Sunspots, Not CO2 is Cause of Climate Change

Charlie Perry is a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, received a Ph.D in physics and astronomy at The University of Kansas. He also has spent time as a meteorologist.

Perry does not subscribe to the CO2 theory of global warming, rather, he believes firmly in the effect of sunspots as the source of global warming, and global cooling. A sunspot, Perry explains, is a location on the sun's surface that is cooler than the surrounding area. When there are more sunspots, the sun's surface becomes more dynamic and an opposite effect takes place, releasing more heat and energy when other parts of the sun become hotter.

A solar minimum is when the amount of spots on the sun is at a low and the reverse is true for a solar maximum. The complete solar cycle is about an 11-year process. Perry says the current solar minimum could continue into 2010.

"There's a fair chance it will be a cooler winter than last year," Perry said. There is a feeling from some in the scientific community the Earth may be entering into a grand minimum, which is an extended period with low numbers of sunspots that creates cooler temperatures.

Perry said there’s evidence the Earth's temperature may be slightly decreasing, but local weather patterns are much more affected by the jet stream than solar activity. However, Perry said snow in Buenos Aires and southern Africa, the best ski season in Australia and a cooler Arctic region are some of the evidence for a cooling period. So, Perry said, sunspots may have a far greater impact on weather than previously thought.

Perry is a proponent of the cosmic ray and clouds theory as opposed to the CO2 global warming theory to explain recent global warming trends. The cosmic ray and clouds theory was first put forth twenty years ago by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, and his been accepted by the scientific community until the less defensible CO2 theory emerged recently.

In a July 2007 issue of Discover magazine, Svensmark said the theory is simply that solar activity can alter the amount of clouds in the atmosphere, which affects the temperature of the Earth. More clouds mean a cooler Earth because more of the sun's heat is being reflected. Fewer clouds equal a warmer Earth.

Perry says data indicates global temperature fluctuations correlate to a statistically significant degree with the length of the sunspot cycle. Longer cycles are associated with cooler temperatures.

Johan Feddema, acting chair and professor of geography at KU, studies global warming. He is skeptical of any one phenomenon being the direct cause of global warming because there are so many climate variables that factor into global temperatures.

The CO2 theory is so thin, and contradicts most other theories regarding weather fluctuations, it's difficult to imagine how the CO2 theory gained any traction at all. Credit must go to Al Gore, and his now discredited "An Inconvenient Truth" film which environmentalists pushed blindly around the globe, much like Silent Spring was blindly accepted a generation ago.

Climate Change Scientists Backpeddaling...FAST

The New Scientist, a staunch global warming advocate, is making a fast retreat from its previous "certainty" that global warming would continue unabated unless governments across the globe acted fast, and act radically. Numerous global warming models had shown with great certainty that the earth is in trouble, that all the ice is going to melt, oceans will rise, flooding all the world's seaports, and that we will all be driven to oblivion--mostly by Americans who use more fossil fuels than anyone else, and pump carbon into the atmosphere, creating this disastrous condition.

Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany, and one of the authors of the IPCC report that got everyone worked up about global warming, said, "Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter, we could be about to enter one or two decades during which temperatures cool." Hmmm. And one of his collegues said, "In many ways we know more about what will happen in the 2050s than next year," said Vicky Pope from the UK Met Office. Frankly, I'm not convinced anyone know anything about 2050 either.

Latif predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans. The cooling would be due to cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades.

Well, this is absolute heresy, and this is all the "critics" and "naysayers" have been saying for the past few years, and been ridiculed for it by the eco/left. It's not like environmentalists are the only ones who know anything about the weather, or who have access to real data. But it gets better.

Eric Berger, the science editor for the Houston Chronicle writes, "For a long time now, science reporters have been confidently told the science is settled. That the planet is warming and humans are unquestionably the primary cause. We've been told to trust the computer models -- the models which show a markedly upward trend in temperatures as carbon dioxide concentrations increase. And I've trusted the scientists telling me this. When An Inconvenient Truth came out I believed the movie to be scientifically accurate.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the end of the world: hurricane activity on the global scale is near historical lows. And the Earth seems to have stopped warming.

This, despite the fact that some of the country's leading climate scientists say there is unequivocally a link between major hurricanes and climate change. And despite the fact that other leading climate scientists predicted 2009 or 2010 will go down as the warmest year in recorded history. Either prediction, if true, would be alarming. Yet both of these predictions seem to be off." Indeed, way off.

And Richard Black, the Environmental writer for the BBC writes, "The Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted."

It's difficult not to look upon the "climate change" crowd with complete disdain, not to mention distrust, because it is this "natural climate cycles" issue that critics of global warming have been spouting about for years. Warming and cooling cycles are part of the earth's weather, they have been occurring forever, so far as we can tell, and for Al Gore and the environmental extremist crowd to ridicule the critics for bringing up this little "inconvenient truth," and then turning around and admitting it is really happening (duh), discredits the entire notion of global warming as a man caused event.

Apparently, (since I have no way of counting the number of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere), CO2 is on the increase, and has been for decades, if not millennia; yet, the uncooperative global weather has the gall to stop warming. And for a highly educated and respected scientist like Richard S. Lindzen, MIT, Cambridge, MA, to state matter of factly that CO2 is a minor atmospheric constituent, (.003%) and as such it’s variations are not important, must really stick in the craw of Al Gore and his cronies.

Because increasing numbers of "skeptics" are coming out of the closet, and because even the environmentalists themselves are having to admit their folley and falseness regarding global warming; this brings into question the entire premise, not to mention "facts," of global warming.