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Paper that claimed the Sun caused global warming gets retracted:
A paper published last June was catnip for those who are desperate to explain climate change with anything but human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. It was also apparently wrong enough to be retracted this week by the journal that published it, even though its authors objected.
The paper's headline conclusion was that it described a newly discovered cycle in the motion of the Sun, one that put us 300 years into what would be a thousand-year warming period for the Earth. Nevermind that we've been directly measuring the incoming radiation from the Sun and there has been no increase to explain the observed global warming—or that there is no evidence of a 2,000 year temperature cycle in the paleoclimate record.
Those obvious issues didn't stop some people from taking this study as proof that past warming was natural, and only mild and unavoidable warming lies in our future.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday March 07 2020, @05:57PM (3 children)
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/02/01/039203 [soylentnews.org]
Not much left to argue against between these two publications. Is it too late to pull Al Gore out of the mothballs?
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @07:19PM (1 child)
That article is intentionally misleading. There are a large number of 'climate models are accurate, honest!' articles. Most laypeople take this to mean 'well what they predicted must have come true.' That is not what these articles say.
One of the most critical factors in climatology is 'forcing'. In particular a trillion dollar question is if human emissions increase by *x* how much does this increase atmospheric concentration of CO2? You'd think this would be one of the easiest questions to answer in climatology. And in fact it, in theory, should be. The reality is we still have no clue what it is. Climate models in the past dramatically overestimated forcing. In other words they thought human emissions were having a much larger impact on CO2 levels than they actually were. And so they predicted that our continuing emissions would, consequently, also have a much larger impact than they have. And we also have increased our emissions dramatically faster than most of any old model ever expected. So old models generally predicted *far* greater heating than we've observed.
So is the paper lying? No, but the headline on the site linking to it is. Look at the final word salad on the abstract:
What that paper is actually measuring is not what the headline, "Claims that climate models overestimate warming are unfounded, study shows" claims it's measuring. It's not measuring whether the models overestimated expected heating. It's measuring whether the expected response to a given forcing was inaccurate. And the answer there is 'kind of'. Even the forcing response is not so accurate, but the models generally give themselves a large enough error range than the observed error can still be attributed to variance/randomness.
When you actually look back at what climate models of the past would expect for *x* emissions vs *y* increase in temperature (what people generally think of when measuring whether or not models overestimate heating), they're all absurdly wrong. Look at any paper that claims the models are accurate and you'll find the retroactively changing the forcing predictions of the old models with varying justifications for it. In this case, they don't need a justification because they're not even claiming to measure whether the temperature predictions were accurate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @04:08AM
Maybe the climate scientists should talk to some botanists. At 180ppm plants stop processing CO2 and starve.
There are plenty of forests where growth was limited by available CO2, increasing the atmospheric concentration means they suddenly eat a lot more of it. Higher concentrations mean they need less water too, so more plant growth is occuring in a lot of areas that were marginal before.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @09:50PM
He's too young to be President these days.