Variations on Sun’s role in climate change
DOI: 10.1063/1.4796649
In the March 2008 issue of Physics Today, Nicola Scafetta and Bruce West show a graph (page 51) of global surface temperature and total solar irradiance. Two curves of TSI are shown. The red curve shows an increase of TSI since 1980 and is used to argue that global surface temperature is sensitive to TSI. The reference citation for the figure says that data for the red curve are from http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk and http://www.acrim.com .
Both links show that TSI has not increased since 1980, but instead decreased during that period, so Scafetta and West’s red curve disagrees with the cited data sources. That error is serious because it leads to the inaccurate conclusion in the last sentence of the article, that the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should not be trusted.
More about the authors
Wim Klaassen, (w.klaassen@rug.nl) University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands .
