Is Senator Fielding being Disingenuous? (June 9, 2009)

Family First Senator Stephen Fielding fresh back from a conference of deniers of the anthropogenic contribution to current global warming asks rhetorically: "Is carbon emissions really the major driving force of global temperature change?" and follows with, "What I heard at the conference is that solar activity seems to be more closely aligned to global temperature changes over a long period of time. I intend to take some of the graphs and the charts that I've got from Tuesday, and ask her [Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Penny Wong] to explain why what they've put forward isn't credible. I think that's fair enough. I think to question things is a positive thing. The big question that I've got; what happens if what they're saying is true?"

For openers he might like to listen to what Australia's Chief Scientist, astronomer Penny Sackett had to say this morning on the ABC's Radio National:

Furthermore, in 2006, Nature published a carefully written and documented review by scientists from Heliophysics, Inc., Nahant, Massachusetts, USA., the Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos, World Radiation Center, Switzerland, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, USA; entitled Variations in solar luminosity and their effect on the Earth’s climate. (Nature, Vol 443|14 September 2006|doi:10.1038/nature05072). It contains seventy-eight references.

The abstract of the paper reads:

Variations in the Sun’s total energy output (luminosity) are caused by changing dark (sunspot) and bright structures on the solar disk during the 11-year sunspot cycle. The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years. In this Review, we show that detailed analysis of these small output variations has greatly advanced our understanding of solar luminosity change, and this new understanding indicates that brightening of the Sun is unlikely to have had a significant influence on global warming since the seventeenth century. Additional climate forcing by changes in the Sun’s output of ultraviolet light, and of magnetized plasmas, cannot be ruled out. The suggested mechanisms are, however, too complex to evaluate meaningfully at present.

We hope that before the Senator, who has what may well be a deciding vote on a matter of crucial importance, casts his vote, he has done his homework thoroughly.*

Senator Fielding is going to show some charts when he confronts the Minister for Climate Change. Perhaps he would like to include in his confrontation the following material from the 2006 Nature review (TSI = total solar irradiance):

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*Copies of the Nature review paper were forwarded to Senators Fielding and Wong on June 8 by TFW. The list of references in the review paper would be a good starting point for Senator Fielding to get to know what he's talking about.