Global warming unlikely to be caused by the sun

[Soriak]

OSLO, Norway (Reuters) -- The sun's energy output has barely varied over the past 1,000 years, raising chances that global warming has human rather than celestial causes, a study showed on Wednesday.

Researchers from Germany, Switzerland and the United States found that the sun's brightness varied by only 0.07 percent over 11-year sunspot cycles, far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.

"Our results imply that over the past century climate change due to human influences must far outweigh the effects of changes in the sun's brightness," said Tom Wigley of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Most experts say emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars, are the main cause of a 0.6 Celsius (1.1 Fahrenheit) rise in temperatures over the past century.

A dwindling group of scientists says that the dominant cause of warming is a natural variation in the climate system, or a gradual rise in the sun's energy output.

"The solar contribution to warming over the past 30 years is negligible," the researchers wrote in the journal Nature of evidence about the sun from satellite observations since 1978.

They also found little sign of solar warming or cooling when they checked telescope observations of sunspots against temperature records going back to the 17th century.

They then checked more ancient evidence of rare isotopes and temperatures trapped in sea sediments and Greenland and Antarctic ice and also found no dramatic shifts in solar energy output for at least the past millennium.

"This basically rules out the sun as the cause of global warming," Henk Spruit, a co-author of the report from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, told Reuters.

Many scientists say greenhouse gases might push up world temperatures by perhaps another 3 Celsius by 2100, causing more droughts, floods, disease and rising global sea levels.

Spruit said a "Little Ice Age" around the 17th century, when London's Thames River froze, seemed limited mainly to western Europe and so was not a planet-wide cooling that might have implied a dimmer sun.

And global Ice Ages, like the last one which ended about 10,000 years ago, seem linked to cyclical shifts in the earth's orbit around the sun rather than to changes in solar output.

"Overall, we can find no evidence for solar luminosity variations of sufficient amplitude to drive significant climate variations on centennial, millennial or even million-year timescales," the report said.

Solar activity is now around a low on the 11-year cycle after a 2000 peak, when bright spots called faculae emit more heat and outweigh the heat-plugging effect of dark sunspots. Both faculae and dark sunspots are most common at the peaks.

Still, the report also said there could be other, more subtle solar effects on the climate, such as from cosmic rays or ultraviolet radiation. It said they would be hard to detect.

Surprise!

[Lejina Bloodbath]

If it isn't the sun, or some shift of the Earth, then God himself is the source of the planet warming. The humans aren't responsible.

To try to figure out what is going on is futile, just accept it.

[TOOL]

To try to figure out what is going on should be educational. That is, if the scientists doing the figuring are actually trying to figure out what is going on rather than trying to prove how we're fucking up our fragile little planet omgz.

[Itzena]

Thay have figured it out, you imbecile.

[Tuco]

It's the heathens smoking cocaine and other illegal substances and gay people having too hot of sex.

[Dintorr]

Originally Posted by Itzena

Thay have figured it out, you imbecile.

Only idiots like yourself think so.

[dak]

People still question global warming?

They better get together with those who still question evolution and start building another ark.

[Dintorr]

2 things that have yet to be definitively proven:

Is global warming happening?
If it is happening, what is the cause?

[Clericnon2boxed]

proven to which persons ?

people like George W. Bush ?

define "proven", what is enough proof ?

Try using the internet, its not like there arent tons of articles and whatnot describing currently increasing yearly average temperatures, melting (vanishing) glaciers, polarcap shrinking (which might fuck up the gulf stream, due to all the fresh water).

Do you think the Kyoto protocol was made just for the sake of emmission trading rights ?

[Kugbok_Fennin]

Do we have a source for the original article?

[Rad]

USA today has some great articles on the subject... Worth a read.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/clim...-warming_x.htm

[Clericnon2boxed]

Originally Posted by Kugbok_Fennin

Do we have a source for the original article?

Reuters, September 13, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...ONMENT-SUN.xml

[Eomer]

2 things that have yet to be definitively proven:

Is global warming happening?
If it is happening, what is the cause?

You're wrong on the first. Global warming is happening. There's no question on this, and hasn't been for years. The earth is warmer now than it has been at any point in the past few millenia, and the rate of temperature increase is far higher than any other period of warming.

You're right on the second part. They haven't definitively determined what the causes are, how they work together or against each other, what % each is responsible for, and all that jazz. And of course, they haven't worked out what portion of it is "natural", and what portion humans are responsible for.

So naturally, the reasonable course of action is to continue polluting as much as we possibly can, until we're totally 100% sure that we're completely fucked.

And yeah, I was gonna post this here for James, because that was one of his favorite points to make when we discussed this in the past. I'm sure Michael Crichton can tell us why this latest research on the Sun's output is bunk, though.

[Slick Willey]

Originally Posted by Eomer

Global warming is happening. There's no question on this, and hasn't been for years. The earth is warmer now than it has been at any point in the past few millenia, and the rate of temperature increase is far higher than any other period of warming.

Not that I don't believe you, but where are they getting the data for global temperature levels "millenia" ago?

[Eomer]

Ice cores from the poles, tree rings, isotope measurements from soils, vegetation studies, there's a whole slew of different ways to gauge what the earth's temperature was in the past. Obviously some are far more accurate than others.