Sallie Baliunas

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Sallie Baliunas is at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences Division and formerly Deputy Director of the Mount Wilson Institute.

Baliunas is primarily an astrophysicist and this is where the bulk of her research has been done (e.g. [1]). She studies visible and ultraviolet spectroscopy of stars; structure, variations, and activity in cool stars; evolution of stellar angular momentum; solar variability and global change; adaptive optics; exoplanets of Sun-like stars.

Baliunas received her M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1980) degrees in Astrophysics from Harvard University. She serves as Senior Scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington, DC, and chairs the Institute's Science Advisory Board. She is also Visiting Professor at Brigham Young University, Adjunct Professor at Tennessee State University and past contributing editor to the World Climate Report. Previously Robert Wesson Endowment Fund Fellow (1993 – 1994) at the Hoover Institution. Her scientific awards include the Newton Lacey Pierce Prize in Astronomy from the American Astronomical Society. She also received the Derek Bok Public Service Prize from Harvard University. In 1991 Discover magazine profiled her as one of America's outstanding women scientists. She has also received a political award, the Petr Beckmann Award for Scientific Freedom from Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, a body associated with the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in recognition of her work criticising the theory of global warming.

[edit] Global warming and solar variability

In 1992, Baliunas was third author on a Nature paper [2] that used observed variations in sun-like stars as an analogue of possible past variations in the Sun. The paper says that

"the sun is in an unusually steady phase compared to similar stars, which means that reconstructing the past historical brightness record may be more risky than has been generally thought".

More recently she has moved into the global warming area as a skeptic. The work of Willie Soon and Baliunas, suggesting that solar variability is more strongly correlated with variations in air temperature than any other factor, even carbon dioxide levels, has been widely publicized by lobby groups including the Marshall Institute, Tech Central Station [3] and SEPP [4] [5], and mentioned in the popular press [6]. However, her viewpoint - that solar variation accounts for most of the recent climate change - is not widely accepted among climate scientists.

Baliunas is a strong disbeliever in a connection between CO₂ rise and climate change, saying in a 2001 paper with Willie Soon:

But is it possible that the particular temperature increase observed in the last 100 years is the result of carbon dioxide produced by human activities? The scientific evidence clearly indicates that this is not the case. All climate studies agree that if the one-degree [Fahrenheit] global warming was produced by an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the additional CO₂ first warms the atmosphere, and the warmed atmosphere, in turn, warms the earth’s surface. However, measurements of atmospheric temperatures made by instruments lofted in satellites and balloons show that no warming has occurred in the atmosphere in the last 50 years. This is just the period in which human-made carbon dioxide has been pouring into the atmosphere and according to the climate studies, the resultant atmospheric warming should be clearly evident.

The absence of atmospheric warming proves that the warming of the earth’s surface observed in the last 100 years cannot be due to an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by human activities. The recent global warming must be the result of natural factors in climate change. [7].

The claim that atmospheric data showed no warming trend was outdated at the time it was made, since the published satellite data at that time showed a warming trend, though weaker than at the surface (earlier estimates published in the 1990s showed no warming). Balloon data also showed warming. Since 2001, new data and corrections of measurement error have eliminated the apparent discrepancy between surface and atmospheric trends (see satellite temperature record).

With Soon, Baliunas investigated the correlation between solar variation and temperatures of the earth's atmosphere. When there are more sunspots, the total solar output increases, and when there are fewer sunspots, it decreases. Soon and Baliunas attribute the Medieval warm period to such an increase in solar output, and believe that decreases in solar output led to the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling from which the earth has been recovering since 1890.

In 2003, Baliunas and Soon published a paper which reviewed a number of previous scientific papers and came to the conclusion that the climate hasn't changed in the last 2000 years. However, 13 of the authors of the papers Baliunas and Soon cited refuted her interpretation of their work, and several editors of "Climate Research", the journal which published the paper, resigned in protest at a flawed peer review process which allowed the publication. The observations used by Baliunas and Soon in respect of MWP and LIA are often not temperature proxies but indications of wet or dry; Mann et al. argue that their failure to ensure that the proxies reflect temperature renders the assessment suspect [8]. More recently, Osborn and Briffa repeated the Baliunas and Soon study but restricted themselves to records that were validated as temperature proxies, and came to a different result [9].

Baliunas' extra-academic positions at several think tanks funded by energy industry organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute are often cited by her opponents as a source of bias on her part. Baliunas is a member of at least nine organizations which receive financial support from the petroleum industry [10].

[edit] Ozone depletion

Baliunas earlier adopted a skeptical position regarding the hypothesis that CFCs were damaging to the ozone layer, which earned its originators, Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995. Her arguments on this issue were presented at Congressional hearings held in 1995 (but before the Nobel prize announcement).

Baliunas' criticism was supported by Fred Singer, Hugh Ellsaesser, Patrick Michaels and Frederick Seitz, among others. [11],[12].

Although Baliunas never publicly retracted her criticism of the ozone depletion hypothesis, an article by Baliunas and Soon written for the Heartland Institute in 2000 promoted the idea that ozone depletion, rather than CO₂ emissions could explain atmospheric warming [13].