PART-1: ZHARKOVA

The publisher, Scientific Reports is investigating how it came to publish a study suggesting that global warming is down to natural solar cycles. The paper was criticised by scientists for containing “very basic errors” about how Earth moves around the sun. The study was published online on 24 June by Scientific Reports, an open access journal run by Nature Research, which also lists the prestigious Nature journal among its titles. A spokesperson told New Scientist that it is aware of concerns raised over the paper, which was authored by four academics based at Northumbria University, the University of Bradford and the University of Hull, all in the UK, plus the Nasir al-Din al-Tusi Shamakhi Astrophysical Observatory in Azerbaijan. The authors suggest that Earth’s 1°C temperature rise over the past two centuries could largely be explained by the distance between Earth and the sun changing over time as the sun orbits around our solar system’s centre of mass {barycentre}. The phenomenon would see temperatures rise a further 3°C by 2600, they say.

The Ken Rice critique: It’s well known that the sun moves around the barycentre of the solar system due to the influence of the other solar system bodies, mainly Jupiter but this does not mean that this then leads to changes in the distance between the sun and the Earth. The claim that we will see warming in the coming centuries because the sun will move closer to the Earth as it moves around the solar system barycentre is very simply wrong. Ken Rice is urging the journal to withdraw the paper, and says it is embarrassing it was published.

Gavin Schmidt critique: The paper contains egregious errors. The sun-Earth distance does not vary with the motion of the sun-Earth system around the barycentre of the sun-Jupiter system, nor the sun-galactic centre system or any other purely mathematical reference point. The journal must retract the paper if it wants to retain any credibility.

Michael Brown, Monash University Australia critique: Lamented uncritical media coverage of the paper in Australia.

Valentina Zharkova responds: Following criticism of the paper, lead author Valentina Zharkova, of Northumbria University, described Ken Rice as a climate alarmist and reiterated that the close links between oscillations of solar baseline magnetic field, solar irradiance and temperature are established in our paper without any involvement of solar inertial motion. The publisher, Scientific Reports, says it has begun the process to investigate the paper it has published. “This process is ongoing and we cannot comment further at this stage”.

A REVIEW OF THE VARIOUS WORKS OF ZHARKOVA CRITICAL OF THE THEORY OF ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING BY WAY OF FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS WITH THE PROPOSITION THAT VARIATIONS IN GMST IS GOVERNED BY VARIATIONS IN SOLAR IRRADIANCE IS PRESENTED IN A RELATED POST: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/10/30/climate-wars/

HER HISTORY OF REPEATED FORECASTS OF THE COMING COOLING BASED ON A THEORY OF SOLAR OUTPUT VARIATION AS THE PRIMARY DRIVER OF EARTH’S TEMPERATURE HAS BEEN FALSIFIED BY HISTORY.

PART-2: THE CONNOLLYS

THE REPORT OF THE CONNOLLYS CERES RESEARCH IN CLIMATE DENIAL WEBSITES: A diverse expert panel of global scientists finds blaming climate change mostly on greenhouse gas emissions was premature. Their findings contradict the UN IPCC’s conclusion, which the study shows, is grounded in narrow and incomplete data about the Sun’s total solar irradiance. Most of the energy in the Earth’s atmosphere comes from the Sun. It has long been recognized that changes in the so-called “total solar irradiance” (TSI), i.e., the amount of energy emitted by the Sun, over the last few centuries, could have contributed substantially to recent climate change. However, this new study found that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only considered a small subset of the published TSI datasets when they were assessing the role of the Sun in climate change and that this subset only included “low solar variability” datasets. As a result, the IPCC was premature in ruling out a substantial role for the Sun in recent climate change.

WHAT THE CONNOLLYS RESEARCH PAPER SAYS

In this post, we briefly summarise some of the main findings of our 2015 paper with Dr. Willie Soon, “Re-evaluating the role of solar variability on Northern Hemisphere temperature trends since the 19th century”, that was published in the journal, Earth-Science Reviews. This summary is adapted from a similar post from 2019 on the CERES-science website.

In this post, we review how the UN’s highly influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that climate change since the 1950s is “mostly human-caused”. We argue that this conclusion was premature and scientifically unjustified. This essay was originally published on Medium.com on 23rd September, 2019.

It is widely believed that “90-95% of scientists agree on climate change”. This is technically true if you define “agree on climate change” to mean “agree that the climate is changing”. We would be included in that 90-95% of scientists. Indeed, the very subject of this website is about climate change. However, many people mistakenly assume that 90-95% of scientists agree that recent climate change is “mostly human-caused”. The reality is that there is a wide range of views among the scientific community about the causes of recent climate change. Many scientists agree with that view, but many do not! In this post, we explain how this mistaken idea became embedded in the public conscience, and what is known about the true views of the scientific community on climate change.

A SUMMARY OF THE CONNOLLY’S RESEARCH

WHAT IS BEING PRESENTED IN 2021 IS ALSO FOUND IN THEIR 2019 PAPER REVIEWED IN A RELATED POST ON THIS SITE: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/10/31/connolly/

THIS WORK IS SUMMARIZED BELOW

1. THE CLAIM IS THAT THEIR ANALYSIS SHOWS THAT THE GHG EFFECT OF CO2 THAT IS THE FOUNDATION OF THE THEORY OF ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT THE PRIMARY DRIVER OF GMST (GLOBAL MEAN SURFACE TEMPERATURE) AS CLAIMED BY CLIMATE SCIENCE. THEIR FINDINGS SHOW THAT VARIATIONS IN TSI (TOTAL SOLAR IRRADIANCE) DATA EXPLAINS THE WARMNG WITH AND WITHOUT THE GHG EFFECT AND THAT THEREFORE THE GHG EFFECT OF CO2 IS NOT A NECESSARY VARIABLE FOR THE UNDERSTANDING OF GLOBAL WARMING.
2. They found that in the study period 1881 to 2013, when the Hoyt & Schatten TSI {total solar irradiance} data are used in conjunction with CO2 forcing, TSI can explain the current warming with or without the CO2 effect with almost equal precision. Very high correlations of ρ≥0.7 are found for TSI alone against temperature. The authors of this post tested the validity of the correlation with detrended correlation analysis and found detrended correlations ≥0.45 with strong statistical significance. More importantly, the addition of CO2 forcing did not make a significant improvement in the correlation.
3. The results imply that long term temperature trends in surface temperature data are driven almost entirely by variability in total solar irradiance (TSI) when the Hoyt&Schatten proxy data are used. The dramatic difference between the Kopp&Lean and the Hoyt&Schatten TSI data are depicted in the chart above (Figure 16 in Scafetta and Willson 2014). The  greater variability of Hoyt&Schatten is able to explain the current warming event with greater precision than the Kopp&Lean TSI data and without the use of CO2 GHG forcing. The important contribution of this work to the AGW discussion is that it may encourage a greater attention to solar variability in the understanding of climate change that now relies on the Lacis principle that climate change can and must be understood solely in terms of fossil fuel emissions and CO2 forcing,   Related posts on this site are : [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK][LINK] [LINK] 
4. HOWEVER, THERE ARE TWO SIGNIFICANT WEAKNESSES IN THE WORK OF THE CONNOLLYS. First, it is important in the context of the data used in the study to pay attention to the issue of uncertainty in proxy paleo data in general and in reconstructions of TSI in particular. The large differences seen in the chart above between the Hoyt&Schatten and Kopp&Lean TSI proxy data are not anomalous but rather what one would normally expect in paleo proxy reconstructions. Therefore, that a single proxy reconstruction exists that supports the Connolly hypothesis requires confirmation with different proxy data sources. This aspect of proxies is a generic problem with paleo data that has been described most clearly by Professor Carl Wunsch [LINK].
5. Professor Wunsch writes that “Thousands of papers do document regional changes in proxy concentrations, but almost everything is subject to debate including, particularly, the age models, geographical integrity of regional data, and the meaning of the apparent signals that are often transformed in complicated ways on their way through the atmosphere and the ocean to the sediments. From one point of view, scientific communities without adequate data have a distinct advantage because they can construct interesting and exciting stories and rationalizations with little or no risk of observational refutation. Colorful, sometimes charismatic, characters come to dominate the field, constructing their interpretations of a few intriguing, but indefinite observations that appeal to their followers, and which eventually emerge as “textbook truths.” Therefore, although high correlations between TSI proxies and temperature have been shown with the Hoyt&Schatten proxy data, this relationship will gain greater credibility if it can be shown to exist in other proxies or in direct observations.
6. Yet another consideration is that the study examines five distinct regions with  mean temperature data for China, USA, the Arctic, the Northern Hemisphere, and sea surface temperature. AGW is a theory about global mean temperature and it would seem important that a test of that hypothesis should include a test of global mean temperature. Thus, in the selection of proxies to use and in the selection of regions to study, the methodology leaves open a possibility of data selection bias that would imply a circular reasoning issue in the form of the so called Texas Sharpshooter fallacy in the sense that data selection may have played a role in the success of the empirical test in proving what the authors had apparently set out to prove.

IN VIEW OF THE DATA AND METHODOLOGICAL WEAKNESSES NOTED ABOVE, THOUGH THIS WORK RAISES INTERESTING ISSUES THAT SHOULD BE LOOKED INTO, THE FINDINGS AS PRESENTED DO NOT SHOW THAT THE THEORY OF ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING BY WAY OF FOSSIL FUEL EMISSIONS HAS BEEN FALSIFIED. SPECIFICALLY, (FIRST): THE UNCERTAINTY IN TSI RECONSTRUCTIONS REQUIRES VERIFICATION OF THE FINDINGS WITH MULTIPLE SOURCES OF THIS DATA. AND (SECOND): THE PROPOSED RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TSI AND GMST MUST BE ESTABLISHED AGAINST GLOBAL MEAN SURFACE TEMPERATURE AND NOT AGAINST SELECTED REGIONS WHERE A GOOD CORRELATION IS FOUND.