From CERES-Science

CERES Team

CERES co-team leader, Dr. Willie Soon was the keynote-speaker at the Clintel 5th Anniversary Congress on 18 June 2024. This is the recording of his speech. Below you can find a summary of his presentation and details on the peer-reviewed papers he referred to in the talk.

Summary of presentation

In this talk, Dr. Soon discussed major fundamental problems with the “detection and attribution” of global warming by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that the media doesn’t tell you about. The IPCC’s “detection and attribution” process is the entire basis for why the IPCC concluded (using computer models) that global warming is mostly human-caused. We discovered that the IPCC’s analysis was scientifically flawed because of major problems in (a) the thermometer record and (b) the total solar irradiance databases.

Dr. Soon explained that the current global temperature records adopted by the IPCC reports have been contaminated by urbanization biases. When we removed this major flaw, we created a rural-based temperature record that was then adopted for the revisit of the attribution problem. We found that IPCC’s approach in attribution was highly selective and rather non-scientific as proven in their recommendation of a single choice of the solar irradiance factor. In contrast, we showed that there were at least two dozen valid estimates of solar irradiance that were conveniently de-selected by the IPCC team. However, when one applies some of these solar irradiance estimates, we found that the rural-only temperature records can be explained mostly by the solar forcing factor.

This result directly challenges IPCC’s iconic statement that the warming observed since the 1950s were mainly human-caused.

The slides can be downloaded here:

Our peer-reviewed scientific papers mentioned in the talk

1. W. Soon, R. Connolly, M. Connolly, S.-I. Akasofu, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, A. Bianchini, W.M. Briggs, C.J. Butler, R.G. Cionco, M. Crok, A.G. Elias, V.M. Fedorov, F. Gervais, H. Harde, G.W. Henry, D.V. Hoyt, O. Humlum, D.R. Legates, A.R. Lupo, S. Maruyama, P. Moore, M. Ogurtsov, C. ÓhAiseadha, M.J. Oliveira, S.-S. Park, S. Qiu, G. Quinn, N. Scafetta, J.-E. Solheim, J. Steele, L. Szarka, H.L. Tanaka, M.K. Taylor, F. Vahrenholt, V.M. Velasco Herrera and W. Zhang (2023). “The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data”, Climate, 11(9), 179; https://doi.org/10.3390/cli11090179.
2. R. Connolly, W. Soon, M. Connolly, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, C.J. Butler, R.G. Cionco, A.G. Elias, V. Fedorov, H. Harde, G.W. Henry, D.V. Hoyt, O. Humlum, D.R. Legates, N. Scafetta, J.-E. Solheim, L. Szarka, V.M. Velasco Herrera, H. Yan and W.J. Zhang (2023). “Challenges in the detection and attribution of Northern Hemisphere surface temperature trends since 1850”. Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e. Supplementary Materials.
3. P. O’Neill, R. Connolly, M. Connolly, W. Soon, B. Chimani, M. Crok, R. de Vos, H. Harde, P. Kajaba, P. Nojarov, R. Przybylak, D. Rasol, Oleg Skrynyk, Olesya Skrynyk, P. Štěpánek, A. Wypych and P. Zahradníček (2022). Evaluation of the homogenization adjustments applied to European temperature records in the Global Historical Climatology Network dataset. Atmosphere 13(2), 285; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13020285.
4. G. Katata, R. Connolly and P. O’Neill (2023). Evidence of urban blending in homogenized temperature records in Japan and in the United States: implications for the reliability of global land surface air temperature data. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-22-0122.1.
5. R. Connolly, W. Soon, M. Connolly, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, C. J. Butler, R. G. Cionco, A. G. Elias, V. M. Fedorov, H. Harde, G. W. Henry, D. V. Hoyt, O. Humlum, D. R. Legates, S. Lüning, N. Scafetta, J.-E. Solheim, L. Szarka, H. van Loon, V. M. Velasco Herrera, R. C. Willson, H. Yan and W. Zhang (2021). How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate. Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 21, 131. https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/21/6/131. Supplementary Materials available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7088728.

Thanks to the camera crew organized by Clintel for their beautiful camerawork and video editing:

• Robbert Clignett: Camera en Montage
• Sylvester van Nieuwenhuijzen: Camera