Nir Shaviv

Nir Shaviv is an Associate Professor at the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Climate Change Skeptic
Shaviv is a climate change skeptic and was a speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009) hosted by the conservative think tank, the Heartland Institute. While he does believe the earth is warming, he contends that the sun's rays, rather than human produced CO2, are the cause. But a 2009 analysis of data "on the sun's output in the last 25 years of the 20th century has firmly put the notion to rest.The data shows that even though the sun's activity has been decreasing since 1985, global temperatures have continued to rise at an accelerating rate."

Shaviv's arguments and research conclusions have been undermined by subsequent research and his analyses critiqued as "based on unreliable and poorly replicated estimates, selective adjustments of the data (shifting the data, in one case by 40 million years) and [drawing] untenable conclusions, particularly with regard to the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations on recent warming." . Shaviv argues that cosmic rays influence cloud cover, but this link is still under question.

CFACT
Although a document (the "Provisional list of participants" for the June 2010 U.N. climate talks in Bonn) lists Shaviv as a Senior Advisor with Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), when asked about this connection Shaviv responded "This is the first time I hear of this group" - and in the final list of participants, the CFACT contingent was much smaller and did not include Shaviv.

It is not known how Shaviv came to be on the CFACT list.

Related SourceWatch articles

 * Global warming skeptics
 * Heartland Institute
 * International Conference on Climate Change (2009)
 * SourceWatch:Project:Creating Articles on Sponsors and Speakers at The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change

Related SourceWatch articles

 * Jan Veizer, co-author of Shaviv and Veizer 2003

External articles

 * Shaviv explains his views in