Climate change perspective – a failure of rationality.

 In the fifth article in their series "

The Sun-Climate Effect: The Winter Gatekeeper Hypothesis (V). A role for the sun in climate change", Javier Vinos and Andy May go beyond the science to discuss the behavior of scientists and how much of it has become unscientific. They also discuss what the dogmatic segment of the field have left out and why it makes their conclusions problematic.

Summing up: the climate alarmists lack the knowledge and data to justify their alarmism.

Here is a link to their fifth article.

Here are some excerpts.

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5.1 Introduction

The 1990s discovery of multidecadal variability (see Part IV) showed that the science of climate change is very immature. The answer to what was causing the observed warming was provided before the proper questions were asked. Once the answer was announced, questions were no longer welcome. Michael Mann said of a skeptical Judith Curry: “I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility” (Mann 2008). But as Peter Medawar (1979) stated, “the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.” Scientists’ opinions do not constitute science, and a scientific consensus is nothing more than a collective opinion based on group-thinking. When doubting a scientific consensus (“just like you’re supposed to doubt,” as Feynman said) becomes unwelcome, the collective opinion becomes dogma, and dogma is clearly not science.

Lennart Bengtsson, former director of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, winner of the Descartes Prize and a WMO prize for groundbreaking research put it succinctly after agreeing to participate in a skeptical organization headed by Nigel Lawson, a member of the House of Lords and former Chancellor of the Exchequer:

“I had not [been] expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expected anything similar in such an originally peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently, it has been transformed in recent years” (von Storch 2014).

This is the effect that dogmas have on scientists, normal scientific research becomes impossible by introducing a strong group-bias against questioning the dogma.

Once dogmas are established, they tend to evade scientific scrutiny. Stuart Firestein, when reviewing the main mistaken scientific consensuses of the past in his 2012 book, Ignorance: How it Drives Science, wonders if

“… is there any reason, really, to think that our modern science may not suffer from similar blunders? In fact, the more successful the fact, the more worrisome it may be. Really successful facts have a tendency to become impregnable to revision.” Stuart Firestein (2012)

The main dogma of climate change science is stated in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as:

“It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period (Figure SPM.3)”(IPCC 2014).

However, there is no evidence confirming this dogma. It is based on computer model results that were programmed with the same assumptions that emerge from them, in a clear case of circular reasoning. An example of such assumptions is that the only accepted effect of solar variability on climate is the change in total solar irradiance (TSI). None of the solar effects described in Part II are included because they are not accepted, and even if they were accepted, we would not know how to program them. We don’t know how they happen or how they affect climate. Such is the hubris of modern climate theory supporters that they believe we understand how climate changes well enough to make reliable projections 75 years into the future.

Fig. 5.1. The main dogma of climate change science is shown in Figure SPM.3 from AR5. The fifth IPCC report, claims that observed 1951-2010 warming was due to anthropogenic causes, without contribution from natural forcings, despite low volcanic activity and high solar activity; and without any contribution from multidecadal oscillations, despite the 1976-2000 period of warming coinciding with an AMO upswing.

In Part III we showed the importance of meridional transport (MT) and the latitudinal temperature gradient (LTG) in both the global and regional climate. They determine the amount of energy directed toward the poles. In Part IV we showed that changes in MT cause climate regime shifts, and that these shifts alter the energy budget of the climate system. This evidence refutes the dogma, revealing that changes in MT constitute a climate forcing not accounted for in Fig. 5.1. In Part II we reviewed the evidence that changes in solar activity affect the polar vortex, ENSO, Earth’s rotation rate, and planetary wave atmospheric propagation properties, resulting in dynamical spatiotemporal changes in atmospheric circulation, temperature, and precipitation that correspond with substantial climate changes of the past as recorded by paleoclimatological evidence. Each and every one of the climatological factors affected by solar activity points to an effect of the variable sun on MT. Through changes in MT, changes in solar activity constitute one of the main causes of climate change, further refuting the climate dogma.

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5.6 The Cycle-length/Climate-effect paradox

One of the main objections to a more substantive role on climate change by the sun is that the 11-year solar cycle does not appear to have a great effect on climate. Modern climate analysis using satellite data since 1979 have covered almost four full solar cycles, and it is clear that the changes observed, although significant, are modest (Lean 2017; see Fig. 2.2). And no change is clear between cycles, much less a trend in any climate variable that would correlate to the trend in solar activity.

But solar activity also displays longer cycles. Solar cycles receive the name of important solar researchers. The 11-yr Schwabe cycle, the 22-yr Hale cycle, the 100-yr Feynman cycle, the 200-yr de Vries cycle, the 1000-yr Eddy cycle, and the 2500-yr Bray cycle have all been described in the scientific literature as having a climatic effect (see Vinós 2022, and references within). The 100-yr Feynman cycle is responsible for two 11-yr cycles with low activity in the early 1800s (cycles 5 & 6, 1798–1823), the early 1900s (cycles 14 & 15, 1902-1923) and the early 2000s (cycles 24 & 25, since 2008 and until c. 2030). The 200-yr de Vries cycle is responsible for the spacing of the Wolf, Spörer, and Maunder grand minima during the LIA. The 1000-yr Eddy cycle is responsible for the main climatic periods for the past 2000 years, the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages cold period (also known as the Late Antiquity Little Ice Age), the Medieval Warm Period, the LIA, and the Modern warm period that started c. 1850, with some anthropogenic contribution during the past seven decades.

From paleoclimatic studies the longer the solar cycle, the more profound its climatic effect. The biggest effect comes from the 2500-yr Bray cycle, the longest clearly discernible cycle in solar and climatic studies. This cycle, presented in Part II (Sect. 2.2), and Fig. 2.1, not only established the biological subdivisions of the Holocene (the Boreal, Atlantic, Sub-Boreal, and Sub-Atlantic periods), but also caused great periodic fluctuations in human populations of the past. As Bevan et al. (2017) say:

“We demonstrate multiple instances of human population downturn over the Holocene that coincide with periodic episodes of reduced solar activity and climate reorganization. … This evidence collectively suggests quasi-periodic solar forcing of atmospheric and oceanic circulation with wider climatic consequences.”

Those periodic episodes of human population downturn correspond in great part to the 2500-yr Bray cycle, as can be appreciated in Fig. 2.1 or in their figure 3. One can only imagine the kind of climatic effect of the 2500-yr Bray cycle to cause such downturns in human population.

It appears paradoxical that solar variability has almost no effect on the short term (the 11-year cycle), but a huge effect on the long term (the 2500-yr cycle). The WGK-h also provides an explanation for this cycle-length/climate-effect paradox. As shown in Fig. 5.3, solar activity is not the only modulator of MT. At least the QBO, ENSO, the stadium-wave oscillation, and volcanic eruptions act as modulators of MT, and therefore the effect on a particular year can be the opposite of what solar activity alone could dictate. On top of that during an average activity 11-yr solar cycle close to half of the years act in one direction and close to the other half in the opposite direction. The result is a moderate effect where causality is unclear.

The effect of the QBO and ENSO tends toward an average of nearly zero in a few years, and the multidecadal oscillation in a few decades. The longer the solar cycle the longer the period with low solar activity at its troughs. As we have seen, the biggest climatic effect is produced by continuous periods of decades when most of the years display low solar activity. The small increment in the large amount of energy that the planet loses at each winter pole during low solar years is cumulative, as with the increased energy retained by the rise in CO2. Progressively the planet loses more energy that it gains, and cools down. The longer the cycle, the longer the downturn, and the more profound the cooling. The areas in the MT main paths, particularly the North Atlantic region (including Europe and North America) cool first, longer, and more profoundly, but the energy drain affects the entire planet. And although the Arctic region initially warms due to a larger influx of energy from the enhanced MT, it eventually cools too, as the entire planet gets colder.

Climate is therefore not very sensitive to solar activity until several consecutive 11-yr cycles of consistently low or high solar activity cause the effect to raise above background noise. And then only if the multidecadal stadium-wave oscillation is not acting on MT in the opposite direction. Solar activity and the stadium-wave cooperated during the 1976–1997 climate phase to produce accelerated warming through a strong reduction in MT, that resulted in a long period of global wind stilling (McVicar & Roderik 2010; Zeng et al. 2019) for which no explanation has been provided until now. Since 1998 MT has increased, producing Arctic warming and a pause in global warming. The concatenation of two consecutive low solar activity cycles since 2008 and the approaching shift in the stadium-wave towards an AMO cooling phase, signaled by the recent cooling of the North Atlantic warming hole (46°N–62°N & 46°W–20°W; Latif et al. 2022), spells trouble for the CO2-hypothesis of climate change. The CO2 hypothesis projects accelerating warming for as long as atmospheric CO2 keeps rising. But natural climate change is cyclical, and the modern theory of climate change does not understand that.

In this part of the series, we have seen how changes in solar activity produce changes in climate by modulating the MT of energy towards the poles in a seasonally dependent manner. The result is that the Modern Solar Maximum has significantly contributed to modern global warming, and the current extended solar minimum is at least partially responsible for the ongoing reduced rate of global warming. But the sun’s role as a modulator of poleward energy transport cannot be deduced from first principles. The stratospheric ozone response to UV changes affects MT via the Charney-Drazin criterion, the Holton-Tan effect, and stratospheric-tropospheric coupling. All these atmospheric phenomena derive from observations, not theory. The IPCC considers that solar variability slightly affects climate through small changes in total incoming energy. The top-down mechanism acts through small UV changes that involve even less energy. The change in UV energy, transferred to stratospheric ozone, is partly converted to changes in wind speed. The energy to alter stratospheric circulation dynamics and, through coupling, tropospheric circulation is provided by atmospheric waves generated in the troposphere, not by incoming radiation from the sun. The WGK-h proposes that the energy that alters the climate as a response to solar changes is energy already in the climate system. Under low solar activity this energy is directed to the poles and radiated to space, cooling the planet, and under high activity it remains within the climate system longer, warming the planet. This unexpected energy bypass, that cannot be deduced from theory, is what made the solar-climate question unsolvable for so long. In the last part we will review the evidence that MT is the true climate control knob, and how it can explain the climate changes that have taken place on the planet from the early Eocene hothouse, 52 million years ago, to the present icehouse.