Saturday, July 07, 2007

Canadian Climatologist Says Sun Causing Global Warming

Confounding Al Gore and his legion of global warming zealots, climatologist Tim Patterson says the fluctuations of the sun's output are to blame:

Another scientist has added his voice to the Global Warming debate. Canadian climatologist Tim Patterson says the sun drives the earth’s climate changes—and Earth’s current global warming is a direct result of a long, moderate 1,500-year cycle in the sun’s irradiance.
Patterson says he learned of the 1,500-year climate cycle while studying cycles in fish numbers on Canada’s West Coast. Since the Canadian West had no long-term written fishery records, Patterson’s research team drilled sediment cores in the deep local fjords to get 5,000-year climate profiles from the mud. The mud showed the past climate conditions: Warm summers left layers thick with one-celled fossils and fish scales. Cold, wet periods showed dark sediments, mostly dirt washed from the surrounding land.
Patterson’s fishing profiles clearly revealed the sun’s 87 and 210-year solar cycles—and the longer, 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles found since the 1980s in ice cores, tree rings, and fossil pollen.
“Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators is not unique,” says the climatologist from Carleton University. “Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia’s Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.”

What does he think of the theory that CO2 emissions are causing the warming?

The Canadian expert concludes, “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.” Instead, Earth’s sea surface temperatures show a massive 95 percent lagged correlation with the sunspot index.
Patterson says climate change is the most complex field we’ve ever studied. He notes that a 2003 German poll of 530 scientists from 27 countries found two-thirds of the respondents doubted that “the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.”
Attempting to stop global warming with the Kyoto Protocol, he warns, could be as useless as King Canute commanding the tides to cease.

Perhaps when Al Gore becomes King of the universe, he can command the sun to stop fluctuating.

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