Paper That Blames The Sun For Climate Change Was Just Retracted From Major Journal
A paper published last year that claimed global warming was all to do with the Sun has been retracted. Nature Publishing Group-owned Scientific Reports has found that the paper's conclusion was based on a flawed assumption.
The decision comes after sharp criticism from the scientific community prompted the journal's editors to undertake a further review of the study.
The paper, titled "Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale," led by mathematician Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University in the UK, was published in June 2019.
It claimed that human activity was not to blame for the roughly one degree rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, and therefore we can avoid culpability for the shockingly fast upward trend of global temperatures having devastating effects on communities and ecosystems around the world.
Instead, the paper claimed that rising temperatures were due to the changing distance between Earth and the Sun, because of the way the Sun moves around.
The Sun does actually move, a little bit. Although our home star is the most massive object in the Solar System, there are numerous objects orbiting the Sun, and collectively they have quite a lot of mass, too. Thus, the true centre of the Solar System is the centre of its entire mass, and it has a name: the barycentre.
Furthermore, each planet has its own centre of mass between it and the Sun. As the other planets whirl around the Sun, they tug on it a little, so the Sun moves around the barycentre.
Jupiter, naturally, has the biggest influence, so it makes the Sun move the most. These slight Sun movements are called "solar inertial motion," and they're generally pretty small.
In the now-retracted paper, Zharkova et al. contended that the motion of the Sun around the barycentres created by the gas giants was enough to alter the distance between Earth and Sun by up to 3 million kilometres (1.85 million miles), over a timeframe of a few hundred years.
But, as other scientists were quick to point out on PubPeer, Earth doesn't orbit those barycentres. It orbits the Sun. So its average distance from the Sun remains pretty constant on small timescales. Read original full article
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