Posted by
Steve on Wednesday, September 02, 2009 3:56:01 PM
The sun got its first sunspot in 51 days. It just missed the record of 53 days set 96 years ago. When you have a lot of sunspots, the sun is hotter. When you have fewer sunspots, the sun is cooler. Is it any wonder that we have not had a statistically significant increase in temperature since 1995 and no actual increases since 1998? The sun has had few sunspots in the past 15 years. When we do get a sunspot, it is almost nonexistent. This new sunspot is almost undetectable.
In an article by Jonah Goldberg, he outlines the causes and effects of the scientific opinions. Not being a scientist, he is reluctant to draw conclusions from the information he puts out. Being a scientist, I am not restrained by Jonah’s ignorance of the science involved.
For centuries, scientists have known that sunspots affect the climate. The problem is that they really did not know how sunspots affected the climate, they just knew they did. Last month in the magazine Science, Oregon State University researchers claimed to know what caused and ended the last Ice Age. The OSU scientists claim that increased solar radiation coming from a slight change in the Earth’s rotation caused the Ice Age to end. Greenhouse gases had no impact at all on the Ice Age. Greenhouse gases did not cause the Ice Age to start or stop.
The interesting thing is that the OSU authors and the media have gone out of their way to make the point that this study has no significance on the Global Warming debate. I beg to differ. If all this occurring without the greenhouse gases having an impact, why are greenhouse gases the culprit now? Couldn’t or rather, shouldn’t the same forces be working now to increase or decrease our average temperature? The answer to that question is obviously yes. The same forces that were at work to start and end the last Ice Age are still at work today. To claim otherwise is to ignore the obvious.
The impact of man and pollution on the climate is so minor as to be insignificant. It may rise to the level that it could be detected if we had the right instruments. The odds on that are somewhere between slim and none. If I had to guess at a percentage of the change in the climate that would be due to human activity, I would have to say it would be somewhere between 0.0000000001% and 0.1%. Is it larger than that? I sincerely doubt that it could possibly be larger than 1%. The forces of the sun and nature are so large that we cannot comprehend the magnitude of these forces. We can make a local situation change by quite a bit due to pollution, but climate is a different thing than weather.
People that believe in global warming are always bringing up the computer models that show that we will be boiling to death in 50 years or so. These computer models have been around for years and have never been right, yet. Since they have never been right in the short term, what is the probability that they will be right in the long term? Computer models are great, if you put great information into them. If you put junk into the computer model, you get junk out. We have been loading up these computer models with junk science from the beginning and wonder why we get junk out. We need to start putting real science into these computer models. Then we might actually get some useful data out in return. Until then, the computer models are just there to scare everyone. They are not valid for anything else.
What am I trying to say? I am saying that there are a lot of unanswered questions about the climate. There are more indications that the climate is moved by forces much larger than the greenhouse gases we worry about. If that is the case, why are we rushing to destroy the American economy in an effort to control something that has little or no impact on climate? Why don’t we take the time and get it right before we go about destroying anything. It would be better not to destroy anything when we apply a fix, but if we have to destroy something. At least let us destroy it with the knowledge that it will do some good.