Seen at the BBC:
But the most striking feature, he says, is that looking at the past 1,150 years the Sun has never been as active as it has been during the past 60 years.
Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that has accelerated in the past century, just at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer.
The data suggests that changing solar activity is influencing in some way the global climate causing the world to get warmer.
Over the past 20 years, however, the number of sunspots has remained roughly constant, yet the average temperature of the Earth has continued to increase.
Critics of the idea that human activity is contributing to global warming love to point to sunspot activity as a sign that change is futile, and surely this bit of news will fuel that tendency.
However, when considering the potential that at least part of global warming might be beyond human control, I can’t help but have the following thoughts:
- When will we have some research that considers that global climate change could be influenced by both human activity and solar changes?
- Aren’t there some other measurable benefits to greenhouse-gas reduction that might also help justify the cost in changes necessary to reduce emissions?
- So, we have some folks arguing that because our climate is being affected by solar changes, there’s nothing we can do to reverse the process. On the other side of the fence, there seem to be several folks who argue that we’ve already past the tipping point on greenhouse gas emissions, and global warming has become inevitable. If either “global warming is unstoppable” position is potentially correct, the isn’t the question of “who’s right” somewhat moot, and shouldn’t more energy be being expended on forecasting potential impacts and ways to react to those changes?