Preface
The day the book Die kalte Sonne was launched in Germany happened to be the coldest of 2012. And 6 February was remarkable for another reason too: on that day Germany’s power grid teetered on the brink of collapse. Having decommissioned eight of its older nuclear reactors, the country was no longer able to guarantee its own power supply. Electricity from an old, mothballed, oil-fired power plant in neighbouring Austria and from Czech nuclear power plants had to be fed in to prevent Germany’s power supply failing.
In 2011 Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that Germany would implement the Energiewende (energy turnaround) in an attempt to replace nuclear and fossil fuel power plants with renewable sources. At the same time, she promised that Germany would no longer need to import electricity and that electricity prices would not go up. Within less than a year this grand declaration proved to be little more than wishful thinking.1 Today electricity prices in Germany are soaring out of control due to unlimited subsidies given to renewable power, and the German power supply can be secured only through emergency decrees.
Power companies also have to keep unprofitable power plants on standby and large power consumers may find their supply cut off in the event of unexpected supply bottlenecks. Within less than a year, Germany has gone from having a power supply that was one of the world’s most stable to one that is on the brink of collapse. How did Germany reach this point? Germany is implementing an energy policy driven by fear. After a catastrophic tsunami on the other side of the globe struck Japan in 2011, causing the Fukushima reactor accident, fear gripped Germany. While other leaders such as Britain’s David Cameron and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy soberly acknowledged that a tsunami could not be expected in their respective countries and that their reactors were deemed safe, Merkel lost her nerve and promptly shut down eight of Germany’s nineteen reactors even though they had been rated as among the safest in the world.
At the same time, the German government made generating 80 per cent of the country’s electricity from renewables – wind and solar energy – by 2050 a national priority. Gas, coal and oil would not play a role in the future because Germany’s energy policy was being driven by fear of a climate catastrophe. This fear was being fanned by climate scientists such as Professor Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He had been promoted to the position of chief climate adviser to the German Chancellor. Schellnhuber and his group succeeded in apportioning all the blame for past and future climate change on CO2 alone. He is on record as saying, ‘We … can show that there is an extremely simple, quasi-linear relation between the global mean temperature and the total amount of CO2 that will be emitted into the atmosphere over the next four or five decades. The climate system’s entire complexity can be boiled down to this simple linear relation’ [1].
Politicians simply accept this as true and base energy and social policy on this. The climate scientists who shape public opinion and the IPCC postulate that an uncurbed rise of atmospheric CO2 concentration will lead to a dramatic temperature increase of 2–6° C. Spreading fear is poor policy It is this fear-driven energy policy that has led to millions of tonnes of wheat being converted into biofuel, with some even being imported for that purpose. Our fear-driven energy policy has led to wind parks being erected in the middle of forests, thus destroying the function of the forest. Fear is why half of the world’s photovoltaic capacity is installed in mostly overcast Germany, a country with no more sunshine than Alaska. This German energy policy mantra is what we question in our book.
The reaction to our book from politicians and media was predictable: indignation, ostracism and marginalization of the issues and the authors. Just what outrageous facts did we bring to light? We were able to cite hundreds of scientific studies showing that the changes in the sun’s activity and oceanic decadal oscillations are responsible for at least half of the recent warming, which means that the contribution of CO2 is at most half. Yes, some warming can be traced to anthropogenic and natural sources, but the impact of CO2 has been wildly exaggerated. A warming of 2–6° C is not to be expected by the end of the twenty-first century; a warming of about 1° C is more likely. Worse still: the sun and ocean decadal oscillations indicate that we are entering a period of modest cooling that will last decades. Consequently, the earth-burning climate catastrophe, which has long been a creed for many in politics and the media, should be abandoned. That would mean cancelling the annual circuses of 20,000 participants in exotic venues like Doha, Cancun and Durban. The high priests of climate fear would no longer be welcome; political advisers and their huge research budgets would shrink. The much yearned for transformation envisaged by green ideologues, where a centrally controlled energy economy would be put in place and hollow out the nation’s industrial base, would disintegrate. The alarming headlines of the globe burning up, which no doubt boost circulation and ratings, would quickly become a thing of the past.
Indeed, there was a real threat to alarmism when Germany’s most widely circulated daily Bild changed tack and ran a series titled ‘The CO2 Lie’ just after our book was released. Everything is fine – just don’t voice any criticism! There were plenty of reasons for the media, scientists and politicians to avoid spreading such realism. Especially active in this respect were the leftist-liberal weekly Die Zeit (‘Vahrenholt as the front man of a new eco-reactionary movement’) [2] and the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (‘Obsolete climate claims’, ‘ridiculous’). On the other hand, the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel and other dailies such as Die Welt gave the issues examined in our book broad coverage. The reaction of some climate scientists was particularly harsh, among them Professor Jochem Marotzke, director of Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg. He kept it as simple as possible by claiming that we were not real climate scientists: ‘If Vahrenholt studied the IPCC report, then he read a lot but understood little’ [3]. Professor Mojib Latif of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Sciences, Kiel took it a level higher, claiming that our arguments ‘belong in a well-deserved place in the graveyard of Absurdistan’ [4]. Universities, academies and other institutes came under pressure to cancel scheduled speaking engagements by the authors.
Changing winds
However, the arguments raised in our book were welcome overseas. Invitations came from the University of Oslo and the London Royal Society. Speaking engagements in Chicago, Vienna and Berne were met with positive resonance. We were even able to present our arguments before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, thanks to an invitation from the European People’s Party. Over the course of the year we were able to gain support even in Germany. The longer that Die kalte Sonne stayed on the bestseller list, the more obvious it became that our arguments were very well supported by a growing number of scientific publications, and as a result the more support we got from politicians and the media. Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt found the reaction of some in the media ill-advised. He invited Fritz Vahrenholt to an hours-long meeting, and even allowed Vahrenholt and Lüning to quote him as follows: ‘I find your line of argument plausible.’ Science always progresses.
Hardly a week went by that new scientific publications underpinning the fact that CO2 had been exaggerated did not appear. Contrary to the supposed IPCC consensus that natural climate variability does not play a major role in today’s or the past climate, many scientists continue to work on this important subject. New papers documenting the great importance of the inconvenient natural climate drivers are published in international, peer-reviewed journals almost every week. Many disciplines contributing to the climate puzzle are still in the early stages of research and many fundamental questions remain unanswered. Controversial scientific debates are an essential part of science and are taking place today despite all the claims coming from the IPCC that the ‘science is settled’. Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth.
Scientists find themselves in a quandary. How are they to deal with the politically incorrect scientific results? Two American researchers, Jackson Davis and Peter Taylor, recently came across something astonishing. While studying an Antarctic ice core covering the past 12,000 years, they identified a total of forty-six strong natural warming events throughout the pre-industrial era. The mean warming rate of these events was approximately 1.2° C per century, more than the 0.7° C warming we have seen since 1900. While the material, methods and analysis of the study were sound and unchallenged, not a single major scientific journal was interested enough to publish these important results. Was it the study’s powerful, yet inconvenient conclusion that deterred the journals? Contrary to what is always claimed by IPCC-affiliated scientists, the warming that occurred over the past one and a half centuries is not unprecedented after all. Desperate to share their results with fellow scientists and the public, Davis and Taylor eventually posted their paper on the largest climate discussion blog (
http://www.wattsupwiththat.com) for maximum distribution [5].
Similar pre-industrial warming events over the past 2000 years were also reported from China [6]. While papers from well-connected climate alarmists are routinely published within a few weeks, papers refuting the IPCC often struggle to get into print. Similar problems occur with the media coverage of new scientific climate studies. Interestingly, while new results inconvenient to the IPCC are often ignored, the latest climate scare stories – some paid for by insurance companies with a vested interest – are widely carried by the mainstream media. For example, how many of us have heard that winter temperatures at the Antarctic Ross Sea have significantly cooled over the past 30 years? [7]. Has anyone read that current temperatures on the Antarctic peninsula were at their present level for 7000 out of the last 10,000 years? [8]. One might think that a study documenting that temperatures in southern Italy during the Roman Warm Period were slightly higher than they are today would be a worth reporting [9]. But such reports are largely ignored. Why do so many journalists shy away from spreading good news? The US National Oceanographic Data Center, for example, recently found in a new study that the ocean is not warming up as aggressively as the IPCC had predicted [10]. And the Gulf Stream is remarkably more stable than predicted earlier by the IPCC-affiliated climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf. In western Europe the supposed record summer heatwave of 2003 was recently downgraded to second place because it turns out a heatwave in 1540 was markedly warmer [11]. If the media are truly after an explosive news story, then they could begin by investigating the dubious temperature ‘corrections’ that are now being made to the measured data before they are input into official databases. Is it really justifiable that temperatures from the 1930s warm period are routinely corrected downwards while modern values are often inflated?
Here comes the sun
The past is the key to the present and to the future. Data provide us with a picture of pre-industrial, natural climate patterns. They reveal that when the sun was active, temperatures were high; and when the sun was quiet, temperatures were low. This was always the relation during pre-industrial times. That is one of the key findings of this book and is thoroughly documented in Chapter 3. Reconstructions based on ice cores, dripstones, tree rings and ocean or lake sediment cores reveal that temperature history was characterized by significant temperature changes of more than 1° C. Warm and cold phases alternated according to thousand-year cycles. Examples include the Minoan Warm Period three thousand years ago and the Roman Warm Period two thousand years. During the Medieval Warm Period, around a thousand years ago, Greenland was colonized and grapes suitable for winemaking were cultivated in England. Cold periods prevailed between the warm phases, among them the Little Ice Age which lasted from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. All these temperature fluctuations occurred at a time when atmospheric CO2 concentration was essentially stable, which means that only natural processes could have been responsible for the historical climate variations. Is it really credible to think that these natural variations came to a halt about 150 years ago?
Let us consider for a moment what the climate since 1850 would have looked like had the natural pattern simply continued. 1850 marks the end of the Little Ice Age, a natural cold period associated with low solar activity. Based solely on the natural pattern, we see that solar activity has increased since 1850, more or less in parallel with an increase in temperature. When we compare this with real-world climate data for the past 160 years, we are surprised to learn that this is exactly what happened. Both the timing and the 1° C warming fit nicely into the natural scheme. The solar magnetic field has more than doubled over the past century. According to the solar physicist Sami Solanki, the past decades have been among the most active in terms of solar activity in the last ten thousand years [12].
Does it really make sense to assume that the sun has almost nothing to do with modern climate warming, as the IPCC claims? Hard-core IPCC supporters such as Rahmstorf deny that solar-driven millennial-scale climate cycles exist and insist it’s a cul-de-sac for climate science. But many researchers disagree. Since the first edition of our book appeared in German in early 2012, many studies have been published confirming the great importance of natural climate cycles in the past, and therefore they also must apply to the present and the future [13]. We find that solar-driven millennial-scale cycles have controlled wet and drought phases in the Mediterranean region during Roman times [14]. Along the French Mediterranean coast, storms occurred in millennial cycles in line with solar activity [15]. In Germany too, the sun has driven the climate over the past 10,000 years [16]. Likewise, the temperatures of the Swiss Alpine lakes fluctuated according to the same rhythm [17]. Millennial-scale solar cycles were also found to be responsible for Alpine glacier movements [18]. Similar cycles were found in Finnish Lapland. Interestingly, each successive warm phase over the last 2500 years was colder than the one that preceded it [19], marking a long-term cooling, which is not compatible with the climate catastrophe now being proposed by the IPCC. Solar-driven millennial-scale climate cycles are also reported in North America by a number of new studies. For example, temperatures along the coast of Cape Hatteras pulsated according to the rhythm of the thousand-year solar cycle [20]. Florida was drier when the sun was weak and wetter when the sun was strong [21]. The climate of British Columbia has been driven by solar activity over the past 11,000 years [22] and in South America the sun regulated the distribution and intensity of the monsoon rains [23]. In China’s Taklamakan desert, oases blossomed according to solar millennial-scale cycles [24]. Likewise, temperatures on the Tibetan plateau followed the sun’s pattern [25]. The East Asian monsoon too was controlled by solar activity [26]. The currents of the East China Sea varied according to the sun’s activity [27]. Even the climate of Lake Baikal fluctuated in accordance to the solar rhythm [28]. Natural climate cycles led to the collapse of the mighty Indus civilization [29]. Finally, the rains in south-east Australia followed the solar pattern [30].
Could all this be a coincidence? All these studies affirm the need to include the sun as a key climate driver. And any models used to project future climate trends need to be tested rigorously by using the climate of the pre-industrial 10,000 years. Only models capable of reproducing the known climate past can be approved for use in future modelling. Unfortunately, not a single climate model used today by the IPCC is able to reproduce the climate cycles of the past. We find the sun everywhere Besides long-term millennial-scale solar cycles, researchers have also found evidence that changes in solar activity strongly contribute to climate development on human timescales, that is to say in years and decades. For example, Norwegian studies have revealed that a significant part of the warming in their country has been caused by the sun [31–34]. In Sweden too, climate and solar activity are tightly linked [35]. In neighbouring Finland, solar cycles have been discovered in tree rings [36]. The extent of Baltic Sea ice is now known to be influenced by solar activity [37], as is the ice on the Rhine in central Europe [38]. A massive cold period in central Europe 2800 years ago appears to have been triggered by a weak sun. [39]. The north Atlantic deep water formation was found to be modulated by the sun [40]. The notorious rains in Northern Ireland are affected by changes in solar activity [41]. Winds in Portugal were particularly strong when the sun was weak [42]. Solar activity fluctuations and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) have contributed to Italy’s climate over the past 10,000 years [43]. A solar influence can even be detected in Italy’s salt marshes [44]. In Asia, monsoon rains have waxed and waned according to the rhythm of the sun over the past 150 years [45]. Rains on the Tibetan plateau ceased whenever the sun weakened [46]. Coral reefs in Japan died during cold phases triggered by low solar activity [47]. A marked solar influence on Japan’s climate was also found in other recent studies [48–49]. Wet phases in the Aral Sea were associated with solar high activity phases [50]. The rains in Maine over the past 7000 years have been controlled by the sun [51]. A solar influence on precipitation has now been found for Brazil [52–53]. Solar cycles have even been detected in the water masses of the deep sea [54]. The field of research in solar–climate interaction is more active than ever [55–58]. Unfortunately, the IPCC has chosen to marginalize and underrate this important subject. Therefore, books like this one provide thousands of active researchers in this field with a much-deserved public platform and recognition for their painstaking and fascinating work.
The illusive CO2 fingerprint in the middle atmosphere In the past, IPCC-friendly scientists always argued that the enormous climate potency of CO2 could easily be demonstrated. In the middle atmosphere, namely the stratosphere, temperatures had been cooling, they said. And the reason for this could only be the CO2 greenhouse effect because warming in the lower atmosphere would always be associated with cooling in the middle atmosphere. Activist scientists like Mojib Latif have used this logic in numerous public lectures. People hear this and have no choice but to believe it because they don’t have knowledge or literature to verify the claim. However, when we take a closer look at this proposed CO2 ‘proof’, the story quickly falls apart.
First, while the temperature in the stratosphere did indeed decline between 1980 and 1995, since then it has been fairly stable. Contrary to Latif’s claim, the stratosphere has not cooled at all over the last 15 years. This is not a good start for the alleged CO2 warming ‘proof’. Unfortunately, there is more: the cooling of 1980–95 coincided with the thinning of the ozone layer. Since the mid 1990s, however, the ozone layer has been recovering due to the reduction of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other substances addressed by the Montreal Protocol. This is precisely when stratospheric cooling stopped. Could temperatures in the middle atmosphere possibly be linked to the ozone concentration rather than to the CO2 greenhouse effect as Latif claims? Research conducted at Columbia University and the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Kühlungsborn, appears to indicate precisely that. It is indeed mostly ozone that drives temperatures at those atmospheric levels, and not CO2 [59–60]. And what really drives the ozone concentration in the stratosphere and mesosphere besides the CFCs? A series of papers published in 2010–12 provide the answer [61–65]: it’s the sun, stupid!
The CO2 fingerprint in the middle atmosphere has disappeared, but hardly anyone has acknowledged it, especially not the old climate guard of the IPCC. Extreme views on extreme weather Major new developments have also occurred in the field of extreme weather since the German edition of our book came out. In March 2012, the IPCC published a special report on extreme weather [66], which stated that there will be no detectable influence on the earth’s weather systems by mankind for at least 30 years, and possibly not until the end of the century. If and when mankind’s influence becomes apparent, then it may just as likely reduce the number of extreme weather events as increase them [67]. New studies from central Europe confirm that our weather is still well within the range of natural variability [68]. In the Alps, weather extremes have even declined [69].
As discussed in Chapter 5, there is currently no scientific evidence that storms have become more extreme in recent decades. When a severe drought struck the United States in 2012, many pundits viewed it as a portent of the coming climate catastrophe. While this event was certainly a catastrophe for the areas affected, an individual event like this has little relevance for the long-term climatic drought trend. A study carried out by researchers at Princeton University and the Australian National University, Canberra was published in the science journal Nature in late 2012 [70]. The results are unequivocal: droughts have not increased in frequency over the past 60 years. Another recent study of the Mediterranean found that rainfall today remains within the range of natural variability [71]. Other studies have revealed that the most severe droughts in Sweden and Spain occurred during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, during the Little Ice Age [72–74]. What has long been ignored is that marked natural drought–wet cycles operating over timescales of decades, centuries and millennia do exist. Many of these cycles are driven at least in part by changes in solar activity [75]. Studies have documented such cycles all over the world – Norway [76], the Mediterranean [14], the north-eastern United States [51], Mexico [77–78], South America [23, 79–80], the Sahel, [81], Lake Malawi [82], China and East Asia [24, 26, 46, 83–85], the Aral Sea [50] and south-east Australia [30].
A team from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that current climate models are still not able to reproduce regional trends in precipitation [86]. Most notably, the models significantly underestimate natural variability, according to these authors. River flooding is still within the range of natural variability Research has also moved forward on the question of whether river floods have already spiralled out of control and beyond the range of natural variability during the current Modern Warm Period, as some IPCC-affiliated players have claimed. The first surprising news was that global precipitation has become less extreme over the past 70 years [87]. Yet studies in the United States and Africa could not detect any statistically significant increase in flooding events [88–89]. Greater damage has more to do with ever more people settling in areas vulnerable to flooding and higher property values. Evidence for a link to anthropogenic global warming has not been found [90]. Prior to the floods of 2011 and 2012 in Australia, the IPCC suggested that droughts would be greatest environmental threat to the country. Abruptly, the floods were re-interpreted and explained by alarmist activists as ominous signs of an imminent manmade climate catastrophe. However, a subsequent and in-depth scientific analysis revealed that the Australian floods had a natural cause – the La Niña phenomenon, enhanced by the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) [91].
Another interesting result comes from the central European Alps, where research has shown that floods were more frequent there during cold rather than warm periods [92–93]. The climate sciences are still in an early and turbulent phase, where new research often exposes previously held scientific beliefs to be misconceptions. It is therefore essential to keep asking critical questions whenever sensational climate claims are made. All too often such concepts have collapsed when subjected to rigorous testing. This book aims to investigate the fundamental facts relevant to the climate catastrophe claims proposed by the IPCC and industries with vested interests, such as the insurance sector. Prepare yourself for an eye-opening journey through a climate science Wild West. You will be surprised to read about scientific distortions that you never would have thought possible in the supposedly enlightened twenty-first century.