A German climate researcher has discovered that the surge in solar radiation that began in 1700, peaked in 1960 and is still at historically high levels was far stronger and more significant than had previously been realized.
According to Dr. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, who spent months comparing the varying widths of annual tree-rings and stalagmite deposits with recent temperature and sunspot records, this remarkable increase in solar activity was the real reason why the weather got warmer from 1950-2000. There has been no warming since 2000.
Dr. Lüdecke reports his major discovery in the latest issue of the acclaimed climate-science journal Energy and Environment.
His discovery is consistent with earlier results from Professor Sami Solanki in Finland, who reported in the journal Science six years ago that the Sun’s activity in the second half of the 20th century had been greater than during almost any similar period since the end of the last Ice Age 11,400 years ago.
In contrast to Professor Solanki’s conclusion that Man was nevertheless the main cause of global warming since 1950, Dr. Lüdecke’s research shows that the Sun is the real culprit.
The new analysis indicates that changes in the Sun’s output of radiation, which depends upon anomalies in its magnetic field that show up as sunspots, are what really drives temperature changes here on Earth.
Dr. Lüdecke said: “The Sun is still recovering from the Maunder Minimum, the 70-year period from 1645-1715 when there were hardly any sunspots. It was less active then than during any similar period over the past 11,400 years. It was then that the Hudson in New York and the Thames in London used to freeze over in the winter.
“It is the unprecedentedly rapid recovery of the Sun’s activity over the past 300 years – far stronger than anyone had previously suspected – that has been the chief driver of global warming in recent decades. We have very little to do with it.”
Dr. Lüdecke’s analysis of the 200-year record of monthly temperatures measured by thermometers at five northern-hemisphere stations shows the Earth cooled almost as much in the 19th century as it warmed in the 20th.
Also, two 2000-year temperature reconstructions – one from a stalagmite, one from tree-rings – indicated that 100-year ups and downs in global temperature far stronger than those of the past 200 years were commonplace, strongly contradicting the “official” hypothesis that 20th-century global warming is unusual.
Dr. Lüdecke said, “The Sun gives its name and its warmth to the Solar System. One should look there, not here, for the true cause of recent global warming.”
Contact: Dr. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, email@example.com.
Click following PDF link to See Lüdecke, H.-J., 2011, Long-term reconstructed and instrumental temperature records contradict global warming, Energy and Environment 22,6.
Revealed at last: the true cause of global warming
Table 1. A “hockey-stick” graph (above) of annual mean sunspot numbers (SSN) from 0-2000 AD, revealing clearly for the first time the startling growth in solar activity from 1700 until the peak of solar activity in the last 1000 years, which occurred in 1960 (Lüdecke, 2011).
For comparison, the notorious “hockey-stick” graph of reconstructed and instrumental northern-hemisphere surface temperatures (right) by which the UN’s climate panel attempted to abolish both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age., It is very likely that the change in sunspot numbers (above), not Man, was the chief cause of recent warming (right).