Climate Feedback Fact Checks CO2 Coalition

by A. May, Apr 17, 2022 in WUWT


The Climate Feedback website critiques my CO2Coalition article “Attributing global warming to humans.”Their factcheck is here. Like most “fact checks” these days it is a thinly disguised opinion piece. The statement that they claim is incorrect is:

“There is no evidence, other than models, that human CO2 emissions drive climate change and abundant evidence that the Sun, coupled with natural climate cycles, drives most, if not all, of recent climate changes, as described in Connolly, et al., 2021.” [emphasis added]

They cleverly leave out the last phrase: “as described in Connolly, et al., 2021,” and then immediately assert “Solar irradiance has had a negligible impact on Earth’s climate since the industrial era.” This is followed by no evidence other than an appeal to the mythical “consensus.”

Later in the article, they say Connolly, et al. uses simple linear regression to establish a link between solar irradiance and surface temperature. Connolly, et al. does not state that the Sun controls the climate or that humans do, it simply shows that, using available evidence, solar variability (actually TSI, or Total Solar Irradiance variability) could account for anywhere from 0 to 100% of the warming since the Little Ice Age (the so-called “pre-industrial” era). One of the main points of Connolly, et al. is that the IPCC and the so-called “consensus” are ignoring two critical areas of current research. First, they ignore the uncertainty in our estimate of surface warming since the Little Ice Age, and second, they ignore the considerable uncertainty in solar-variability-long-term trends, both recently and since the Little Ice Age. As they state in the paper, the amount of 20th century warming that can be simulated as due to solar variability, depends upon the surface temperature dataset and the solar TSI model used. There are many versions of both. Suffice it to say, while the exact influence of human activities and solar variability on climate change are both unknown, no one can claim solar influence is negligible. The correct answer is we don’t know.

Is the third La Niña on the way?

by Dr R. Maue, Apr 16, 2022 in NoTricksZone


It was supposed to be a groundbreaking forecast, the early prediction of the weather phenomena El Niño and La Niña. Both affect the weather in very different ways.

It would have been so nice to know a year in advance what conditions would prevail at a later date. On November 4, 2019, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published what was held as groundbreaking news. Thanks to its new algorithms and a lot of computing power, it was now possible to predict an El Niño or a La Niña a long time in advance. The hit rate was supposed to be 80%.

Unfortunately, one year later exactly the opposite of what was predicted in fact happened, the German Klimaschau reported. Science is settled? Well, maybe not.

Since then, things have been quiet about these PIK long-term forecasts. The US agency NOAA is much more cautious, both in terms of the long term and the probability of occurrence. Perhaps they don’t have as good algorithms and the computing power that Potsdam has? In any case on Twitter, US meteorologist Ryan Maue sees a good chance that a third will follow the two recent consecutive La Niñas.

The last time this happened was 22 years ago at the turn of the millennium.