Principia Scientific lists 20 recent papers documenting the relationship between solar variation and climate change here on earth.
I think that climate change probably has no single cause but that human agency, solar variation, and any number of other factors probably play a role.
Looked over the first two papers. They are looking at long term trends and it looks like their observations largely stop 20-30 years ago. We have been tracking total solar output for a while. Unless there is something in the other papers that says so, solar output plateaued about 30-40 years ago but temperatures kept rising.
Steve
I keep wondering if we could be getting lucky enough for an ironic twist- AGW causing a raise in temperatures and counterbalancing the onset of what would have been an Ice Age.
One look at that website’s logo made me google it. It’s not very–what’s the word?– credible . Apparently the founder wrote a book about how there’s no such thing as the greenhouse effect.
Two of the papers are about an 11-year solar cycle. How would that have anything to do with the actual data? It doesn’t seem like they’re even trying; it’s just throwing stuff at the wall.
Anyway, the basic science has been known for years. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and humans are methodically putting it into the atmosphere. It’s not hard to draw a conclusion from that. The energy companies knew about it back in the 70s.
“I think that climate change probably has no single cause but that human agency, solar variation, and any number of other factors probably play a role.”
That’s my understanding of the current level of science. The debate is over the relative strengths of each factor. Most climate scientists believe human activity accounts for greater than 50% of the observed warming over the past century, but they haven’t been able to quantify it accurately. The skeptical/heretical scientist either say there isn’t enough data to know or believe it’s less than 50%.