by Cliff Mass, June 17, 2017
Should scientists and the media exaggerate the current and future impact of human-forced global warming to encourage people “to do the right thing”?
A number of scientists and media folks believe the answer is yes.
For me, the answer is an emphatic no, for reasons I will explain below. Let’s consider some of the arguments for and against and you can decide for yourself
by David Whitehouse, Financial Post, June 22, 2017
Some are adamant that the “hiatus” does not and never has existed, and will never change their minds. But the evidence is irrefutable. As a large number of influential climate scientists have just said in the journal Nature Geoscience, since the turn of the century there has been a substantial slowdown in warming that computer climate models did not predict or can explain. In fact, such models predict a warming twice that observed.
by P. Gosselin from F. Bosse and F. Vahrenholt, June 18, 2017
In May the sun was very quiet as sunspot number was a mere 18.8, which is only 36% of what is typical for the month this far into the cycle. Seven days saw no sunspot activity at all.
The following chart shows the current cycle, Solar Cycle 24 (red), compared to the mean of the previous cycles (blue) and the similarly behaving SC 5 (black).
It’s clear that the current cycle is significantly weaker than the mean and far weaker than the cycles we saw throughout most of the warming 20th century.