{"id":182559,"date":"2015-08-11T19:13:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-12T00:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/08\/11\/another-climate-change-denial-talking-point-bites-the-dust\/"},"modified":"2015-08-11T19:13:00","modified_gmt":"2015-08-12T00:13:00","slug":"another-climate-change-denial-talking-point-bites-the-dust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/08\/11\/another-climate-change-denial-talking-point-bites-the-dust\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Climate Change Denial Talking Point Bites the Dust\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that the evidence that we are in a period of some sort of freakishly high sunspot activity <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2015\/08\/10\/iau_told_no_sunspots_dont_drive_climate_change\/\">is just an artifact of how counting was modernized in 1947<\/a>, which means that suggesting that it&#8217;s all sunspots is a load of bunk:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">A bunch of boffins has completed the first-ever revision of the world&#8217;s most important sunspot data repository, along the way challenging the theory that climate change is substantially attributable to the prevalence of sunspots.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">It turns out, in fact, that the pro-sunspots argument relies on a statistical artefact introduced in 1947 and not corrected until this year.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">While the change officially took place in July, rendering obsolete the data that climate deniers use to \u201cprove\u201d that it&#8217;s sunspots driving global warming rather than CO2, it came to prominence at the end of last week in a presentation to the International Astronomical Union&#8217;s current general assembly in Hawaii.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The most important correction to come out of the new data, the Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations (SILSO) project says, is \u201ca lowering by about 18% of all numbers after 1947, to remove the bias produced by a new counting method started in 1947 in Z\u00fcrich\u201d.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">As SILSO <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sidc.be\/press\/01\/welcome.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">explains<\/a>,  the sunspot data set (which, courtesy of Galileo (the man, not the  spacecraft), stretches back 400 years) was first collected into an index  by Rudolph Wolf in 1849. Startlingly, SILSO says, \u201cthis series was left  unchanged since its creation \u2026 without any backward verification\u201d.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The adoption of the new Sunspot Number doesn&#8217;t change our  understanding of the Maunder Minimum, the low sunspot activity period  between 1645 and 1715 that coincided with the \u201cLittle Ice Age\u201d.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">However,  the recalibration does overturn a previous consensus that the data set  showed a 300-year upward trend in sunspot activity, culminating in a  \u201cgrand maximum\u201d in the 20th century.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">As <i>Physicsworld<\/i> <a href=\"http:\/\/physicsworld.com\/cws\/article\/news\/2015\/aug\/07\/new-sunspot-analysis-shows-rising-global-temperatures-not-linked-to-solar-activity\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">says<\/a>, the dataset \u201cnullifies the claim that there has been a modern grand maximum\u201d.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In response, I expect some right wing nut-job state Attorney General to subpoena scientists private communications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that the evidence that we are in a period of some sort of freakishly high sunspot activity is just an artifact of how counting was modernized in 1947, which means that suggesting that it&#8217;s all sunspots is a load of bunk: A bunch of boffins has completed the first-ever revision of the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1054,1154,978,1069],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropogenic-climate-change","category-astronomy","category-politics","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182559"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}