Caveat: Sun Found to Be Cause of Global Warming

Who would have thought?  But seriously, I'm certainly not what one would call a global warming skeptic, but I have been known to harbor doubts about the anthropogenic aspect of it.  This report on recent scientific work on the variable radiation output of the sun sheds some additional light on the subject.

Global warming or not, I've been really cold lately.  Obviously a bit under the weather in one way or another, sleeping far more than usual at night, and not fully "with it" during the day.

The latest iteration on the date for my upcoming move to the new housing facility:  next Monday.  I'm not looking forward to it.  I will not have internet at home, again, for at least a while.  And of course, as mentioned before,  I can't access my blog's maintenance page from school computers.  Just like the Toys R Us website, it's arbitrarily blocked.

3 Comments

  1. Kray Van Kirk

    Well…I would say the title is a bit misleading. :-p
    The paper discusses the effects of heretofore unobserved and un-accounted-for increase in ultraviolet output during periods of reduced solar output in the visible spectrum, affecting ozone densities at various atmospheric planes. This increase in UV radiation, along with its forcing on planetary climate, displays a different phase response than the visible spectrum. They fitted some new models and some regressions to the data, and the fits look pretty good. The paper is fairly complex (I just skimmed through it) but it will be very interesting to see how the new analysis plays out.
    The full paper is available here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7316/full/nature09426.html

  2. @Kray. I wouldn’t have described the title as misleading – there is a level at which any statement that attributes global warming to the sun is trivially true. Therefore… the headline is funny – both the one in the Reg as well as my reduction of it. I’m certainly not up on the technical aspects of the actual Nature article – I made no attempt to read it. I’m neither trying to support nor attack the anthropogenic view of global warming. It was mostly an effort at humor, with an added observation that although the FACT of global warming seems scientifically incontrovertible, the FACT of it being due to human carbon emissions is rather less so.

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