Statistics

Soon & Briggs: Sunspots do impact climate

Had you thought I had forgotten about the doom that awaits us once global warming strikes (it’s on it’s way!)? I had not. Today’s post is at the Washington Times:

SOON AND BRIGGS: Global-warming fanatics take note
Sunspots do impact climate

Scientists have been studying solar influences on the climate for more than 5,000 years.

Chinese imperial astronomers kept detailed sunspot records. They noticed that more sunspots meant warmer weather. In 1801, the celebrated astronomer William Herschel (discoverer of the planet Uranus) observed that when there were fewer spots, the price of wheat soared. He surmised that less light and heat from the sun resulted in reduced harvests.

Read the rest here.

Two cautious reminders: editorial writers do not write their titles and editorials nearly always suffer curiously placed wordectomies.

Update A third reminder: First one to scream “peer review!” loses 20 points, unless he also yelled it each time Jim Hansen or some other this-is-the-end-unless-we-give-government-lots-of-our-money guy published an op ed or blog post. Fair’s fair, you know.

Categories: Statistics

13 replies »

  1. Leif Svalgaard seems to take great exception to your solar radiation curve.

    He’s extremely up in arms about it. What do you have to say about what he says, mr Briggs?

  2. Luis,

    Asked Soon. He said “we can make this independent of any TSI curve. I really meant it when I said, we got evidence for Arctic, China and USA temperatures to very co-varying somewhat similarly.” I’ve seen several of these other plots and can verify. For instance, we sent four to the Washington Times; they printed just the one. Willie and I are hunting around for other outlets (with more exposure than this small blog) to show the others.

    Willie also asks, in the proper spirit, “Svalgaard knew his curve is correct?”

  3. Fair is fair, so I will not scream (or even whisper) p**r r****w, but it sure would be helpful if you could put your data and methods out there before writing op-eds. For example, Leif’s criticism amounts to painting in his preferred TSI curve using the same scale for TSI as your plot, whereas I suspect it would be more in the spirit of what you did to rescale his TSI (and maybe even compute a moving decadal average of his TSI curve and then rescale). But without the details we are left helpless.

  4. Dr.Briggs,

    I’ve been having a running argument with Leif Svalgaard at WUWT over your article with Dr.Willie Soon. Leif is calling your integrity to question because you lent your name to this ” flawed ” paper without doing due diligence, it seems. I pointed out that if that is his criteria for lack of integrity then the same should apply to him also as in the same thread, he selectively quoted my posts without reading the whole post and assimilating it.

  5. I respect Briggs and I respect Svalgard. I see a good healthy scientific debate going on. However, Leif is bordering on name calling at the WUWT site (to be fair there are some folks being unnecessarily rough on him). Whether Leif’s or Brigg’s science on this particular issue is right or wrong, at least they agree CAGW is not the answer. On this solar influence issue and for what my opinion is worth, Leif has not convinced me and Brigg’s arguments make more sense to me.

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