talk by Singer

[John Lacy]

I went to a talk recently by Fred Singer, perhaps the most notable
climate change denier, and I thought others would be interested in his
arguments.

I was aware that he picks the studies that support his point of view and
ignores those that don't. I presumed he was doing that, but I still
found one of his arguments convincing enough to be worth looking into.
It was based on a paper in Nature (Neff 2001) on stalagmites from a cave
in Oman. They have annual layers, so can be dated, and the 14C and 18O
isotopic abundances have been measured. Singer stated that 14C is an
indicator of solar activity, which I think is right, and that 18O is an
indicator of temperature, which sounded reasonable to me. The 14C and
18O abundances are very strongly correlated, which Singer stated
demonstrated that much of the temperature variations are caused by solar
activity variations. This contradicts statements by climate modelers.

I found this argument sufficiently convincing that I looked up the
paper. It turns out that the title of the paper is "Strong coherence
between solar variability and the monsoon in Oman between 9 and 6 kyr
ago". The paper clearly states that 18O in these stalagmites is not a
temperature indicator. It depends on the origin of the rainfall, so
correlates with monsoon rainfall. The authors state that they don't
know why monsoon rainfall correlates with solar activity, but the data
do not indicate any correlation between temperature and solar activity.

I guess my conclusion is that I should have brought my laptop to the
talk so I could check his references in real time. And that Singer's
technique is not just to quote only favorable data, but to misquote
unfavorable data.

John