The Martlet

There is a saying attributed to the Buddha: “these three things cannot be hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth.”

Yet one of the most common fabrications found in the climate change misinformation campaign has to do with the sun — that the recent warming trend can be explained by changes in solar irradiance.

The hope is that by confusing the public as to whether or not global warming is due to natural causes, the legislation governing greenhouse gas emissions can be delayed. This delay allows business as usual — or rather, emissions as usual — in the face of overwhelming evidence linking mankind’s actions to the warming climate.

Luckily, despite being one of the more common pieces of disinformation, it’s also one of the easiest to discredit. And the easiest way to do this is to simply look at the solar irradiation measurements themselves.

We have been measuring solar irradiation by satellite since 1979 and, though solar output has cycled up and down over this period, it has shown no overall increase.

When the satellite data is contrasted with the global temperature (see graphic), it’s pretty clear that changes in solar irradiation are not responsible for the recent warming.

The graph is of total solar irradiance (sun rays) and the global land-ocean temperature index (waves crashing against shoreline) from 1980 to 2006. You can see the correlation.

We don’t see the warming pattern that we would expect were the warming due to a change in the sun’s output.

We see more warming at the poles than at the equator, we see the same warming at night as during the day and we see more warming during the winter than during the summer.

In addition, instead of warming uniformly as one would expect due to changes in solar irradiance cycles, the stratosphere is cooling while the troposphere is warming. All of these observations add up to form a pretty clear acquittal of solar cycles in global warming.

Perhaps the oddest part about blaming climate change on solar irradiance is the inference that the global community of researchers, working over decades on this problem (and including solar output in their models the whole time) somehow didn’t think to consider the sun.

Such a proposition is insulting to the scientists and doubly insulting to the general public, who are assumed gullible enough to buy such a tale.

When the data is presented, the lack of a connection between solar irradiance trends and the recent warming trend is quite clear for all to see.

At the end of the day, the truth about the sun and global warming cannot be hidden.