Sunspots May Cause Climate Fluctuations (Duh!)

The Harvard Crimson ^ | 4/14/2009 | ERIC W. BAUM

[Rocky]

Actually, I think you are making his point for him. At the beginning of the paragraph, he says:

“The answer to this question depends on the period of time we consider.”

The whole question about whether the earth is warming or cooling at any given time depends on what timeframe you are looking at. The earth has been hotter than it is today, and much colder, too.

[gondramB]

>>The whole question about whether the earth is warming or cooling at any given time depends on what timeframe you are looking at. The earth has been hotter than it is today, and much colder, too.<<

We’re at about a 10,000 year high so it needs to start cooling or we are gonna break out of anything human civilization has had to deal with.

But again, what’s missing is a good breakdown of the causes.

[Arizona Carolyn]

What was the weather in the USA like in 1911 when there was so little sunspot activity? Anyone know where you can look at weather vs sunspots by year?

[Rocky]

The earth has been hotter in the past.

But the timeframe you have chosen to focus on is the trend over the past 10,000 years. The past 10,000 years, the earth has been coming out of an ice age.

The heating is not manmade, and there’s nothing you can do about it except adapt. And by “adapt” I don’t mean cap-and-trade nonsense that does nothing to help the situation but just hampers the economy and gives the government weenies more power.

But cheer up. The sun’s activity over the past several months has been much lower than in recent times, so we may well be in for some cold weather.

[ModelBreaker]

I wrote: >>What is not said here is that sunspot activity was unusually high before 1999 (the period of substantial warming). If climate modelers honestly included the strong correlation between sunspots and temperature into the pre-1999 models, there wouldn’t be much warming left unexplained for them to blame on CO2. That’s why it won’t happen.<<

You replied: “That’s interesting and I had not seen that - don’t suppose you have link handy.”

Yes.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/markey_and_barton_letter.pdf at page 24,

which reads as follows:

“From the Maunder Minimum to the 70-year Grand Maximum from 1925 to 1995, during which there was
more solar activity than at almost any previous period in the past 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2005), solar
activity as measured by the number of sunspots visible during the maximum of each 11-year solar cycle
showed a steady increase – CHART IN ORIGINAL —”

[gondramB]

Thank you. I’ll delve into that tomorrow when I’m conscious.

[neverdem]

Thank you ModelBreaker for your the URL & link. gondramB, I also have read about increased sunspot activity at the end of the twentieth century. I went looking for links. When I had a hard time finding them, I suspected I would have to look in pdf links. BTW, maybe someone is erasing HTML links?

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/markey_and_barton_letter.pdf at page 24

Milankovitch cycles also need to be taken into account.

What was the weather in the USA like in 1911 when there was so little sunspot activity? Anyone know where you can look at weather vs sunspots by year?

Sun survey reveals least activity since 1913

Maybe a NOAA link can help. There's one in comment# 1 on that thread.