Sometimes I get email from visitors to my site in which they ask my opinion on something or sent me something interesting to watch/read. And sometimes I get an email that’s critical about something that I wrote. Most of the time I react to those message privately, but the email I received this time I found interesting enough to write a public response for.

The email in question is a response to my blog post ‘Piers Corbyn: The UN IPCC And All It Stands For Must Be Destroyed‘ and the email is quite critical towards what I said in my blog post. I’ve lifted the text as is from the email and you’ll find my responses below the quoted segments:

As ever i find the topic of climate change quite interesting. although i would have to say from all i have watched and listened to about it i am in the corbyn pot.

Climate science is indeed an interesting topic that at the moment is very relevant to our civilization. However, I doubt that this individual has been reading very good sources if (s)he thinks that Piers Corbyn is in any way credible on the subject of climate change.

Corbyn is on record saying that “there is no observational evidence in the thousands and millions of years of data that changes in CO₂ have any effect on weather or climate” (from the homepage of WeatherAction, archived here). This is him denying research about past climate changes that shows CO₂ has this effect. From lab experiments alone we know that CO₂ can trap heat and this effect by itself will cause a 1 degree increase in temperatures for a doubling of CO₂.

Disputing this puts Corbyn clearly in the climate science denier group.

The most interesting thing i heard was that x number of years ago way before humans the planet was actually warmer than today and has had even more CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Personally I find the Snowball Earth hypothesis more interesting than the little factoid (if you can call it that) that was just mentioned.

This cannot be used to defend Corbyn or argue that because of that CO₂ somehow doesn’t matter. Our knowledge about how atmospheric CO₂ levels have changed and how temperatures have responded to that is what tells us that increasing atmospheric CO₂ levels is a very bad idea.

Also you mentioned that you did not think corbyn idea of the sun being a big part in the climate, should the sun just suddenly stop one day i think we would find that it would get pretty cold  quickly, which would mean it does play a pretty big role in our climate.

No, I said “the sun has nothing to do with the rise in temperature” and showed this graph:

That’s not me saying the sun doesn’t influence our climate; it does. The amount of solar energy that reaches our planet is the triggering factor for the start or end of a glacial period (Milankovitch cycles). I’m well aware of these types of effects and how this has influenced our planet over the billions of years that it has existed (in short: I was talking about the sun influencing climate on the decade scale for this and the past century).

And yes if you take away the sun life on this planet would end. Temperatures would drop till the atmosphere of our planet condenses and freezes to its surface. The sun vanishing would not be a good day.

What I’m responding to is Corbyn saying that “the world has warmed over the last 30 years or so is merely an expression of the natural solar-lunar 60yr cycle of temperatures.” My point was that what we’re measuring from the sun does not match the claim made by Corbyn. If you model the sun, and other natural factors, and exclude the human factor we should be seeing a slight cooling:

i am not any expert however i dont study this purely its a past time of seeing what people say about things but for me if someone uses the sun and the moon to predict and get things right quite alot when you have the actual met office way off sometimes then it makes me think about the kind of controlling greedy world we live in today.

I’ll repeat what I said in my blog post ‘Piers Corbyn: The UN IPCC And All It Stands For Must Be Destroyed‘:

Ever since I’ve been aware of Piers Corbyn I’ve found him extremely confusing. Simply because what he says is so at odds with what we know in science, and because he’s very secretive about how arrives at his conclusions.

What I’m referring to are the weather predictions he makes via his company WeatherAction. What his company does is make long-term weather forecasts based on solar activity, the earth’s magnetic field, and the moon’s orbit. He calls it the Solar-Lunar-Action-Technique, or SLAT for short. He claims he gets a high rate of success with this technique and can predict the weather up to a year in advance; but I’m not convinced.

The problem is that what he uses for his predictions, like the sun, has at best a minor effect on weather and our climate. This is well known in the scientific community, yet he claims it has a big effect. But it’s also Corbyn that claims this high accuracy, there’s actually very little out there that hints at there being any skill to his predictions.

His predictions are also extremely vague, like forecasting heavy rain. Which leaves you to wonder how much rain would mean a successful forecast. It’s vague predictions like this why most people ignore Corbyn, but it doesn’t stop some folks from taking a look at how skilful his predictions are. Suffice to say that almost always his predictions are wrong. Which makes him mostly irrelevant to the field of weather forecasting.

I said all this on the basis of what I’ve read about him and from watching his predictions for a while. So far I haven’t noticed anything that indicates real skill with his forecasts. What also doesn’t help is that he’s so secretive about his predictions. He banned the use of extracts of his predictions after people picked them apart (this was on his homepage for a while).

As long as his predictions stay vague and he doesn’t let external parties verify his accuracy rate I don’t see a reason to take him serious. Especially considering his incorrect statements on climatology.

Note:
I asked permission to respond publicly to this email from the person that sent it to me. I didn’t include anything that would identify said person and I will not share anything that isn’t relevant to addressing the points made in the email.