I’ve Never Bought the Hype

Just recently, as in a couple of days ago, a science article came out that puts the blame for global warming more squarely in the sun’s lap.

I’ve never bought into the idea that global warming was caused by, or even heavily influenced by, humans. Part of that has to do with the fact that I consider the messenger a lying sack of shit who is using this issue for his own socialist agenda, but it also has to do with an interview I read ALMOST TEN YEARS ago in Reason magazine with Sallie Baliunas, an astronomer who has been studying the sun for quite a long time at that point.

Basically, the sun goes through 11 year cycles of sunspot activity, with corresponding changed in the sun’s magnetic field. The core thing to note here is that the earth is inside the sun’s magnetic field and that the ozone layer and other parts of our atmosphere protect us from that magnetic field to a great degree. If we didn’t have the ozone layer, there would be no life on earth as we know it because we’d all die from one hell of a bad sunburn. Further, it’s reasonable to assume that any change in the sun’s activity would have a measurable effect on the earth’s climate.

Remember, this interview is nearly a decade old. The Great Prophet AlGore was still the VP at the time. He had written his first book on the environment by then, I think, but he hadn’t morphed into the unrefuted genius of climate change yet. Here’s a money quote:

Reason: If the magnetic activity on the sun is changing, what mechanisms are there that might affect the earth’s climate?

Baliunas: It depends what time scale one is talking about. The sun brightens and fades over the sunspot cycle, the 11-year cycle. But also the intensity of the 11-year cycles has been building over the centuries.

Reason: What do you mean by “intensity”?

Baliunas: Looking back several hundred years, the sun’s magnetism is at an all-time high. The last four peaks have been quite high.

Reason: Do these fluctuations produce a big effect?

Baliunas: It’s relatively small from cycle to cycle, but we estimate that from the 17th century to now it could have been four or five tenths of a percent of the sun’s energy output. Run that through a climate model, and that’s enough to explain the temperature change.

So, given the climate models they had at the time, the sun’s activity can fully explain any rise in temperature on the earth. Interesting. But what about man-made green house gas emmissions:

Reason: Would this solar variability research say anything about what would happen if we were really to increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere a lot?

Baliunas: That experiment has been done. We’ve increased the amount of greenhouse gases by an equivalent of going halfway to a doubling of carbon dioxide–and doubling is the benchmark that everyone talks about. And then you look at how the earth’s temperature has responded, and it has not warmed more than a tenth or two-tenths of a degree. So a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation says a doubling is a few tenths of a degree. That’s not significant, because it’s not noticeable above the natural background changes.

The real test of this is the last 20 years, with very precise satellite measures of the earth’s temperature made globally. The global average temperature of the atmosphere, just above the surface of the earth, has not warmed at all. There’s been no warming trend in the past 20 years, and the models all say that there should have been a warming of several tenths of a degree centigrade in that time.

She then goes on to skewer the objections to the fact that there has been no warming of the earth’s surface.

This interview was done almost ten years ago, people. Ten years. In that time, we’ve been subjected to hysteria and misinformation regarding climate change and what’s causing it. It’s good to see current articles come out the sun’s huge effect on the earth’s climate now. But if this interview had gotten a bit more exposure back in 1998, the current bullshit hysteria over climate change may not be so strident. With a guy like AlGore, one never knows. But think of what reasonable ideas and discussions we could have had in the last ten years, rather than all of this doom and gloom hatred of humanity we have instead.