This would have been welcome news to the people of Adelaide back in March when they had 13 straight days over 100F. Or to those who worry that the North Pole may be liquid sea water this northern summer, for maybe the first time in a million years. Real scientists who study the effect of solar flares tell us the effect is minor. If we should be in a cooling trend then something must be spoiling it, like maybe adding 30 billion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere each year. The good news is that the human caused part will have to stop within a generation as it gets harder to find anything left to burn. Let's worry about the cooling trend then.

This is what Professor David Karoly, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne and Member, Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, had to say about it:

“It is excellent to have well-informed opinion pieces published in our newspapers. It is a pity when opinion pieces contain significant errors or misleading information, and then draw mischievous conclusions from them. The opinion piece written by Phil Chapman in The Australian on 23 April appears to contain a number of factual errors, misleading statements and incorrect conclusions.”

His full response can be found here:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/04/the_australians_war_on_science_12.php#more

I notice Chapman's related links point to Icecap and Bob Carter - Chapman's "opinions" then are not unexpected.

Sorry to spoil the fun but the alleged sources of this 0.7 degree decline are actually available, easily online.

eg NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York
see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/
which says

GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
Global Temperature Trends: 2007 Summation

The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data

and the Hadley Centre

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

which says

The time series shows the combined global land and marine surface temperature record from 1850 to 2007. The year 2007 was eighth warmest on record

Further, the author's ignorance of the subject matter is shown by his comment:

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming ...

Fact: no one seriously interested in climate change could possibly imagine that carbon dioxide is the only factor affecting climate. Why would they find the idea that sunspots affect climate disconcerting?

Another scary climate story, this time from the opposite extreme of the global warmers.

The best thing for us to do is ignore the lot of them. We have no control over the forces of nature, and we have much more important things to think about.

Will Mr Gore and Flannery please give their money back.

This piece is out of date. Before writing this post I checked with spaceweather.com, and the sun at the moment is completely blank, i.e. there are no sunspots at all.

The other thing I take issue with is the idea that millions of refugees will flee to Australia. That will not happen. If necessary our armed forces will sink the boats. If our previous Prime Minister has been given his rightful place as a Knight of the Garter, (as Baron Howard of Tampa,) he would have been able to advise on how to sort out the refugee problem. At the very least, they would have been required to sit for the dictation test.

Nevertheless, I await with great interest the reaction from the media crowd. I am sure that if this comes to pass, they will abandon global warming with the greatest of ease, as all they really need is some imminent catastrophe, whatever it may be.

Mr Right "The best thing for us to do is ignore the lot of them. We have no control over the forces of nature, and we have much more important things to think about."

I think you are "Right".

The Shaman of primative cultures pretended to make predictions based on inspecting the entrails of chicken and goats.

Nothing changes, except these days some fellows are using computers, with less accuracy than that observed from reading the entrails of a chicken or a goat.

I am not talking about Chapman personally but about the entire scientific community who, for whatever motive or self-interest or ego, parade dubious and erroneous predictions around as if they were fact and then denigrate the opinion of anyone who questions their view.

It is all too much like the discussions between Gallileo and the Church of Rome regarding what orbited what.

After the fall out. little credibility is left to make anything of but the real downside:

we will have all been conned,

Especially if it is used as an excuse for Carbon taxes, which are, afterall, nothing more than "Socialism by Stealth".

I have to agree. No sun spots no ice age. I thought this was going to be a hard one. Normal sun, higher temperatures. Co2! That's why they call it the green house effect. See! its not much point in me giving you the 101, cause most of you have debated it already, and know the answers.

So what the!

EVO

David Karoly in "Warming trend has not been reversed" in The Australian today (29 April)destroys this Phil Chapman puff piece.

http://www.Australian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23612876-7583,00.html

I heard this clown interviewed on radio last week and his sunspot arguments systematically destroyed.

Even the article says "the next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1,000 years". Well that's pretty definite.

A "50-50 chance" between cooling and heating? Another revelation!

Also his notion that we should be sending MORE methane (carbon on the radio) up into the atmosphere to heat up the planet seems to be a clear admission that there is a direct correlation between greenhouse gases and global warming.

During the last major ice age, the entire planet wasn't under ice. While Europe was frozen, Australia was tropical. A small change in AVERAGE temperature still allows for extreme changes at either end.

Localised decreasing temperatures are an outcome of global warming. Ice melts, ocean salinity decreases, currents change and ocean-carried heat flows are re-routed or stopped. Not a very hard concept and it is being measured now.

As for the effect of sunspots, even the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster implies a link between the decrease in the number of pirates in the world and the increase in global temperatures. Apparently we had the same sunspot conditions 11 years ago and didn't see the same effects.

Voodoo science and attention-seeking, right up there with the moon landing hoax and Elvis sightings.

Sorry, Phil: There is no strong correlation between sunspots and warming: http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11650

The colder weather in 2007 is largely explained by the shift from el nino to la nina: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080114085128.htm

And as an astronaut, you never got off the ground: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Chapman

Yes, he worked for NASA between 1967 and 1972, but now he's just a businessman working in space and aeronautical related fields.

Rule of thumb, if someone quotes Oliver Cromwell AND suggests a geo-engineering solution involving all the world's bulldozers, they're probably a fully paid-up member of the lunatic fringe.

I may be wrong but wouldn't dirtying-up the snow in Siberia and Canada make it more likely to absorb heat from the sun and increase melting?

This is an improvement on an article written by a political "scientist", however the writer still doesn't have the appropriate qualifications. When do we see an article written by a skeptical climatologist?

Surely the point, no matter which side of the fence you sit, is that we humans are destroying our habitat, denying the rights of and justice to the poor and that climate change of any description will not be a worry to anyone if humans manage to send themselves to extinction through unsustainable living!

I'm tired of the raging debates about climate change. It's time for the rubber to hit the road and start changing our attitudes, overconsumption and egotistical lifestyles NOW!

Stanners,

Good post. Hopefully some of the earth worshiping preachers will take note.

Phil,
You're talking about a Maunder minimum. However your mathematics are all over the shop.

Maunder minimum solar forcing 0.17W/m2. Current level of Solar forcing 0.23W/m2. Radiative forcing of CO2 added to the atmosphere since the pre-industrial era 1.66W/m2 (does not include additional CO2 to be emitted in the future)

So, even if the sun went into a Maunder minimum right now and stayed there. It would only reduce the rate of warming.

"During the last major ice age, the entire planet wasn't under ice. While Europe was frozen, Australia was tropical. A small change in AVERAGE temperature still allows for extreme changes at either end."

Rubbish. During the last Glacial Maximum Australia was joined to Tasmania and New Guinea and rainfall was much lower due less ocean evaporation, windiness and greater continentality. That's where all those sand dunes in central Australia came from (the formerly mobile Sahara-type ones now fixed and in many cases vegetated), not to mention glacial and periglacial features in Tasmanian highlands and the Snowy Mountains.

"I may be wrong but wouldn't dirtying-up the snow in Siberia and Canada make it more likely to absorb heat from the sun and increase melting?"

The whole idea is to absorb heat from the sun- otherwise the white snow/ice would reflect energy to space. The idea of bulldozers is stupid, in reality coal black (powder) would be dispersed by aeroplanes.

"Surely the point... I'm tired of the raging debates about climate change. It's time for the rubber to hit the road and start changing our attitudes, overconsumption and egotistical lifestyles NOW!"

How about recognising that the planet's simply overpopulated, and dictators like Mugabe have turned their countries from breadbaskets to a basket-cases? Why is it the responsibility of agriculturally efficient nations like ours to feed the rest of the world when they get off their rear ends and farm their own land efficiently? Or be happy to pay market price for food whatever the price might be?