By Paul Homewood
Reports on global warming issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) underestimate the role of the Sun in the warming process while falsely laying blame on human beings, according to a study published last month.
In 2021, Ronan Connolly, a scientist at the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Science (CERES), and his colleagues published a review raising concerns about multiple reports issued by the IPCC. The IPCC reports concluded that global warming since the mid-20th century was essentially human-driven, dismissing natural causes behind the process. The 2021 review was disputed in a 2022 article by two climate researchers who claimed that the review was “flawed,” that it “should not be treated as credible,” and that the IPCC’s decision to rule out solar activity as a major driver behind climate change “remains intact.”
In a Sept. 27 study published in IOP Science, a team of 20 climate researchers led by Mr. Connolly sought to debunk the 2022 article and reaffirm the 2021 review. It found that the IPCC may have “substantially underestimated the role of the Sun in global warming,” according to a recent post by CERES.
The 2021 review noted that the IPCC reports had two major flaws:
- For their analysis, the IPCC reports used global surface temperature data that was “contaminated by urban warming biases,” meaning that only temperature records from urban regions were considered. Urban areas tend to be warmer than the countryside due to human activity and various structures. Though urban areas only represent a small percentage of land, these places make up the majority of thermometer records used in estimating global temperatures.
- The IPCC reports used only a small data set from a large pool of data related to Total Solar Irradiance (TSI), which measures the radiant energy emitted by the sun falling on Earth’s atmosphere. And this small data set used by IPCC mostly came to two conclusions—there have been very few TSI changes over the past centuries or that TSI has slightly decreased since the 1950s.
By analyzing data showing a rise in temperatures in urban regions and little to no change in Total Solar Irradiance, the IPCC reports blamed human activity for global warming, dismissing the sun’s role in the process.
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