Alec Rawls on the Next IPCC Global Warming Report: Yep, Still Ignoring the Sun

In about 2008, the general public started to figure out that the giant ball of nuclear fire in the sky might be related to temperatures here on Earth. As one of our commenters put it:

Alec Rawls looked at the draft of the IPCC's next report and sent the following guest post. /Gabe

Anti-science: draft IPCC report inverts the scientific method

Guest post by Alec Rawls

In 2008, Canadian climatologist Tim Ball had this to say about the previous years IPCC report (AR4):

…they studiously avoided any discussion of the clear relationship between sunspot activity and temperature. They claimed there was no mechanism to explain the correlation so it could not be included, but that is incorrect. A very valid mechanism known as the Cosmic Theory (Svensmark and Calder, “The Chilling Stars”) has been in the literature with increasing detail since 1991.

Now the first draft of AR5 is doing the same thing. The supposed lack of a good enough theory of the mechanism by which solar magnetic activity could be driving climate is used as an excuse for omitting the by now massive evidence that there is SOME mechanism by which solar activity IS driving global temperature.

Over the last 10 years, literally dozens of very careful empirical studies have found a high degree of correlation, in the range of .5 to .8, between solar activity and various temperature proxies going back many thousands of years. That is, solar activity "explains," in the statistical sense, about half of all past temperature change, yet this mountain of evidence only rates one oblique sentence in AR5, noting three papers (author and year) that found some kind of correlations between solar activity and climate, but they aren't going to tell you what.

No mention that strong correlations have been found, no hint of the range and repetition of the findings. The EVIDENCE for a solar climate driver has been excised because the IPCC authors don't like the theories that account for it. In a precise inversion of the scientific method, theory is being used to jettison evidence. It is not science. It is anti-science. As I put it in my submitted "expert review":

Imagine a pre-Newtonian “scientist” predicting that a rock released into the air will waft away on the breeze on the grounds that we understand the force that the breeze imparts on the rock but we have no good theory of the mechanism by which heavy objects are pulled to the ground. We should therefore ignore the overwhelming evidence that there is some mechanism that pulls heavy objects to the ground, and until such time as we can identify the mechanism, proceed as if no such mechanism exists. This is what the IPCC is actually doing with the solar-climate evidence. Y’all aren’t scientists. You are actual, definitional, anti-scientists.

Full review here.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 07:27 AM

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