Shining Light on Dubious Theories

Temperature rises ‘not caused by sun’ | Climate change | Guardian Unlimited Environment

Anyone who has viewed and/or forwarded links to this controversial “documentary”, The Great Global Warming Swindle, must read the above Guardian article and forward it to all the people to whom they forwarded the original misleading documentary. Yet again, another argument against global warming force-fed to the public by biased sources has been proven wrong by raw data–not models, not hypotheses, and not theories. By raw data, which is to say, by reality.

The latest line of sophistry from the oil industry that was disseminated by the fraudulent British documentary went as follows: global warming is not caused by human activity, but by changes in solar activity. The sun is putting out more rays, the shysters claim, and that is why the earth is getting warmer. The shysters theorized this claim with the awareness that the general public lacks the technical wisdom and resourcefulness to know that this appealing theory can be tested with real data. The scientific community is not as naive.

Mike Lockwood, a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK and Claus Frohlich of the World Radiation Centre in Davos, Switzerland, compared temperature and solar data for the past 100 years. Lockwood concluded

It is absolutely clear that the sun is nothing to do with the recent warming.This doesn’t rely on models, it uses real data and it shows that all the solar trends have been going in the opposite direction [toward less radiation and, hence, global cooling] for the last 20 years. 

The two scientists conclude their upcoming communication (to be published by the Royal Society)

Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever mechanism is invoked. 

Carl Wunsch, a professor at MIT, was duped into giving an interview to the makers of  Swindle, and he later called the movie propaganda. The film’s claims have been meticulously documented as false by many sites, including this one and this one. UK Channel 4, which aired the documentary, decided to distance itself from the production after discovering that the primary graph used by the program was fabricated by the right-wing agencies that funded the production. And now, we even know that the phenomenon proposed by the program never happened in reality. In fact, we now know that reality is diametrically opposed to the claims of the program. Will this be enough to kill this piece of propaganda?

One Reply to “Shining Light on Dubious Theories”

  1. Good idea to encourage people to self-correct their earlier mistakes by forwarding the true state of our climate bother! I always hope reality dawns on more people that it is not solar activity but human activity that is causing climate change. Unfortunately, there are forces at work actively spreading misinformation. Certain people are attracted to what pseudoscientists have to say, and seem to enjoy passing bogus information from junk science sources on to their friends. If Lockwood and Fröhlich’s paper gets the attention it deserves, and Live Earth gets more people to make a greater effort themselves and gives them confidence to put pressure on businesses and governments to combat climate change, so much the better.

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