Poor, gullible, lazy Justin Higgins

Yup. Our boy Justin has been duped again — mostly because he’s too damn lazy to look up the facts.

Justin is a global warming denialist. He’s only too happy to help spread the denialist propaganda, and that’s exactly what he’s doing in a post entitled “Whats Really Behind Global Warming?”. He quotes a claim made by wingnut columnist Bill Steigerwald:

In 2004, a study by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research said Earth was getting hotter because the sun was burning brighter than it had in 1,000 years.

This is where Justin’s gullibility comes into play. Had he bothered to actually investigate the facts, he’d have found that Steigerwald is lying through his teeth.

Steigerwald is actually conflating two papers here. The first, entitled "Millennium-Scale Sunspot Number Reconstruction: Evidence for an Unusually Active Sun since the 1940s" [PDF], does in fact present evidence that “the period of high solar activity during the last 60 years is unique throughout the past 1150 years”. But those authors assiduously avoid making any claim of causation between solar activity and climate change. In fact, they specifically state:

To clarify whether this similarity reflects a real physical connection requires a more detailed study of the various proposed mechanisms for a solar influence on climate.

And now we move on to the second paper, which actually does look at the influence of the sun on climate. This one is entitled "Solar Variability and Global Warming: A Statistical Comparison Since 1850" [PDF], and its authors come to a very different conclusion than Steigerwald and Justin would have you believe.

We assume that the Sun has been responsible for climate change prior to 1970 and that their inter-relation remained unchanged afterwards. Then, employing reconstructions and measured records of relevant solar quantities as well as of the cosmic-ray flux, we estimate statistically which fraction of the dramatic temperature rise after that date could be due to the influence of the Sun. We show that at least in the most recent past (since about 1970) the solar influence on climate cannot have been significant.

Oops.

These papers weren’t hard to find. A few minutes of Googling was all it took. But this was a few minutes too many for our good little propagandist Justin. He’d much rather have someone else do his thinking for him.

Somehow, it seems likely that Justin will be suffering the effects of this inability to check the facts before shooting off his mouth for a long time to come.