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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday March 07 2020, @01:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the sunny-disposition dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @04:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @04:08AM (#968081)

    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.

    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.