re: #50 Spare O’Lake

What about the sunspots? They keep talking about the measurably decreased sunspot activity.

This is a great question.

The they who talks about it the most are the non-scientific political shills.
They would like you to believe that by creating a tempest in a teapot, that somehow the entire set of other observed facts of AGW magically go away. Alas, many are gullible enough to fall for it.

It is true that there is a small - read very small - variation in the sun’s irradiance because of the lack of sunspots. It is true that there is a large and heated debate in the community over if this has a small effect on the overall models.

However, there are four things to note:

1. Solar cycles are 11 years long. The sun was behaving perfectly normally for the last century while we were warming through all the past 11 year solar cycles.

2. Even in the most extreme cases of what this effect could be, it does not account for the all the warming we see.

3. If it were the sun causing the warming from increased output, we would see the atmosphere warming from the top down - because the sun is supposedly outputting more to heat us… We see the exact opposite. This means that rather than more heat coming in from the top, more heat is being trapped at the bottom. This is the smoking gun, game over argument.

4. The sun is currently outputting less… We are still warming. What happens in the next cycle when it gets back to normal and all the things we did to the atmosphere to make us warm better are still in play - or in fact, worse?