Here Comes the Sun
It’s alright
The Canadian Financial Post recently featured an article suggesting that the sun is the most likely primary driver of temperature changes here on Earth.
The article is by R. Timothy Patterson, professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University. He notes that the field of climate change has experienced significant growth in the past 10 year:
Climate-change research is now literally exploding with new findings. Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the field has had more research than in all previous years combined and the discoveries are completely shattering the myths. For example, I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of all energy on the planet.
Also of note is Patterson’s citing of a survey that indicates that, contrary to much of the certainty we hear from politicians and actors, the scientific community recognizes the complexity of trying to predict climate change:
“..the science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that ‘the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.’ About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all.”
The article is an interesting read and part of a longer series.
[tags] global warming, climate change, solar activity, sun, Patterson,
February 24th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
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