Recently, Dr. John Robson of the Climate Discussion Nexus (CDN) interviewed CERES co-team leader, Dr. Ronan Connolly, on the role of the Sun in recent climate change.

CDN have now published their 20 minute “explaine” video including extracts from this interview and discussion of some of CERES’ recent scientific research. Although the video covers quite a few technical points, they are explained in a very clear and accessible manner.

Topics covered include:

The significance of the debates between the two main rival satellite estimates of solar activity trends since 1978, i.e., PMOD and ACRIM.

How using either PMOD or ACRIM to calibrate the pre-satellite era solar data can give very different estimates of how much solar activity has changed since the 19th century and earlier.

How politics and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have downplayed the possible role of solar activity in recent climate change.

The urbanization bias problem of current thermometer-based estimates of global temperature trends since the 19th century.

The video refers to Connolly et al. (2021), i.e., this recent CERES-led scientific paper:

R. Connolly, W. Soon, M. Connolly, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, C. J. Butler, R. G. Cionco, A. G. Elias, V. M. Fedorov, H. Harde, G. W. Henry, D. V. Hoyt, O. Humlum, D. R. Legates, S. Luning, N. Scafetta, J.-E. Solheim, L. Szarka, H. van Loon, V. M. Velasco Herrera, R. C. Willson, H. Yan and W. Zhang (2021). How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate. Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics 21, 131. Link (preprint pdf).

See here for our press release summary of Connolly et al. (2021)

The video can be found on the CDN website here and the Youtube link is embedded below:

Climate Discussion Nexus’s latest “Backgrounder” John Robson explains that a technical dispute about satellite readings of solar output since 1979 is of enormous importance because temperature fluctuations over the last four decades correlate very closely with cycles in the sun’s activity or have nothing to do with them depending who’s right about the calibration of some backup sensors.

What about the 540 AD global cooling?