Photo CreditHommie09

The Sun’s influence on our planet cannot be overstated—it is the life source of us all, what keeps us warm and the Earth from freezing into a ball of ice. It’s no wonder that it is the primary driver of climate change, though environmentalists and the media, caught up with blaming humans for a climate catastrophe, have lost sight of the obvious.

Fortunately, Dr. Willie Soon has recently released a captivating 12-minute video with Gorilla Science that gives viewers a basic understanding of the Sun’s influence on the climate. Dr. Soon is an Independent Scientist at the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences, who specializes in studying solar and stellar activity as it relates to the Earth’s climate.

Let’s explore some highlights from the video to get a better understanding of topics that are often misrepresented by the media.

Dr. Soon starts out the video with the simple statement: “Anyone who says that the science is settled when it comes to the climate is lying.” The climate is a chaotic system that is extremely difficult to model. Even something as simple sounding as clouds can be impossible to properly calculate. We are only just beginning to understand how the vast natural forces on the planet and the solar system have affected the climate over Earth’s history.

The Earth’s climate has been changing “for millions of years, long before there were humans driving Honda Civics and using food blenders,” Dr. Soon tells us. We have seen glaciers covering vast amounts of the planet, and times when there were jungles at the poles. The following graph from the CO₂ Coalition of temperature over time, covering the past 4,000 years, puts the relatively small changes we are witnessing today into stark perspective.

Dr. Soon goes on to explain how clouds affect the climate. There has been less cloud cover over the past four decades, resulting in more sunlight reaching the Earth, and hence, warmer temperatures. This is likely the cause of the small temperature rise we have seen in recent decades.

The Sun is a dynamic system, “a multi-billion years’ nuclear explosion,” Dr. Soon tells us, “predictable in some ways but not in others.” Solar activity changes over multiple timescales: daily, yearly, over decades, and even thousands of years. These solar cycles have a clear impact on the Earth’s climate. In his research, Dr. Soon has found that temperature matches closely with solar activity over the decades rather than carbon dioxide (CO₂). However, publicizing these results leads to significant push-back from the “climate industry.” Dr. Soon has received endless criticism due to his scientific findings and was ordered not to talk to the media about his results.

This deliberate, irrational silencing of climate scientists is one of the reasons the scare has persisted for decades. If we had a more open environment of questioning data, presenting new results, and properly analysing the alternatives—all basic practices in science that are unfortunately not adhered to when politics steps in—we could have killed the climate scare much earlier.

Dr. Soon also explores how the temperature record has been adjusted to show a steep warming trend in recent decades. This manipulation of data, while much of it has been debunked, has not been properly corrected in the public eye. Most people still believe the graphs showing a sharp rise, a “hockey stick,” accurately represent temperature data.

The following graph is what the government wants us to believe with respect to temperature and solar activity. This graph was produced by the NASA press office. They claim that this illustrates that we are witnessing a sharp rise in temperature (red) that does not follow solar activity (yellow). Hence, CO₂ is the culprit, they say! 

https://science.nasa.gov/resource/graphic-temperature-vs-solar-activity/

It is this graph that has been misleading the public for years. It ignores the urban heat island effect, which is when cities and towns have higher temperatures due to the warming effects of asphalt, air conditioners, and other devices. To correct for this effect, it is important to use temperature readings from rural thermometers. If those temperatures are used, the following graph is obtained.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012825215300349

This is certainly not the sharp rise in temperature prominently touted as evidence of human-induced warming. We have also found that this temperature record doesn’t match well with the CO₂ output. CO₂ rose slowly up to the 1940s, whereas temperatures rose relatively sharply in the rural temperature record. “CO₂ couldn’t possibly have caused this temperature rise,” Dr. Soon says. But then, when CO₂ began to rise quickly after the 1940s, temperatures fell.

Since then, temperatures have risen, but not drastically. As we have seen in the graph above, current temperatures in the US are about the same as they were in the 1940s. Since CO₂ isn’t responsible for these temperature changes, what is? It’s the Sun!

Looking further into the graph produced by the NASA press office (above), other NASA scientists revealed in a paper published in the journal Remote Sensing that the solar activity they displayed is not based on real satellite data but is a “model construction.” Yet climate models have repeatedly been inaccurate and unable to properly model the climate. The authors instead introduced a well-respected record of solar variation over the past three hundred years and compared it to the rural temperature record. As seen in the graph below from Dr. Soon, with red indicating solar activity and blue temperature, the two lines follow very closely throughout the 1900s and early 2000s.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012825215300349

Similar patterns can be seen in other countries and on different time scales. Dr. Soon has written several papers on this correlation, one of which can be seen here.

Dr. Soon concludes, “There is no way that rising CO₂ can explain temperature changes on the Earth over the past century and a half.” Rather, “Temperature changes over the past 120 years have the fingerprints of the Sun.”

To recap the video’s key points:

1. Our understanding of climate is limited. It is an extremely complex science.
2. Earth’s climate has been changing for millions of years, well before humans developed.
3. Less cloud cover leads to higher temperatures due to increased solar radiation at the surface.
4. Temperatures on Earth match closely with solar activity over the decades rather than CO₂.
5. Evidence has been suppressed by leading authorities when scientists’ findings did not adhere to politically correct narratives.

I encourage you to watch Dr. Soon’s 12-minute video in full, learning about his research into the Sun in an easily accessible and at times humorous presentation, perfect for sharing with friends and family. Hopefully, you’ll convince them that there is much more to the story than the narrative of climate doom that we hear from the government and media!

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Tom Harris is Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition - Canada. Mary-Jean Harris, BSc, MSc Physics, contributed to this article.