Nature dominates climate

by Richard Schulman

Recent studies are reinforcing the view that nature still dominates climate, not the CO2 generated by human combustion of fossil fuels. The studies center around two questions:

1. Can the warming that has taken place since the 19^th century be explained by natural causes rather than CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion?
2. If CO2 is having an effect on global temperatures, how powerful is that effect (the sensitivity debate)?

Progressive media and politicians have turned themselves into an anti-science party by doing everything they can to suppress public discussion of non-conforming climate studies that address these two questions. Their endlessly repeated refrain is that “the science is settled.” They haven’t the slightest knowledge or interest in the ferment among those climate scientists whose commitment is to science rather than partisan politics.

A multi-disciplinary challenge

Understanding the earth’s climate in a way that explains its changes over the several billion years of the planet’s history requires technical expertise in multiple fields. No single scientist can claim expertise in all these fields, which is why debate, collaboration, and exchange of ideas between different disciplines is essential — just what the anti-science Progressives are against.

It would have been better if politicians had left the scientists undisturbed for several decades to sort out the issues, but that is not the reality that Progressives have forced on the public. Despite the technical challenges, citizens must inform themselves of the scientific issues or be punished by electing ignorant politicians who will destroy the economy with quack trillion dollar alternate energy programs.

For this reason, we summarize here a few of the significant climate papers published in recent years.

Kauppinen and Malmi

Jyrki Kauppinen and Pekka Malmi, Finnish scientists based in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Turku, argue in a 2019 paper that there is no experimental evidence for significant anthropogenic climate change. The general circulation models models used in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report 5 (AR5), they write, fail to take into account the important influence on climate of low cloud cover and its variations. Having left out the important low-cloud effects, the IPCC models have “to use a very large [CO2] sensitivity to compensate [for] a too small natural component.” Furthermore, the IPCC scientists “have to leave out the strong negative [i.e., cooling] feedback due to the clouds in order to magnify the sensitivity.” The paper goes on to argue that “the low cloud cover fraction” the IPCC omitted “practically control[s] the global temperature.”

The Kauppinen and Malmi paper implicitly supports the work of Danish climate scientist Henrik Svensen and his collaborators.

Zharkova, Shepherd, and Popova

Valentina Zharkova, a professor of mathematics at Northumbria University with a PhD in astrophysics, joined by collaborators in the UK and Russia, published in Scientific Reports a highly original 2019 paper on solar physics, planetary movements, and their relationship to climate on earth. While it has been known for centuries that there is a connection between periodic sunspot activity and temperature on earth, the connection seemed to break down in the recent (approximately) eleven-year sunspot cycles, in particular in cycle 24. The Zharkova et al paper (version 2) provides an explanation of this and much more:

Recently discovered long-term oscillations of the solar background magnetic field associated with double dynamo waves generated in inner and outer layers of the Sun indicate that the solar activity is heading in the next three decades (2019-2055) to a modern grand minimum similar to Maunder.

Why the Modern Minimum won’t be so cold

The Maunder Minimum occurred in the years 1645-1715 and featured unusually cold winters in Europe, including the freezing over of the Thames. But the Zharkova paper does not predict a similar cooling in the 2019-2055 period — because the new minimum we are now entering is embedded within a longer cycle characterized by increasing total solar radiance (TSI):

[A] reconstruction of solar total irradiance suggests that since the Maunder minimum there is an increase in the cycle-averaged total solar irradiance (TSI) by a value of about 1 to 1.5 Watt per square meter closely correlated with an increase of the baseline (average) terrestrial temperature.

The 350-400 year “grand” cycle that produced the 1645-1715 Maunder Minimum (and the new Minimum that started last year) are embedded within a larger “super grand” cycle of 1950 plus or minus 50 years. That cycle is predicted to feature an increase in solar activity that will attain its maximum at 2700 A.D., to be followed by a decrease and minimum at 3700 A.D., the authors write.

The magnetic double dynamo

The cycles reflect changes in solar activity in the sun’s interior, producing “double dynamo [magnetic] waves generated in [the] inner and outer layers of the sun.” To verify the existence of these cycles and their duration, the authors tracked the double dynamo waves for the last one hundred thousand years. They confirmed three cycles that describe the sun’s changing irradiance and its effects on earth’s climate. These cycles are

• the eleven (and twenty-two) year “sunspot” cycle, which have been recognized for centuries;
• a 350-400 year grand cycle; and
• an approximately 1,950-year super-grand cycle.

Additionally, the authors observe that

These oscillations of the baseline solar magnetic field are found associated with a long-term solar inertial motion about the barycenter [center of gravity] of the solar system and closely linked to an increase of solar irradiance and terrestrial temperature in the past two centuries. This trend is anticipated to continue in the next five centuries that can lead to a further natural increase of the terrestrial temperature by 2.5 degrees C.

So it should be getting warmer in the coming years and centuries, modulated by the two shorter cycles, but this will have nothing to do with fossil-fuel CO2.

What causes the third, “super grand” cycle?

The authors note that the

The 11 year solar cycle and 350-400 year grand cycle are well accounted for by the solar dynamo waves generated dipole magnetic sources in [the sun’s] inner and outer layers. They can explain the magnetic field oscillations with a grand cycle by the beating effects of the two waves generated [in] these two layers. However, it is rather difficult to find any mechanism in the solar interior that can explain much weaker and longer oscillations of the baseline of magnetic field. Therefore, we need to look for some external reasons for these oscillations.

They find this in the sun’s motion about the solar system’s barycenter. Specifically, they argue that the planets perturb the outer layer of the solar dynamo, leading to “dynamo waves in this outer layer with the frequency slightly different from that in the inner layer, and, thus to the beating effects caused by interference of these two waves.” This aligns Zharkova et al.’s grand and super-grand cycles with research published in 2012 by Abreu and others. The latter researchers “suggested that the tidal forces of large planets can excite gravity waves” in the sun. Using beryllium or carbon isotope dating “of terrestrial proxies to derive the various periods of solar and terrestrial activity,” they found periods close to the 370 and 2200 years found by Zharkova and collaborators.

Progressive rejection

Both the Kauppinen and Malmi paper and the just-discussed Zharkova et al. paper elicited the usual shrill denunciations by the alarmist community. The Kauppinen and Malmi paper was scorned for being a preprint rather than peer-reviewed and for not including the data on which its conclusions were based. But that data was referenced in previous papers of the authors which the preprint duly footnoted.

The Zharkova et al. paper could not similarly be dismissed as a preprint. But on the pretext of a minor error — an error that would normally have been handled in the correspondence section of a non-politicized journal, the editors of Scientific Reports retracted the article. Nature, the publisher of Scientific Reports, is notorious for its wall-to-wall support of pro-warmist news and research. Zharkova and two of her three collaborators strongly protested the editor’s retraction.

The recent papers of the two teams discussed above strongly complement the once also denounced but now more widely accepted cosmic cloud theory of Henrik Svensen, Nir Shaviv, and collaborators. The cosmic cloud theory’s strength is in explaining the earth’s major climate epochs and in filling in a major shortcoming — cloud cover — in the IPCC models. In Svensmark’s theory, cosmic rays originating outside the solar system impinge strongly upon the lower earth’s atmosphere, triggering cloud formation which reflects solar energy back into space. But when the sun is highly active, producing the double magnetic dynamo that Zharkova et al discuss, fewer cosmic rays reach the lower atmosphere. Clouds become scarce and the climate turns warmer.

An earlier, more open NASA

NASA — like Nature now dominated by warmist zealots — in a more open-minded earlier period published a paper also acknowledging a natural, not CO2, basis to the general warming tendencies of recent decades. Here is a Science Daily report on an important 2003 NASA study:

Since the late 1970s, the amount of solar radiation the sun emits, during times of quiet sunspot activity, has increased by nearly .05 percent per decade, according to a NASA funded study.

“This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change,” said Richard Willson, a researcher affiliated with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s Earth Institute, New York. He is the lead author of the study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters.

“Historical records of solar activity indicate that solar radiation has been increasing since the late 19th century. If a trend, comparable to the one found in this study, persisted throughout the 20th century, it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years,” he said.

Temperature records for the recent decades are themselves sometimes in dispute as to direction and extent, but even if we accept IPCC claims, clearly there are strong reasons for believing that the major influences on that warming are natural, not anthropogenic, and come from cycles in the solar irradiance and magnetic activity of the sun, influencing the cloud cover produced by the presence or absence of cosmic rays reaching the lower atmosphere.

Other studies indicating that nature dominates climate

For reasons of space and the understandable time budgets of readers, we have not touched on papers discussing many other natural influences on climate, short and long term: oceanic oscillations, plate tectonics, nearby supernovae, volcanic activity, and natural changes in vegetation. Human activity also changes the planetary landscape with effects on climate that are not based on fossil-fuel combustion.

IPCC-allied climate investigators also sometimes conflate gases of natural origin — methane and water vapor — with anthropogenic CO2. This error is made worse by the fact that both methane and water vapor are far more powerful greenhouse gases than CO2.

As the papers discussed above suggest, the IPCC models come up with high estimates of climate sensitivity to increased CO2 because they by error or design leave out the natural causes of the past two centuries’ warming.

So, at the very least, the scientific debate is far from over, and those who claim that it is — the Progressives — are the enemies of science, the modern equivalents of Trofim Lysenko.

Corrections. 4/17/2020: The erroneous reference to John Thomas Scopes in the last sentence has been deleted.