One More Climate Skeptic Argument Dims
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 09.14.06
Per a Reuters news item “Researchers from Germany, Switzerland and the United States found that the sun's brightness varied by only 0.07 percent over 11-year sunspot cycles, far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution”. What the Reuters story refers to is a review paper published in the journal "Nature" . For discussion of the weak and strong points of the review, we highly recommend you pursue the RealClimate link here. The Reuters coverage does contain, however, a perfect statement from one of the review authors 'for the Skeptic In Your Life' (we all have at least one): -- "This basically rules out the sun as the cause of global warming," Henk Spruit, a co-author of the report from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, told Reuters. By the way, if your Skeptic mentions the anomaly of the Little Ice Age, Mr Spruit also said that the “Little Ice Age around the 17th century, when London's Thames River froze, seemed limited mainly to western Europe and so was not a planet-wide cooling that might have implied a dimmer sun”. Solar Flare Image Credit: Standford University
The little ice age didnt just effect western Europe in the 17th C. North America suffered as well as the rest of the northern hemisphere and lasted for as long as 400 years.
=== author's response follows ===
Please cite a reference or provide a link. By that I do not mean a newspaper article or self published or THinkTank piece.
Wow you think you could google it yourself. How about a wikipedia article?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
=== author's response follows ====
My point is that when a commentor makes an assertion that is contrary to the findings of a peer reviewed and NEW piece of research regarding an issue that affect the future of life on earth that the commenter ought to be willing to at least state where the contrary information comes from.
As an aside, I do not personally rely on Wiki's as an up to date source of information on an issue of such gravity. Good as background certainly but not good enough, in my opinion ,to settle ground breaking findings as the one discussed in this post.
Plus, this is what Wikipedia said:
"Crowley and Lowery, 2000 describes the LIA as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C, and says current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period" appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries..."
And didn't something about it pop up in 'An Inconvenient Truth'? Something about how ice poured into some warm current, sending North Europe and parts of North America into another ice age?
In other words, still probably has nothing to do with the sun.
=== author's response follows ====
It is sometimes helpful to think of "Climate" as the "Average of All Weather". The average includes then entire surface of the globe up through the stratosphere. Meteorologists know little actuallly about climate change (contrary to popular expectation). The point that the LIA is non-representative of earth's climate should be easier to grasp in this context. But let's try another analogy.
Call a friend across the country and one of the first things you'll likely compare is the weather. "Is it raining there like here?" It's almost as if we all have constantly to be reminded that conditions vary over terrestrial space. People are always remarking on how odd it is when they drive in and out of a rain shower over a few miles, as if it is somehow miraculous: a huge surprise. They need also to be reminded that Europe being frozen for a few hundred years is non-representative of the earths total climate in that period.
Maybe you should link to an article that does not require a subscription. But the key word is "seemed" it may have been a more pronouned effect in Europe, but that doesn't mean NA was not affected.