 7.8ph seas do?

Desperately clinging to anything that avoids discussing CO2 just marks you out as a die-hard denier or a paid-up oil lacky.

Noa Prophylactic Warmings

There's no doubt the real problem is population growth, which may, repeat may, contribute to climate change now climate disruption.

This is evidenced by the copious volumes of hot air the Warmers are prepared to expend in vociferously attacking the Deniers.

Barry

EveryOneAndNoOne: "Desperately clinging to anything that avoids discussing CO2...."

Or avoiding anything that discusses the sun, for that matter. Or water vapour, or methane, or nitrous oxide.

FedUp

Here it all starts to unravel. In recent years many scientists have made set great store by what they claim is the fact that their climate models (which include solar influences) can completely explain what was going on in the climate up to about 1960 without mankind’s influence, but that after 1960 manmade global warming is necessary to explain the data. It was this line of argument that an initially skeptical David Attenborough said persuaded him of mankind’s influence.

Now if Haigh et al are right the solar factor in this climate modeling was incorrect even though it did an amazing job of reproducing natural variations in climate from the 19th century up to 1960! So, one wonders, which is wrong, the suggestions by Haigh et al, or the climate models that reproduced natural variability so well up to 1960 (suspiciously well, in my view).

I’m also wondering how this research fits in with the infamous Lockwood and Frolich Royal Society paper of 2007. That used sunspot data and GISS global temperature data to show that as the sun’s activity declined after the great solar grand maxima of the late 20th century the earth’s temperature continued to rise. They concluded that the sun’s increased activity wasn’t responsible for the world warming (had they used another global temperature dataset I think they might have got a different answer.) If Haigh et al are right then the decline in solar activity, estimated by Lockwood and Frolich to be in the 1950’s (it was also in the 80’s) actually coincides with the recent spell of warming! So one could now argue it was the sun that did it after all!

http://www.thegwpf.org/the-observatory/1662-solar-speculation.html

Forest Fan

"But no matter how you look at it, the Sun's influence on current climate change is at best a small natural add-on to"

Bloody Hell! Murdock's at it again! First the media, then MPs, now the climate. When will the man stop?

mikef2

I think most scientists are now realising that our recent temp blip is nothing more than ENSo driven plus the chaotic shifts of other ocean drivers...or as BC would call it..."its the oceans stupid" What drives ENSO is not totally understood, but its pretty sure now its not CO2 causing the atmosphere to heat the seas. The elephant and the mouse springs to mind...
What little effect co2 has is dwarfed, so much so as to be statistically insignificant.
I guess it will take the msm another couple of years to catch up. The truth is we are just scratching the surface of climate science, and I'm sure we will go down plenty of blind alleys, like the co2 scare, before the science matures. At least the scare gave the funding to disprove the scare...

michael

All the most effective lies are equivocal... AGW remains the same political sci fi that was started by Mrs Thatcher, and the main beneficiaries of this crap are still the Revenue.

Stephen Wilde

I expected this:

I have been proposing for some time that on the basis of real world climate observations the effect of solar variability on climate must be the opposite of conventional climatology.

I have even worked it into a general climate overview, see here:

http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5497

and other articles of mine on the same site.

"Thus when the sun is more active far from warming the planet the sun is facilitating an increased rate of cooling of the planet. That is why the
stratosphere cooled during the late 20th Century period of a highly active sun although the higher levels of the atmosphere warmed. The higher levels were
warmed by direct solar impacts but the stratosphere cooled because energy was going up faster than it was being received from the troposphere below.The opposite occurs for a period of inactive sun."

DG

This report is just the latest in a whole series of suspiciously convenient patch-up jobs. a giant desperation-driven project of damage limitation and faith restoration, embarked upon following the twin disasters of Climategate and Copenhagen.

Co2 is plant food, and to claim it's THE great driver of all temperatures on Earth is, to put it into its correct scientific context; complete and utter bollocks.

David Ossitt

“In other words, in some cases they grossly overestimated our contribution to global warming”

Rod as is usual, you let your instinctive good nature pull your punches, ‘in all cases’ they have quite deliberately overestimated our contribution.

My own instinct when faced with those, who will brook no dissent, is to automatically take the opposing point of view, this has stood me in good staid the whole of my life.

daniel maris

Well it would seem kudos to S. Wilde for anticipating these results and I can ( I think ) understand how that works. But it underlines, just how complex climate is.

Another factor was the role pollution played in reflecting solar energy.

My own view is that we should take a non-hysterical precautionary approach and endeavour to maintain CO2 levels within the range we have experienced them over the last 1000 years or so.

Josh

A charge was once thrown at the great historian Macauley...

''I wish I was as certain about something as you are about everything.''

The climate change fascists would do well to learn from that statement

JohnBUK

I'm sorry, the answer is very simple - get Gordon Brown onto the case. He'll put an end to "global warming and cooling " for ever. It might be more expensive than the alternatives though!

Baron

listen up EveryOneAndNoOne @ 9.03, explain this: from about 1,000AD till circa 1800 the CO2 levels had moved up only marginally from about 140ppm to some 180ppm, right?

WTF then caused the medieval warming and the mini ice-age later on, ha? Could this not give you a hint that a different mechanism of which we know bugger all may have been and remains in play?

if all the 7bn of us the humans were to drop dead the aggregate annual CO2 discharge would only dip by four per cent. For anyone capable of elementary thinking this fact alone should be it, the rest of the modelling, forcings and stuff is just a noise.

the Greeks got it spot on, if Gods want to punish someone they make him mad first.

RichieP

Very good Rod, couldn't agree more (and have just linked you at WUWT) but why have you studiously ignored the 10:10 'advert'?

rod liddle

Richie - thanks, but truth be told, I quite like the 10:10 advert. I'll do a blog about it very shortly.........

Eli

"...AGW, which I still suspect to be more likely than not." Why?
Which part of the reasoning do you find convincing? That man's CO2 emissions must be the cause because nothing else explains it? That the warming is unprecedented? Or that the catastrophes predicted get worse and closer?

RichieP

@Rod '..10:10..I'll do a blog about it very shortly'

Good, I look forward to being suitably irritated and provoked - that's why I come here. Do have a think about the CO2 tosh though. Some eminent scientists also think it's tosh:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/08/hal-lewis-my-resignation-from-the-american-physical-society/

Jimmock

Where is that Jim Ryan character? Is he no longer on the Team CC payroll?

Osred

I think those scientists need to explain to thick bastards like meself why, when we are regularly exposed to increasing sun activity, i.e. during the day when we face the sun, it gets warmer. When we arent (at night) it gets colder.

Why is it that extra activity, presumably pumping out more heat, then reduces the world's average temperatures?

Findlay

it is becoming more evident that the 'evidence' for AGW is unsubstainable, mainly because,
1) there is no actual warming just now, rather a suggestion of cooling if data is not massaged,
2) Carbon dioxide is necessary for humans. We are a carbon based species. Why would propagandists want to get rid of CO2 unless they want to get rid of people too, and with whom are they starting, India, China? No, with us.
3) To say that the sun is a minor contributor to climate is in common sense terms nonsense. To the meanest intellect, it is clearly the main input that warms and sustains us and its absence leads to cold, as I suspect many will shortly discover. Try Saudi desert after sunset if you need convincing.
4) there is a tiny problem with the second law of thermodynamics.
5) sea levels are not rising, other than cyclicly. Ask why Maldives was not inundated during the tsunami. Bangladesh is mostly on shifting estuarine sands, Honkers is sinking and Thames barrier was designed to avoid flooding because GB is tilting down to the East. Of course this, like most things, is not taught nowadays.
6) Unfortunately polar bears are thriving.
7) Methane hydrates, released in greater amounts by undersea tectonic activity in the past did not cause harm.
7) CO2 is a small portion of the atmosphere and ours an insignificant portion; while absorption may acidify oceans, they will come to no more harm than they did in the past when we had much more CO2. We also had warming in the Middle Ages when My SUV was not in use and the Wright brothers not born. Vine street, anyone?
I could go on and mention Kiwigate but there is really no need. (I am a physical scientist/engineer, by the way).
So why would anyone want to bamboozle us?
Try to check Frankfurt School, you might get a clue there. Next, cui bono? Let me again give you a clue. With government blessing and receipts of huge amounts of tax from airlines and fuel, redcar was closed. The reduction in CO2 was wonderful and I am sure will show up as cooling in Britain. However the Indian company collected big time and the jobs went away. It appears there is a nexus between big business and big government that has resulted in the exporting of our jobs at taxpayers' expense. We are now taxed to the hilt to pay debt interest (1 trillion is now chicken feed) with no prospect of improvement by the coalition. As this fear disappears another and another are conceived to intimidate and tax us. Conspiracy theory, propoganda, taxation, cynical manipulation of young minds? Take your pick.

Baron

Findlay @ 4.42:

excellent summing up, sir, but will any of the deluded take any notice;

here’s another expose of the fraud by a Canadian Donna Laframboise, a longish piece, but worth it; it beggars belief what passes for science these days.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0BwKfjKsXaxaGYjNhYzM0ZDAtZWU5NC00MjllLTk4ZDQtNjg0NGU4OGRkYjg2&hl=en

John Holland

Will people on this (and the fragrant Melanie's) site never get bored of vociferously declaring that all AGW is total balls, and then justifying their rock-like certitude with claims that scientists are arrogant and full of false certainties.
It's a good thing Michael et al are totally and provably correct, otherwise they might sound absurdly and smugly overconfident themselves.

John Holland

Findlay- are you really a physical scientist? Does that mean a physicist, or something else?

I only ask, because some of the points on your post seem a bit confusing.
Please could you direct me to any places, one will do, where someone has made the claim that the sun has little effect on the Earth's climate? I think your confusing arguments about sunspot activity and cosmic radiation with the power of the sun itself. Well done for pointing out that the sun is a source of warmth, though.
Also, the fact that we are carbon-based; I'm not sure why you think that has any relevence to the greenhouse effect of CO2, any more than the effect of being hit over the head with a lump of coal.
Lastly, your simple relationship between the quantity of a substance and its ability to affect its surroundings is oddly scientifically illiterate.
I could go on, but I can't be bothered.

John Holland

Actually, I can.
Does anyone "want to get rid of CO2"? Er, no.
If one wants to reduce CO2 emmissions, does that mean wanting to "get rid of people, too", because people contain carbon? Erm....
I won't ask for an explanation for the second law of thermodynamics statement, as I would'nt begin to understand it.
This sort of incisive and expert science is just the stuff that the Greens fear.

I hope, Finlay, you're writing a book.

PeterSmith

It is the interpretation of research that is the great problem. So often scientists do brilliant research and then draw the most illogical conclusions from their discoveries.

The earth always warms up at the end of an interglacial period whether there is man-made "greenhouse gas" or not. That is where we are now.