Sun does not cause global warming: UK Study

by ryan | July 11, 2007 at 12:13 pm

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With global warming all the rage and most of North America cursing the current heat wave, objections to the results of a new study by UK scientists may abound. Nevertheless, the observation that the output of energy from the sun has decreased in the last fifty does seems to put in question conventional wisdom.

Solar radiation is not the cause of recent global warming, two scientists say in a report published by Britain's Royal Society, the country's science organization.

The study was undertaken partly to rebut a TV documentary that argued natural solar radiation, not human activity, is the cause of global warming, the BBC reported.

The Great Global Warming Swindle was shown on Britain's Channel 4 in March. "We've almost begun to take it for granted that climate change is a manmade phenomenon," the network's website said. "But just as the environmental lobby think they've got our attention, a group of naysayers have emerged to slay the whole premise of global warming."

Mike Lockwood from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Britain and Claus Fröhlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland dispute that. The abstract of their report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A said there is evidence that the sun affected Earth's climate up to about 1950.

But in the past 20 years, "all the trends in the sun that could have had an influence on the Earth's climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures."

Their data show that while the sun's output has fallen, temperatures on Earth have risen.The power of the sun peaked in 1985, they reported after assessing nearly 40 years of data. Yet the Earth's average temperature has gone up 0.4 C steadily over that period, both before and after the peak.

They also studied two other measures of solar activity, solar flux and cosmic rays, and both suggested solar activity has been declining since the late 1980s.

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ScienceDave

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 13:05 on July 11th, 2007

Interesting stuff, and another piece evidence for the effect of greenhouse gases. In fact, over the last few billion years since the sun first formed it has been running out of energy at its core. Subsequently, it has been dimming ever since. This

I read the original article, and the last paragraph sums up my feelings on this debate, "The society said: "There is a small minority which is seeking to
confuse the public on the causes of climate change. They are often
misrepresenting the science, when the reality is that the evidence is
getting stronger every day.""

As Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers put, "Skepticism is an indespensible element in scientific inquiry, but when the intention is to mislead rather than clarify, we have not skepticism but deceit."

Such examples of purposeful straying of public discourse on climate change is abound, if you look hard enough. Flannery cites an example first brought about in Clive Hamilton's Running from the Storm: the Development of Climate Change Policy in Australia. It is based in one of the documents produced by oil and gas supporters, supposedly signed by 70+ scientists claiming doubt in climate change. It turned out most of the name were not scientists, or had not actually signed the document.