The National Post’s Denier king Larry Solomon is once more inventing climate change denial where there is none – once more straining a thin thread of “science” well past the breaking point in an effort to argue that the sun, rather than CO2, is the major cause of global warming.
In this, the 14th edition of his series, The Deniers, Solomon heralds the work of Dr. Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Solanki turns out to be another in a long line of Solomon’s scientists who do not, in fact, deny that CO2 is the culprit for climate change.
Still, even as he acknowledges Solanki’s true position in the fine print, Solomon’s headline remains: “The Heat is in the Sun. ” Solomon also argues the case for solar forcing with this: “Dr. Solanki shows an almost perfect correlation between solar cycles and air temperatures over the land masses in the Northern hemisphere, going back to the mid 19th century.”
Well, in addition to being almost perfect, the correlation ended with a resounding crash in 1980 as solar cycles went down and warming went up. In the meantime, we have passed more than a quarter century during which we have recorded 19 of the hottest years in recorded history.
I have to say that Solomon periodically includes enough information in his articles to allow a determined reader to discern the truth. But that doesn’t seem to be his aim. Rather, his arguments are constructed to lead readers away from facts that the best climate scientists in the world find obvious and into a cloudy morass of conjecture. And when that doesn’t seem to be working well enough, Solomon is capable of just misrepresenting the truth entirely.
