A new perspective on global warming

“The earth is but a pimple on the sun’s surface,” said Terry Donze during his global warming lecture where he presented the view opposing man made climate change.

Donze first exhibited “Unstoppable Solar Cycles”, a video from the Heartland Institute featuring Dr. Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Dr. David R. Legates, a climatologist at the Center for Climate Research at the University of Delaware.

Soon and Legates both pointed out that the sun is the primary force driving climate change today. “The sun… in terms of its light energy output is probably the only true external driver of the earth climate system,” said Soon. He explained that there is no other force like the sun than can affect such large scale events such as ocean currents, wind patterns and even tree growth. He concluded that no other force, except the sun, would be powerful enough to cause drastic climate change, convincing him that “the sun is the main driver and supplier of energy to the earth weather and climate system.”

Legates continued the explanation, comparing the role of the sun to the role of carbon dioxide emissions on climate change. “The sun is the key ingredient to climate. I mean, 99.9% of the energy on the earth that goes into the climate system comes from the sun.” He explained that humans do play a role in affecting their environment, but their part is comparatively small. “I think the biggest driver is gonna be other natural fluctuations [such as the sun] and carbon dioxide plays a small role in that,” said Legates.
In the video, Soon spoke directly about a reason for an increase in the carbon dioxide levels. “If you started to warm the surface ocean temperature, the ability for the ocean water to hold this carbon dioxide in the system is a lot less, meaning that there will be more…carbon dioxide effusing out.”

Legates backs up the idea that carbon dioxide is not primary driver of climate change. “A warmer earth gives birth to more vegetation, which in turn has a more active carbon cycle. As a result carbon dioxide may in fact follow the temperature change as opposed to being a leading indicator.”

After the video, Donze provided more evidence to support his claim that the sun is the main driver behind climate change. He showed a variety of slides with temperature data from the University of Alabama Huntsville as well as Greenland ice core data.

“Overall, the 30 year period has a very slight rise to it, but thirty years isn’t very long geologically. We need to put that into some perspective,” said Donze. He explained that there were various increases and decreases in global temperatures, ranging from the medieval warm period at the end of the first millennium when the Vikings were able to colonize Greenland to the “little ice age about 400 years ago when the Vikings got run out of Greenland, before they froze to death with their animals and people were skating on the Thames river in London.”

Donze then explained exactly how the sun has kept the earth warm, and how these mini ice ages happened. “So how’s the sun keep us out of the glacial periods? Through solar irradiation… It has the highest correlation with earth temperatures than anything else…In periods of lower solar activity we have lower irradience, lower magnetic field strength, fewer sun spots, and less solar wind…If we have less solar wind, more galactic cosmic rays are allowed to come into our atmosphere. Now the cosmic rays are about 90% hydrogen protons. So when they come into our atmosphere they form clouds. Clouds reflect sunlight up to 80 watts per meter squared. What happens, we get colder? [We get] fewer sunspots, more galactic cosmic rays, [and] a colder earth. The cosmic ray cloud link has recently been verified by CERN, that’s the European organization for nuclear research.”