Sun—not CO2—Drives Earth's Climate

Global warming has been reported on Mars, Pluto, Jupiter, Neptune and Triton, the largest moon of Neptune. These heavenly bodies have never had humans to create man-made global warming, and the warming they are experiencing correlates very well with solar cycles—as does the warming of the earth. (The correlation is much better than between carbon dioxide levels and earth's climate.) How can the sun be causing global warming elsewhere in our solar system but not on earth? 

World Climate Report and Geophysical Research Letters have recently carried articles further identifying the correlation between our climate, the sun, and the other planets. Neptune has been getting both warmer and brighter since 1980, which correlates with sunspot activity. The researchers, Hammel and Lockwood, have found the same relationship exists between earth's temperature changes, solar output and Neptune's brightness. If the sun is not the common cause, the researchers ask, “How is it possible that the Earth’s temperature is so highly correlated with brightness variations from Neptune?” There has been no recent recent build-up of greenhouse gases on Neptune.

The news about Neptune came just weeks after weeks after publication of an article showing warming on Mars. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun. 

The large planets Jupiter and Saturn exert a gravitational pull on the earth that makes the earth's orbit around the sun elliptical. These planets align to pull the earth away from the sun to the maximum distance of its orbit every 100,000 years. The earth's 3 degree change in its inclination to its rotational axis has a 41,000 year cycle. And the precession of its rotation, which exposes one pole or the other to more sunlight, has a 22,000 year cycle.

Shorter term cycles are determined by changes in the surface of the sun itself. The sun's radiation is not uniform but varied by disturbances on the surface of the sun, called “sunspot cycles.” Magnetic fields rip through the sun's surface, producing holes in the sun's corona, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and changes in the solar wind, the stream of charged particles emanating from the sun. The solar wind, by modulating the galactic cosmic rays which reach the earth, determines both the formation of clouds and the carbon dioxide level in the earth's atmosphere—which has nothing to do with emissions from factories or automobiles! Sunspot cycles cause only slight changes in the sun's radiation, but these changes are amplified many fold by interaction 1) with ozone in the upper stratosphere, and 2) with clouds in the lower troposphere.

Sunspot cycles have an eleven-year cycle as well as cycles of 87 years and 210 years. Superimposed, these cycles might add or cancel each other out. After about 210 years, sunspot cycles “crash” or almost entirely die out, and the earth can cool dramatically. Singer and Avery, in their best-selling book Unstoppable Global Warming, identify a global warming cycle of about 1,500 years (1,470, actually) based on the 87 and 210-year solar cycles. Seven of the 210-year solar cycles and seventeen of the 87-year cycles fit neatly into the observed 1,470-year climate cycle of the earth. And the Kyoto Treaty and all the proposals to limit carbon dioxide emissions will have no effect whatever on these climate cycles. In their arrogant ignorance, the politicians and the progress-is-the-villain ideologues propose expensive schemes that will waste trillions of dollars, reduce people's standard of living, reduce freedom and extend government control over people's lives everywhere.

Tim Patterson is a paleoclimatologist at Canada's Carleton University. He says that 6,000 years ago the earth was 6 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than now. He also says that 10,000 years ago, when atmospheric CO2 was about the same as now, temps rose as much as 6 degrees C. in a decade—100 times faster than the past century! He also says by 2020 the sun will be starting into its weakest 11-year sunspot cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on earth. "Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again. If we're to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."

For more on global warming and other issues, see “Free Essays” on my website www.amlibpub.com.