What first got my attention to this issue was a fabricated quote from Dr. Kenneth Tapping, a Canadian astrophysicist. For the past two decades I’ve been writing a weekly bulletin for amateur radio operators on sunspots, solar cycles, and how they affect shortwave radio propagation.
Ham operators appreciate high sunspot activity (because it enhances the ionosphere’s refraction of radio waves) and long for the days of Cycle 19, the biggest sunspot cycle ever, which peaked around 1957-1959. Needless to say, many have been nervous the past few years as Cycle 24 emerges from slumber very slowly. I’m not kidding when I tell you I’ve received many emails from hams over the past few years who seem very depressed. You don’t see many sunspot cycles in your lifetime, and many older hams have been waiting for the return of Cycle 19 conditions for 50 years, after first getting licensed as hams in the 1950s.
One day a few years ago I got a boatload of email from readers, most were very upset, and all contained a URL pointing to an article in Investor’s Business Daily (which they have now removed) that claimed that global warming was caused by sunspot activity, scientists say we will have no more sunspots, therefore the problem in the future will be an ice age, not global warming. The “no sunspots” scenario is what threw them into a panic attack.
I was suspicious of the article, because although I am not a scientist, I try to keep up on the literature as well as any layman can, and I had read nothing about any scientist predicting a repeat of the so-called Maunder Minimum, a period several centuries ago in which sunspots seem to have disappeared entirely for decades. Not only that, I had never heard of a method for forecasting one.
I was also suspicious because the article, which contained no byline, quoted Dr. Tapping making all kinds of wild statements about climate (which he is not qualified to do) and sunspots which seemed uncharacteristic. I know him via email correspondence and the occasional phone call, because his observatory in Penticton, British Columbia provides the daily 2.8 GHz solar flux readings, which we use in addition to sunspot numbers as indicators for solar activity. He always seemed a sober sort, worthy of trust.
I sent an email to Dr. Tapping asking if he was quoted correctly, and as I recall, the opening line in his response was, “This has been the worst two weeks of my life”.
He told me a few weeks earlier he received a phone call which ended up lasting over 90 minutes, from a woman he did not know (nor did he have any notes about where she was calling from or who she was) who asked him all kinds of questions about sunspots and climate. She kept running through various scenarios with him, and kept mentioning climate, which of course is way outside his field.
When the article appeared, the quotes from him were a total fabrication.
I googled several phrases from the article, and got hundreds of results, most from the conservative blogosphere. Since then I have watched the misinformation spread. A typical example:
I then created a Google alert, in which I would receive a daily digest email of links to any new usage of the word ‘sunspot’ in blogs, web sites and news stories. What I found was all kinds of wild nonsense being presented as fact. A typical example would be comments on newspaper articles in which someone would remark that ‘there should be hundreds of sunspots on the face of the sun, and there is nothing’, always claiming that sunspots cause global warming.
Their error (besides the false correlation with climate) I think happened when they did a search for old sunspot data on the web, came across some archive where in the peak of a previous solar cycle they found a day which showed a daily sunspot number of (for example) 347, so they assumed this meant that 347 sunspots were visible on that day.
What they didn’t know was that a sunspot number is not the same thing as the number of sunspots.
According to an arcane counting method developed centuries ago and still used today for consistency, to calculate the sunspot number you count the number of sunspot groups, each adding a value of ten, then count the number of sunspots inside those groups, and add one for each. So for instance, if there is a single sunspot, that day would have a daily sunspot number of 11, which is the lowest possible non-zero sunspot number.
This figured into various new conspiracy theories that emerged. For instance, amateur expert writing in the comments on a news article would look at an image of the Sun, see what appeared to be one or two sunspots, but note that NOAA listed a sunspot number of 23 on that same day. So obviously NOAA astrophysicists must be in cahoots with Al Gore and all those evil climatologists, because they are reporting fake data, since everyone knows that sunspots correlate with warming, and it is plain as day that there are just one or two tiny spots today, not 23, and besides, it’s winter and there is snow outside!
As I watched the level of nonsense rise, I noticed a curious thing. I often felt I was seeing the same writing styles, similar prose, and the same already disproved arguments over and over again.
Gradually I realized that there were others using similar Google tools to track stories about climate, but instead of adding comments that might clarify something in the article, purposeful obfuscation was going in, coupled with a sort of willful ignorance. No logic or new information could dissuade them, as if I were trying to argue someone out of their religious faith, a fool’s errand, since matters of faith are basically non-testable and non-falsifiable. And I began to sense that this might be the work of a few professionals posing as fellow citizens, using ad hominem attacks and discredited science in a barrage of nonsense that might look believable to people outside the field, and create a sort of false consensus. At the same time I sensed a shift in public opinion, following the same talking points that these commenters were driving home.
Then I heard about the Koch brothers, and the millions of dollars financing a disinformation campaign using astroturf groups and even some of the same players that were in the tobacco wars a couple of decades back, creating doubt about climate science.
I guess the final confirmation was when I talked to someone who had attended one of those Tea Party rallies, and sat in on a training session which I believe was operated by one of the Koch “citizens” groups. One of the methods being pushed was exactly what I was seeing online, and a trainer described the process that I had imagined, exactly. One thing that was emphasized over and over was how a tiny group of people could influence big changes in public opinion and policy, exactly what I saw happening online.
Posts
