Sun, Not Man, Main Cause of Climate Change, New Study Says
By Monisha Bansal
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
December 11, 2007
(CNSNews.com) - According to a new study on global warming, climate scientists at the University of Rochester, the University of Alabama, and the University of Virginia found that the climate change models based on human influence do not match observed warming.
That is contrary to the views held by former Vice President Al Gore, who accepted the Nobel Prize on Monday along with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and who thinks that climate change is largely caused by human action.
Gore wants nations to tax carbon dioxide emissions and not build any new coal plants, among other steps. "It is time to make peace with the planet," Gore said in his Nobel speech, as reported by the Associated Press. "We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war."
The new report, which challenges the claims of Gore and the IPCC, was published in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society.
The report was written by David Douglass at the University of Rochester, John Christy at the University of Alabama, and Benjamin Pearson and S. Fred Singer at the University of Virginia.
"Our findings basically are that fingerprints - that is to say the pattern of warming - that's predicted by greenhouse models does not match the fingerprints of observations, so there is a disconnect between greenhouse models and the actual reality of observations," Singer told Cybercast News Service.
"This means that the greenhouse effect - while real - is not very important in producing climate change," he said. "It's a lot smaller than what the models calculate."
Singer said the reason why the models "overestimate the effectiveness of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is that the models ignore what are called negative feedbacks which occur in the atmosphere, such as clouds, which reduce the effect of the greenhouse gases."
"Their models just don't consider them properly," he said.
But Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, told Cybercast News Service, that the study is "radically out of step with the complete scientific consensus."
"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not just a report. It's not just a random gathering of scientists. It's the largest scientific body ever assembled," he said. "Their most recent assessment determined that there's 90 percent certainty that global climate change is happening and that it is caused by human beings."
But Singer said, "We have to remember that the climate has always been changing ever since we have records, and we have geologic records going back millions and millions of years. We know that there have been huge climate changes on the earth long before human beings actually came into existence.
"We are fairly sure that what's causing the warming are changes in the sun," he said. "These are very subtle changes that are very difficult to observe. The sun is really a quite variable star."
Hendricks, however, said because of the IPCC report, "the assertion that this is caused by increased solar activity or these sorts of things is out of step with the vast consensus."
"It's dangerous to get into a game of dueling science," he added. "We don't want to be gambling with the fate of the planet."
But Singer said because global warming is a natural event. "There is little point to try to control emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which means that all of this legislation and all of these efforts to find substitutes for fossil fuels are pointless, useless and very, very expensive," he said.
Hendricks countered, saying that alternative energy will be a multi-billion dollar industry and "an opportunity to revitalize our global competitiveness" through innovation and job creation.
This is the answer to your report
Temperature rises 'not caused by sun'
David Adam, environment correspondent Guardian Unlimited, Thursday July 5 2007 Claims in a controversial Channel 4 programme that recent rises in global temperatures have been caused by the sun have been disproved by scientists.
The programme, the Great Global Warming Swindle, claimed that instead of greenhouse gases from human activity being to blame for a recent surge in temperatures, a change in solar activity was responsible because it influenced the number of cosmic rays that strike the Earth.
The film presented such changes in the sun as a viable alternative explanation for rising temperatures, and was widely cited in discussions of a recent poll that showed 56% of the UK public doubted the scientific cause of climate change.
But the new analysis, to be published in a Royal Society journal on Tuesday, shows that global warming since 1985 cannot have been caused by an increase in solar radiation or by a decrease in cosmic rays.
Mike Lockwood, a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, said: "It is absolutely clear that the sun is nothing to do with the recent warming.
"This doesn't rely on models, it uses real data and it shows that all the solar trends have been going in the opposite direction for the last 20 years."
Professor Lockwood carried out the new study to directly challenge the claims made in the Channel 4 programme, which was criticised as misleading by scientists.
With Claus Frohlich of the World Radiation Centre in Davos, Switzerland, he compared temperature and solar data for the past 100 years.
The records show that solar activity peaked between 1985 and 1987.
Since then, trends in sunshine, sunspot number and cosmic rays have all been in the opposite direction to that required to explain global warming - while temperatures at the Earth's surface rose steadily by more than 0.3C.
The two scientists conclude: "Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever mechanism is invoked."
In pre-industrial times, Prof Lockwood said, there was considerable evidence that the sun played a significant role in driving global climate, but he was concerned this genuine area of study had been done a "great disservice" by climate sceptics who were trying to confuse people about recent global warming.
He said: "I know we're attacking a bit of a strawman here because there is no serious scientific debate about recent warming, but those who disagree are very vocal. We wrote this up specifically to show they are wrong, and wrong in a dangerous way."
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