Despite the seemingly ad nauseum claims by alarmists in the media of a consensus amongst scientists that man is responsible for global warming, it now seems that virtually every week, another highly-credentialed individual comes forward to profess a skeptical view.

With that in mind, a significant paper concerning the relationship between sunspot activity and rainfall was published this month in the Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering refuting a number of positions held by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Though highly technical, the work of these five scientists acts to further discredit alarmists’ assertions that the anthropogenic global warming debate is over (emphasis added throughout):

This study is based on the numerical analysis of the properties of routinely observed hydrometeorological data which in South Africa alone is collected at a rate of more than half a million station days per year, with some records approaching 100 continuous years in length. The analysis of this data demonstrates an unequivocal synchronous linkage between these processes in South Africa and elsewhere, and solar activity. This confirms observations and reports by others in many countries during the past 150 years. It is also shown with a high degree of assurance that there is a synchronous linkage between the statistically significant, 21-year periodicity in these processes and the acceleration and deceleration of the sun as it moves through galactic space. Despite a diligent search, no evidence could be found of trends in the data that could be attributed to human activities.

Sound like these folks are part of the “consensus?”

Regardless, after some history was provided, followed by a detailed analysis, the paper concluded that droughts and heavy-rainfall periods seem to have a 21-year cycle. As fate would have it, sunspot activity seems to follow a roughly analogous 21-year cycle, with minimum solar activity showing a high correlation with maximum rainfall/floods, and maximum sunspot activity occurring largely coincident with droughts.

This led the authors to the following conclusions:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2001) dismisses the view that solar activity has a meaningful influence on global climate. The basis for this view is that variations in the receipt of solar activity are too small to account for variations in the climatic responses. These variations were determined from satellite and other observations. What the IPCC scientists failed to appreciate is that changes in the level of solar radiation received on earth are amenable to precise calculation.

[…]

Probably the most important shortcoming in current climate change science is the failure to appreciate that variations in received solar energy are amenable to precise calculations, instead of attempting to derive these changes from observations from orbiting satellites and other sources that are incomplete in both space and time. Furthermore, the calculated wattage changes are appreciably greater than those derived from the sources quoted in the literature.

The paper concluded by honestly pointing how much there is left to understand about solar activity’s link to climate, thereby reinforcing the notion that none of this is settled as the alarmists want people to think:

A study of the literature shows that there are still large uncertainties in three related issues. These are the following:

• The physical causes of the regular sunspot activity
• Reasons for the different climatic responses to the alternating sunspot cycles
• The mechanisms that link changes in sunspot activity with corresponding changes in climate

We believe that we have thrown light on answers to the first two questions and that he [sic] outstanding uncertainties relating to causal linkages do not invalidate the results of the fundamental studies described in this paper.

Recommendations

It is extremely important that all those involved with water resource studies should appreciate that there are fundamental flaws in current global climate models used for climate change applications. These models fail to accommodate the statistically significant, multiyear periodicity in the rainfall and river flow data observed and reported by South African scientists and engineers for more than the past 100 years. They also failed to predict the recent climate reversals based on Alexander’s model (Alexander 1995b, 2005a). The global climate model outputs can therefore not be used for adaptation studies.

Adding it all up, the alarmists’ claims that the debate is over, and the science regarding anthropogenic global warming is settled, are two of the biggest lies ever perpetrated on the people of the world.

All over the planet, scientists are speaking out against this charade. Unfortunately, our media refuse to share these studies, thereby keeping a large percentage of our citizens literally in the dark about this issue.

On a daily basis, I hear from scientists and concerned parties who believe that the worm is turning, and that people like Gore and his sycophant devotees in the media are running out of time to prove their point. In reality, many of these more optimistic skeptics live outside America where the press are significantly more likely to share their views.

In fact, as most of you are aware, even the BBC has recently stated that it will continue to give at least some airtime to contrary opinions regarding this matter because management feels it is their duty to do so.

This leaves us with one crucial question: When will American media come to this same conclusion?

—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.