A headline in the far-right culty conspiracy site Epoch Times recently proclaimed that a study found the “Sun -- not CO2-- may be behind global warming.” A similar story ran in the oft-viral but rarely-right electroverse, also suggesting that really it’s the sun that’s causing climate change.
A commenter at the electroverse site named “Jack,” however, blames the spate of heatwaves recently across the west on something else. They “noticed that nobody wanted to report the source of this heat” which “couldn’t have been more obvious unless it punched you in the nose. It all came from the Phoenix-Vegas urban heat island. The Oregon heatwave. The Canada heatwave. Montana. The Dakotas. You name it. It all traced back to Phoenix-Vegas. Every singke[sic] time. But nobody would say it.”
Of course! It’s all Phoenix’s fault! The comment continues for a bit, but does get to a solution: “stop building the problems. Stop expanding cities in the name of greed. Stop packing large populations into these high-density atrocities because that’s the only place to find gainful employment or because it’s better than California, which is becoming unbearable for various reasons, including the disgusting leadership. Who the heck wants to move to Phoenix anyway?”
But as much as it sounds like Jack has some personal issues he’s transferring into the climate debate, it does match quite well the overall reliability of the 23 scientists supposedly upending the IPCC consensus, and is basically indistinguishable from the extensive quotes from the authors that Electroverse published (because they just ran the press release, apparently.)
Said authors are the usual suspects of “it’s the sun”-flavored climate denial, with the father-son Connollys and Willie Soon serving as lead authors for what is essentially a literature review of debunked climate denial. Soon, long-exposed as someone who does papers like these to collect paychecks from fossil fuel companies, is clearly struggling to legitimize his pseudoscience at a time when his intended audience is abandoning scientific denial in favor of solutions denial.
With around 50 pages, in the full paper (arxiv version here) the authors describe a bunch of studies the IPCC supposedly ignores or overlooks, and comes to the conclusion that they have no answer for their headline question asking “how much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends?”
So not only is the study not global, but instead focused only on one hemisphere, but also, despite being cobbled together by a bunch of deniers united by their irrational opposition to consensus climate science, that question “has not yet been satisfactorily answered… the debate is ongoing.”
The evidence that it’s the Sun is so weak even a paper clearly designed to suggest it’s the Sun couldn’t justify coming to that conclusion!
Here’s the fun part though. Remember back in January when OSTP fired a pair of deniers appointed by Trump for putting out climate denial flyers produced by the “Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences”? (Yes, acronym is CERES, but no, it’s not the good Ceres that works on climate finance issues, because apparently deniers are that unoriginal and desperate to grift off of the good reputation of legitimate organizations.)
Well, the acknowledgements section notes that Ronan Connally and Willie Soon “received financial support” from CERES “while carrying out the research for this paper.”
So who is CERES? Turns out, it’s Willie Soon, as it’s registered to his home address. While it’s no big deal to run your business out of your home (Lomborg used a P.O. Box in Massachusetts for his Copenhagen Consensus Center, after all!) it’s odd that they would acknowledge funding from an organization that they created and run out of one of their homes. Because obviously that funding is coming from someone else!
And since he’s got a history of taking in over a million dollars of dirty money, one might expect this is just his latest “deliverable” to some coal or other fossil fuel funder. Worry not though, the acknowledgement that Soon got money from CERES for this paper can’t be anything shady because “donors to CERES are strictly required not to attempt to influence either the research directions or the findings of CERES.”
Of course! Because after decades of reliable denial production, why would they need to?