By Tom Harris ——Bio and Archives--March 2, 2024

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Scientists have known for a long time that solar activity correlates well with climatic conditions on Earth. This should surprise no one since our home star is an enormous source of energy, only a tiny fraction of which is intercepted by the Earth. Yet that is enough to raise the temperature of our planet from near absolute zero to the relatively comfortable 15o C we enjoy today.

The fact that, in 2004, Prof. Dr. Sami K. Solanki, now of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, et al, found that the Sun had been more active during the previous 70 years than it had been in more than 8,000 years, should obviously have some bearing on the warming of the late 1990s. Dr. Henrik Svensmark, physicist and professor in the Division of Solar System Physics at the Danish National Space Institute in Copenhagen stated:

The problem was, the direct impact of changes in solar insolation, the solar radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface, was too small to account for warming observed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. For example, the Total Solar Irradiance, the amount of solar energy reaching the top of Earth’s atmosphere, only varies by about 0.1% over the course of the familiar 11-year sunspot cycle. While the variations can be greater for longer cycles, for example the 200-year solar cycle, they are still insufficient to account for the observed warming, at least via direct solar insolation changes. This is why the United Nations dismisses the Sun as a candidate for the major cause of warming over the past few centuries. After all, we have no control of the Sun, of course, so the IPCC pays no attention to sunspots, an important gauge of solar activity. Instead they point to humanity’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as the primary driver.

However, as I discussed in “Climate ‘detective story’ upends politically correct science,” my previous article in this series, geologists have found that CO2 and temperature do not show any consistent correlation over geologic time. As seen in the graph I included last week, below, at times, CO2 levels were remarkably high, and temperatures were moderate or even low. At other times, CO2 was low, and temperatures were high. And sometimes they were both high or low at the same time.

As explained in the caption to this important image, the changes in (see part one of this series), a proxy for temperature variations, were determined by Dr. Jan Veizer, the Distinguished University Professor (emeritus) of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa and Institute for Geology, Mineralogy and Geophysics of Bochum Ruhr University in Germany. Veizer was surprised to note that the Earth warmed and cooled periodically, switching back and forth between ice house and hot house, following an approximately sinusoidal pattern with a periodicity of about 140 million years throughout the Phanerozoic, the geologic eon that covers the time period from about 600 million years ago to the present.

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