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Two new internationally peer-reviewed studies published in major scientific journals have documented misleading Northern Hemisphere temperature data and attribution analyses indicating inadequate considerations of Urban Heat Island (UHI) influences on climate records and dominant influences of the sun in producing warming and cooling changes.
Published in August by the journal Climate, the first of these studies concludes that global warming influences on people could be mostly an urban problem associated with a well-known UHI phenomenon whereby structures, including paved surfaces and concrete buildings, absorb heat during the day and release it at night.
Although urban areas account for less than 4% of the global land surface, they contain many of the weather stations where temperatures are collected, which substantially skew the bigger record picture.
Whereas the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that UHI accounts for less than 10% of global warming, the new study suggests that urban warming might account for up to 40% of the recorded change since 1850.
To arrive at this assessment, 37 scientists from 18 countries led by Dr. Willie Soon at the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES-science.com) deleted temperature data from Northern Hemisphere cities and towns and concentrated attention on “uncontaminated” rural temperatures which collectively show a rather small overall warming for the past 150 years.
As expected, the records showed routine episodes of both warming and cooling throughout the mid-to-late 19th century, 20th century and first quarter of the 21st century.
The CERES research team reached conclusions similar to a separate scientific peer-reviewed study involving many of the same co-authors published in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics which took a different approach to analyzing climate changes during the same general period.
The team of 20 climate researchers from 12 countries led by Dr. Ronan Connolly, also at CERES, concluded that in addition to contaminated urban warming bias based largely upon weather station locations, the IPCC may have substantially underestimated the sun’s natural role in climate changes since the 1850s.
Whereas the IPCC only considered one estimate of solar activity for its most recent (2021) evaluation of the causes of global warming, Connolly and colleagues compiled and updated 27 different estimates along with three additional temperature estimates that were used by the scientific community.
Several of these different solar activity estimates suggested that most of the warming observed outside urban areas (in rural areas, oceans, and glaciers) could be explained in terms of the sun along with some estimates suggesting a mixture of human and natural factors and others that agreed with IPCC findings.
When the authors analyzed the temperature data only using the IPCC’s solar dataset, they could not explain any of the warming since the mid-20th century.
On the other hand, using different solar activity estimates applied by the broader scientific community revealed that most rural warming and cooling trends could be explained in terms of the sun’s influence.
As lead CERES investigator astrophysicist, Dr. Soon points out, “The Sun is the sole energy giver to all things on Earth, including the energy for photosynthesis and all the energy to drive the air and water and vegetation.
So it is without a doubt that any, however small, changes in the Sun will lead to consequential effects on Earth weather patterns and climate change. In addition, computer climate modelers have yet been unable to fully account for the slow changes in the orbital motion of the Earth around the Sun.”
Whereas changes in the sun’s output were able to explain most, if not all, changes in rural temperatures based upon uncontaminated heat island records, CERES researchers were unable to correlate any influences of rising atmospheric CO2 with patterns of warming and cooling over the past 150-170 years.
Given that humans have no apparent influence over the sun, conclusions of these two studies should give reasonable people pause in declaring that “the science is settled” regarding a human-caused climate crisis warranting draconian limits upon the sorts of energy we use and dictates regarding the cars we drive.
Dr. Soon of the first study emphasizes that using bad data that are swarmed by UHI effects will not only be scientifically misleading but in fact cause pain and chaos in everyone’s lives — especially in terms of increasing costs for food and heating and cooling our home as well as paying for the gasoline for our cars and other transportation.
He states: “If the IPCC had paid more attention to open-minded scientific inquiry than trying to force a premature ‘scientific consensus,’ then the scientific community would be a lot closer to having genuinely resolved the causes of climate change. Hopefully, our new analysis and datasets can help other scientists to get back to doing real climate science.”
Dr. Connolly, lead author of the solar study, agrees: “In scientific investigations, it is important to avoid beginning your analysis with your conclusions decided in advance. Otherwise, you might end up with a false sense of confidence in your findings. It seems that the IPCC was too quick to jump to their conclusions.”
As CERES co-author professor Ana Elias, director of the Laboratorio de Ionosfera, Atmósfera Neutra y Magnetosfera (LIANM) at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Argentina, explained: “This analysis opens the door to a proper scientific investigation into the causes of climate change.”
That proper scientific investigation is long overdue.
This piece originally appeared at NewsMax.com and has been republished here with permission.
David H Russell says
Anyone with half a brain knows AGW is pseudo-science for 2 simpler reasons: 1) AGW has never been experimentally demonstrated, making it inconsistent with the scientific method (i.e., pseudo-science); and 2) the warming over both the modern and the paleo record happens before the increase in CO2 levels, making AGW inconsistent with causality.