Dr. Willie Soon's keynote speech for Clintel's 5th anniversary (2024) – Watts Up With That?

From CERES Science

Ceres Team

Dr. Willie Soon, CERES co-team leader, was the keynote speaker at the conference Clintell 5th Anniversary Conference June 18, 2024. Below you can find an abstract of his talk as well as details of the peer-reviewed papers he mentioned in his talk.

Speech summary

In this lecture, Dr. Soon discussed the major fundamental issues of “detection and attribution” of global warming. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) What the media doesn’t tell you about. The IPCC's “detection and attribution” process is the entire basis for the IPCC's conclusion (using computer models) that global warming is primarily caused by man-made causes. We find the IPCC's analysis to be scientifically flawed because of significant problems with (a) thermometer records and (b) the total solar irradiance database.

Dr Soon explained that the current global temperature records used in the IPCC report are contaminated by urbanization bias. As we eliminated this significant flaw, we created a rural-based temperature record that was then used to revisit the attribution issue. We find that the IPCC's attribution approach is highly selective and rather unscientific, as evidenced by their recommendation for a single choice of solar irradiance factor. In comparison, we found at least two dozen valid solar irradiance estimates that were easily canceled by the IPCC team. However, when one applies some of these solar irradiance estimates, we find that the temperature record in rural areas only is largely explained by solar forcing factors.

The results directly challenge the IPCC's landmark statement that the warming observed since the 1950s is largely human-caused.

Slides are available for download here:

Our peer-reviewed scientific papers mentioned in the presentation

1. W. Soon, R. Connolly, M. Connolly, S.-I. Akasofu, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, A. Bianchini, WM Briggs, CJ Butler, RG Cionco, M. Crok, AG Elias, VM Fedorov, F. Gervais, H. Harde, GW Henry, DV 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, HL Tanaka, MK Taylor, F. Vahrenholt, VM Velasco Herrera, and W. Zhang (2023). “Detecting and attributing Northern Hemisphere land surface warming from anthropogenic and natural sources (1850-2018): the challenge of insufficient data”, climate,11(9),179; https://doi.org/10.3390/cli11090179.
2. R. Connolly, W. Soon, M. Connolly, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, CJ Butler, RG Cionco, AG Elias, V. Fedorov, H. Harde, GW Henry, DV Hoyt, O. Humlum, DR 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”. Astronomy and Astrophysics Research. https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e. additional 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 application of homogenization adjustments to European temperature records in the Global Historical Climatology Network dataset. atmosphere 13(2), 285; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13020285.
4. Katata, G., Connolly, R., & O'Neill, P. (2023). Evidence for urban mixing in homogeneous temperature records in Japan and the United States: Implications for the reliability of global 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, CJ Butler, RG Cionco, AG Elias, VM Fedorov, H. Harde, GW Henry, DV Hoyt, O. Humlum, DR Legates, S , Lüning, N. Scafetta, J.-E. Solheim, L. Szarka, H. van Loon, VM Velasco Herrera, RC Willson, H. Yan and W. Zhang (2021). How much influence does the sun have on temperature trends in the Northern Hemisphere? An ongoing debate. Astronomy and Astrophysics Research21, 131. https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/21/6/131. Supplementary information is available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7088728.

Thanks to the film crew organized by Clintel for the beautiful photography and video editing:

• Robert Crenit: Cinematography and Editing
• Sylvester van Nieuwenhuijzen: Camera

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