FOOD FOR THOUGHT-"Riding a solar cycle"

     The Waterbury Republican-American weighs in on the global-warming debate in today's editorial, "Riding a solar cycle":

The global-warming scare machine has been running full bore, most recently with Time magazine's cover story, "Be Worried. By Very Worried." What is remarkable about the promulgation of the dogma that global warming is destroying the earth, and human activity is causing it, is the way this perspective ignores a rather large force dictating surface and atmospheric temperatures.

That is to say, the sun.

***

The sun is currently at its most active level in 300 years.

"That, say scientists in Philadelphia [at a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science], could be a more significant cause of global warming than the emissions of greenhouse gases that are most often blamed." It may also help to explain why the effects of global warming have been observed on Mars, a planet not known for its coal-burning power plants or sport-utility vehicles.

      The Waterbury Republican-American thus repeats what I previously covered here in a Post of September 28, 2005 ("Global Warming-On Mars and Pluto")  (see "GLOBAL WARMING" under CATEGORIES", right-hand side of this web page).  There is a substantial scientific view that, if global warming is in fact occurring, the phenomenon may be part of a natural cycle rather then the by-product of evil industrialism.

     Obviously, the jury is still out.  However, before we set about to wreck our lifestyles and plunge the country into recession or even depression (see previous Posts on this subject, again under "GLOBAL WARMING") by signing on to such ill-conceived notions as the Kyoto Protocol, perhaps we should at least let the jury continue to hear all the theories and evidence on the subject of global warming rather than plunge into potentially disastrous policies based on fear mongering.

     A final, side, note:  I'm sure that the above-referenced scientific comment on the sun, rather than man, possibly being the cause of any global warming will receive prominent attention in The New York Times, the LA Times and on the mainstream network newscasts.  Do I need to add a "(sarcasm)" disclaimer to that statement or is the sarcasm obvious?

Comments

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[David]

I think you're asking the wrong question here Stephen. It's not really a question of whether current warming trends are caused mainly by rising greenhouse gases - they could, as you and others have said, be caused by any number of things.

However, there is no debate that the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now are higher than at any time in human history.

So the real question is whether this high concentration of greenhouse gases will cause warming in the future. And I think there's much less debate about that. The only debatable questions now are how much warming and what will flow from that warming.