Interviewer
Grégoire Canlorbe
is the vice president
of the French Parti
National-Libéral
( conservative,
nationalist, and
ree-marketist ).
Dr. Willie Soon is
an independent
solar physicist at the
Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics
who has been
studying the Sun
and its influence
on the Earth’s climate
for more than a
quarter of a century.
The complete interview transcript is at the URL below:
http://gregoirecanlorbe.com/a-conversation-with-dr-willie-soon
The complete interview transcript is at the URL below:
http://gregoirecanlorbe.com/a-conversation-with-dr-willie-soon
My summary of selected
questions and quotes,
formatted for easy reading,
is below:
Canlorbe:
Climate change
is surely nothing new.
It is a long-established,
cyclical behavior
of our planet,
which has long
been oscillating
between glaciations
and interglacial
warm periods.
Should we diagnose
Mother Nature
with a bipolar disorder?
Dr. Soon:
Earth’s climate system
dynamically oscillates
between icehouse and
hothouse conditions
in geological time or,
to a lesser degree,
between the glacial
and interglacial climates
of the last 1–2 million years.
But, as with many
interesting questions
about the Earth’s climate,
there is no certain answer.
The data do not support
over-simplistic accounts.
Sea level rise
– mother of all scares
I was fascinated
to discover that
changing sea levels,
including extremely high
global sea levels
65–250 feet (20–75 m)
above today’s mean,
occurred during the
“hothouse Earth” era.
In addition
to the ever-changing
shape and depth
of the ocean basins
and coastal zone boundaries,
one must also bear in mind
the “leaky Earth”:
There appears to be
a continuous exchange of water
between the ocean bottom
and the Earth’s crust,
as Professor Shige Maruyama
of Tokyo Institute of Technology
has shown.
Sea level has risen
by 400 feet
over the past 10,000 years.
For the past 200 years
it has been rising
at about 8 inches
per century,
and that rate
may well continue.
It has very little to do
with global warming
and much more to do
with long-term
climate cycles.
In fact, so slowly
has sea level been rising
that environmental-extremist
scientists have tampered
with the raw data
by adding an imagined
(and imaginary)
“global isostatic adjustment”,
torturing the data
until they show
a rate of sea-level rise
that has not in reality occurred.
Canlorbe:
You suggest
that the Sun’s behavior
is the driving force
of climate warming,
not factory smokestacks,
urban sprawl or
our sins of emission.
Would you
like to remind us
of the keystones
of your hypothesis?
Dr. Soon:
For a quarter of a century
I have studied the hypothesis
that solar radiation
is causing
or at lest modulating
climatic variations
over periods
of several decades.
I have sought the best
empirical evidence
to show how changes
in incoming solar radiation,
accounted for by
intrinsic solar magnetic
modulation of
the irradiance output
as well as
planetary modulation
of the seasonal distribution
of sunlight, affects the
thermal properties
of land and sea,
including temperatures.
In turn, temperature change
affects atmospheric water vapor
as well as the more
dynamical components
of equator-to-pole insolation
and of temperature gradients
that vary on timescales
of decades to hundreds of years.
Canlorbe:
In the view of many,
IPCC’s predictions
based on
computer models
are little better
than Tarot cards
and astrological
predictions.
Given your expertise
in solar and stellar physics,
do you see solid reasons
not to regard astrology
as reliable?
Dr. Soon:
"... I wish to say something
about the misuse of
computer climate models
by the United Nations’ IPCC
as a supposed “scientific” mode
of divining the Earth’s climate
over the next 20, 50, 100, 1,000
or even 100,000 years.
Dr. Dallas Kennedy
has coined the phrase
“uncontrolled numerical
approximations” for all
climate model simulations
inconsistent with
the observed climate
and insufficiently scrutinized.
The current state
of our understanding
of the dynamical evolution
and variability
of the Earth’s climate,
in the observational
as much as in
the theoretical domain,
is so immature that,
as prudent and careful scientists,
we should stop and think.
I am confident that,
even if we were able to find
some “agreement”
between the outputs of
the current generation
of climate models
and the available
measurements
and observations,
we ought to be cautious,
because we can be
almost 100% certain
that the apparent agreement
is fundamentally incorrect.
Let us heed the caution raised
by the world’s most knowledgeable
atmospheric physicist, Professor
Richard Siegmund Lindzen
of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology:
What historians
will definitely wonder about
in future centuries
is how deeply flawed logic,
obscured by shrewd
and unrelenting propaganda,
actually enabled a coalition
of powerful special interests
to convince nearly everyone
in the world that CO2
from human industry
was a dangerous,
planet-destroying toxin.
It will be remembered as
the greatest mass delusion
in the history of the world
– that CO2, the life of plants,
was considered for a time
to be a deadly poison.