Abstract

When Lockwood and Froehlich go on to say that the intensification of solar activity seen in the past hundred years has now ended, we don't disagree with that. We part company only when they say that temperatures have gone on shooting up, so that the recent rise can't have anything to do with the Sun, or with cosmic rays modulated by the Sun.

AR4 ANALYSIS SERIES Supplementary Analysis Paper #2 Solar Changes and the Climate

Abstract

It is often said that there is a scientific “consensus” to the effect that climate change will be “catastrophic” and that, on this question, “the debate is over”. The present paper will demonstrate that the claim of unanimous scientific “consensus” was false, and known to be false, when it was first made; that the trend of opinion in the peer-reviewed journals and even in the UN’s reports on climate is moving rapidly away from alarmism; that, among climate scientists, the debate on the causes and extent of climate change is by no means over; and that the evidence in the peer-reviewed literature conclusively demonstrates that, to the extent that there is a “consensus”, that “consensus” does not endorse the notion of “catastrophic” climate change.

The June 11^th issue of the U.K.’s The Independent contained a story written by Andrew Gumble titled “The Wrath of 2007: America’s great drought.” The story leads “America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still.”

Or, more accurately, perhaps not.

SIR JOHN HOUGHTON, who was co-chairman of the IPCC Scientific Assessment working group from 1988 to 2002, and Director General of the UK Meteorological Office from 1983 to 1991 has recently posted on the Web a blog attacking The Great Global Warming Swindle, a programme broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK on 8 and 12 March 2007. Sir John’s attack was inaccurate and unfair. The offending passages are here presented seriatim, with explanations of Sir John’s many mistakes in each passage.