The IPCC, Climate Change and Solar Sophistry

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/25864


Sins Of Omission and Commission
The IPCC, Climate Change and Solar Sophistry
By Dr. Tim Ball Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself. Erasmus (1466 - 1536)

Control of the science and content of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports was planned from before it was officially formed in 1988. Exposure of manipulation to achieve desired results also began early.



Benjamin Santer graduated from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), where Tom Wigley supervised his PhD. He returned to the US working at the government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He was appointed lead author of Chapter 8, titled “Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes” of the 1995 IPCC Report. It turned out Santer had significantly altered the meaning of the Chapter from that agreed on by the other authors. As Avery and Singer noted in 2006, “Santer single-handedly reversed the ‘climate science’ of the whole IPCC report and with it the global warming political process! The ‘discernible human influence’ supposedly revealed by the IPCC has been cited thousands of times since in media around the world, and has been the ‘stopper’ in millions of debates among nonscientists.”

An Incestuous Process
Overlooked in exposure of Santer’s malfeasance was the fact that the entire chapter was based primarily on two of his research papers, neither of which was published or peer-reviewed at the time. IPCC chapters list extensive bibliographies, but invariably content is dependent on the work of the lead-author. As Marcel Crok explained, “lead authors are promoting their own work in the chapters and are often asked to give an ‘objective’ opinion about controversies in which they themselves are involved. A clear example of this in AR4 is Phil Jones who promotes his HadCrut3 graph meanwhile ignoring literature (Michaels/McKitrick 2004, 2006) that raises serious questions about the reliability of this graph. A second example is Briffa as lead author of chapter 3, where he, as a member of the Hockey Team, defends the hockey stick, and ignores the divergence problem (i.e. the fact that his temperature reconstruction based on tree rings is going down after 1960).” It is a logical development of the incestuous design of the IPCC process.

A Czech researcher only recently exposed the worst example of this conflict. He calls it Judithgate after Judith Lean co-lead author of Chapter 2 of the 2007 IPCC Report. Section 2.7.1 is titled “Solar variability” and purports to be the work of several researchers according to the bibliography. Actually, the section is dependent on one paper. Lean J., Roltmann G., Harder J., Kopp G.: Source contributions to new understanding of global change and solar variability, Sol. Phys., 230, 27-53, 2005. As a Norwegian government independent reviewer wrote to the IPCC. “I urge IPCC to consider having only one solar physicist on the lead author team of such an important chapter. In particular since the conclusion of this section hangs on one single paper in which Judith Lean is the co-author.” Note the comment “Confidential, Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute.” Why is this necessary for a publicly funded project that has massive global economic implications? Steve McIntyre obtained the information through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

More disturbing was the disclosure that Lean and Claus Frohlich had altered graphs to reduce solar influence. “The original satellite data showed, that TSI (measured in Watts) increased from 1986 to 1996 by cca one third… But then Judith and Clause “laundered” the graphs and voila… solar output increase was gone.” Why was any of this necessary? (Link)

Sins Of Omission and Commission
Deception of claiming Reports are complete synopses of scientific literature produced by a team of experts is enough to reject the entire IPCC findings. However it’s only a part because what they chose to cover was deliberately selective. It was driven by the IPCC objective to prove human CO2 is causing global warming. Computer models and historical data were manipulated to prove CO2 was the only possible cause. This required omitting or reducing to a minimum the role of other mechanisms. Biggest threat to their claims was the Sun and just as they rewrote climate history by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), they rewrote a small portion of the solar record and left out most of the major solar mechanisms that cause climate change.

The Lean paper only considered changes in electromagnetic energy and because of what they produced the 2007 Report concludes. “In comparison, changes in solar irradiance since 1750 are estimated to have caused a small radiative forcing of +0.12 [+0.06 to +0.30] W/m2, which is less than half the estimate given in the TAR.” Prior to the adjustment the IPCC said changes in solar energy explained over 50 percent of temperature variation prior to 1950. But it’s only part of the story that is more easily told by considering long-term climate changes linked to other changes in the Sun and Sun/Earth relationships.

The most recent ice maximum occurred 20,000 years ago, but few are aware that similar maxima and minima occurred over a 3 million year period called the Pleistocene Ice Age. Variations between glacial and interglacial are primarily driven by the 100,000 - year oscillation of the elliptical orbit of the Sun, a major part of the Milankovitch cycle. Few know there were at least five previous Ice Ages that appear to relate to the 220 million year orbit of the Sun around the Milky Way. These processes are still operating, but the IPCC ignore them ostensibly because of the time scale. However, as the late Theodore Landscheidt showed there are short-term impacts of solar movements on cyclical events like El Nino.

There are a multitude of other astrophysical relationships causing cycles related to climate not considered by the IPCC.

Finally, there’s the relationship between sunspot and global temperature. The IPCC consistently ignore the relationship though there’s extensive literature beginning with Galileo’s observations of sunspots in 1610. Initially they said there was no explanatory mechanism. This is not a valid reason if you are doing a complete summary of climate science. Svensmark’s plausible Cosmic Theory appeared in embryonic form in 1991 and more completely in 1996. The 2001 Report mentioned it briefly, but it’s omitted in the 2007 Report. Now there is further confirmation of the theory. Eigil Friis-Christensen, director of the Danish National Space Institute, DTU, and co-author with Svensmark in 1996 said, “The evidence has piled up, first for the link between cosmic rays and low-level clouds and then, by experiment and observation, for the mechanism involving aerosols. All these consistent scientific results illustrate that the current climate models used to predict future climate are lacking important parts of the physics”


Of course they do, because they were designed to prove CO2 was the cause and therefore the problem.