An article on BBC news is reporting the Sunspot activity is at a 1,000 year high.
Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star’s activity in the past.
They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth’s climate became steadily warmer.
This trend is being amplified by gases from fossil fuel burning, they argue.
Who argues? The scientists or the article writer? If the scientists are arguing this point, the article fails to cite it. Read on:
But the most striking feature, he says, is that looking at the past 1,150 years the Sun has never been as active as it has been during the past 60 years.
Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that has accelerated in the past century, just at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer.
The data suggests that changing solar activity is influencing in some way the global climate causing the world to get warmer.
….
Over the past 20 years, however, the number of sunspots has remained roughly constant, yet the average temperature of the Earth has continued to increase.
This is put down to a human-produced greenhouse effect caused by the combustion of fossil fuels. [Put down by whom? The BBC?]
OK get this, the article states frankly that the sun “has never been as active as it has been during the past 60 years”. So even though this activity is at an all time high, because it has remained steady (steadily high mind you) and temperatures continue to go up, this is clear proof that fossil fuels are the culprit. Not.
At the same time, there appears an article in Newsweek by Richard S. Lindzen whose credentials as noted by Newsweek are as follows “Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.”
In his editorial he states quite succinctly:
The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman’s forecast for next week.
…
Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down—not up—the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise—a dubious proposition—future increases wouldn’t be as steep as the climb in emissions.
It seems to me that the Global Warming Consensus is unraveling. More and more ‘mainstream’ scientists seem increasingly comfortable with publicly expressing their doubt. The ordinary ministers of the media will undoubtedly become even more strident in their predictions of doom as the volume and faith in this neo-pagan dogma are inversely related to the amount of objective evidence supporting it. I personally have not entirely made up my mind about the man made contribution to ‘Global Warming’ but the the hysterics of the last 10 years have done nothing to convince me. Furthermore, if we are to conduct ‘war’ on the man-made portion of Global Warming in order to insure that it is a just war we should keep the idea of proportionality at the front of our minds. The overall destruction expected from the use of force (e.g. limits on development, economic impact, poverty, ever expanding government,etc) must be outweighed by the good to be achieved. The case is certainly not made.
