Sunstroke hits Jim Goodridge at WUWT, and is CO2 cooling the sun?

Sunstroke isn't fun, it mushes the brain. That's what's happened at WUWT today. There's a very weird article that Anthony Watts has posted, written by Jim Goodridge who long ago was State Climatologist in California. He started work at the US Weather Bureau in Sacramento in 1950, so he's probably in his late 80s. In that role, he did some good work from what I've read. If Anthony Watts knew him and cared, he'd never have let him post this article about sunspots. The article was very short and very wrong and is archived here.

First of all Jim put up some charts. The first one was of sunspots going back to 1700. I'll put up my own, which looks to be using the same data. Since Jim didn't say where he got the data, I can't say for sure. All the sunspot data shown here is from WDC-SILSO, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels and is the latest version.

Jim Goodridge, in his unwisdom, plonked a linear trend line through the whole lot and proudly proclaimed:

Sunspots have increased by 1 percent per year since 1700. This suggests recovery from the Little Ice Age of 1660 to 1710. A major increase in sunspot trend was observed from 1940 to 2002.

First of all, there was not a "major increase in sunspot trend" from 1940 to 2002. The sunspots reached a maximum of 269 in 1957, and declined in number from there on in.  If you want to see the shape better, below is a bar chart averaged at eleven year intervals (approx solar cycle):

Alternatively, you can look at the data plotted as an 11-year moving average:

It doesn't matter which way you look at it, the number of sunspots hit a peak in the middle of last century and since then have gone down a bit. In fact, they are down quite a bit in this current solar cycle.

Oh Pleeze (not again!)

Then, take a look at the top chart again. Would you do what Jim did to it? Would you whack a linear trend line from 1700 to 2015 over those data? What on earth possessed him, you may well ask. Apparently he's got it into his head that "it's the sun", not the greenhouse effect, which has caused all the recent warming. His next words were:

This is coinciding with the atmospheric CO2 increase. This suggests that the temperature-CO2 correlation is spurious, rather than causal.

Err - what? How Jim Goodridge made that leap of illogic one can only wonder. He skipped over about a zillion steps in his thinking, or maybe he didn't (think, that is).

Jim put up some other charts as well. I've no idea what he thinks he was doing, but he called one of them an "accumulated departure from average sunspot numbers", and the other "accumulated percent of average annual sunspot numbers". I think he must think that the sun adds up and the sunlight accumulates in the air or something.

When I searched for something about Mr Goodridge, I discovered an old post from Tamino from way back in December 2011, called "Oh Pleeze". Poor Jim has been puzzling over the sun for quite some time and learnt not a thing.

Is CO2 is cooling the sun?

I'd best add another chart in case anyone is wondering why I am flabbergasted that even a climate conspiracy blog like WUWT would post such silliness. It's the global mean surface temperature and sunspot numbers. There's no discernible relationship, and for the past few decades they've been going in opposite directions.

If you wanted to talk correlation, you'd be forced to argue that a decrease in sunspots led to an increase in warming. Or that sunlight has a cooling effect on Earth. That's if you didn't know anything about physics or solar radiation or sunspots. The temperature data is from NASA.

From the WUWT comments

The little conspiracy theorists at WUWT, who have had nothing to grab hold of for such a long time, are so desperate to grasp any foolish notion that they mindlessly embrace this nonsense.

Resourceguy probably thinks he's saying something intelligent:

May 3, 2016 at 12:11 pm
Such long term trends and large scale departures from trend hold the key to correlation with climate

He then posts a chart of what he calls the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, though it's not been detrended. Maybe he thinks the Atlantic is causing global warming, or the sun is just warming the Atlantic Ocean, or something. Whatever, it prompts and equally meaningless comment from Old'un, who wrote:

May 3, 2016 at 12:32 pm
Looks good to me There are more things in heaven and on earth than CO2, Horatio! 

Steven Mosher says "no", but without explanation (if one should be needed):

May 3, 2016 at 12:23 pm
“This is coinciding with the atmospheric CO2 increase. This suggests that the temperature-CO2 correlation is spurious, rather than causal.”
Err no.
logic fail. 

Other comments were very perplexing. Mark has to falsely claim that temperature data has been fudged, and presumably all the photos of open water in the Arctic too, and the photos of melted glaciers, and the sea level measurements, and the tide gauge measurements, and all else. He also has yet to learn that burning hydrocarbons produces CO2 and lots of it.

May 3, 2016 at 12:48 pm
before the temperature data got revised, 18 years, that’s all the correlation there is, from around 1975 to around 2000.
But since the data for the 1940s has been revised CO2 now correlates from the 60s to 2000.
Changing data (much of which you didn’t even have due to lack of records) 60+ years later, and using it to make scientific claims of ANY certainty is complete garbage.
Logic is not for you Mosher
It must sting that there is still not a shred of hard evidence as to the source of CO2 growth

Mike the Morlock doesn't understand what's wrong with Jim Goodridges illogical leap either:

May 3, 2016 at 12:57 pm
Steven Mosher May 3, 2016 at 12:23 pm
Err no.
logic fail.
How?
michael 

Russell Klier didn't question Jim's wrong statement. Instead he made a joke about it, which if you thought there was a relation between CO2 and sunspots, would be spot on, only in the other direction. Burning fossil fuels is putting out the sun :)

May 3, 2016 at 12:54 pm
“A major increase in sunspot trend was observed from 1940 to 2002.
This is coinciding with the atmospheric CO2 increase.” …. It’s worse than we thought….Burning fossil fuels is wrecking the sun……..

Mark spouts some nonsense about the 1930s being hotter than now.

May 3, 2016 at 12:58 pm
Some claim mid 1930s were hotter than the 00s after about 2002, this is true for sunspot numbers.

 He's wrong, very wrong, of course:

Sparks decided that ENSO events are caused by the "suns polarities striking the earth". I call Poe.

May 3, 2016 at 1:31 pm
The 30’s were hotter than today… The suns polar field reversed a bit slower too, which causes spikes in the ENSO such as el nino, when the suns polarities strike earth when they are reversing we always see these spikes.