The Australian Senate is holding an enquiry into global warming.
A group of CSIRO scientists has written to the inquiry, “broadly describing the Government’s emissions reductions targets as inadequate.”
A climate scientist from James Cook University, Robert Carter, has also written to the enquiry (story also here), saying that Garnaut’s report was based on the assumption that humans are causing climate change, and that this assumption is wrong.
“The Stern Report and the Garnaut Report in Australia are both reports by distinguished economists – they have no basis in scientific expertise,” he said.
“It is never a good move to appoint someone to a review committee who is not competent to judge the basis for the whole review, but that is what the British and Australian Governments did.”
Meanwhile, the sun has entered a period of extremely low sunspot activity. Will this have an effect on Earth’s climate? Who knows? This could be nothing, but…
A seventy-year cold snap in the seventeenth century, which saw the River Thames freeze over, coincided with a drop in sunspot activity known as the ‘Maunder minimum’.
Let’s hope that those who say that climate change is all due to the sun are wrong! Harvard astrophysicist Willie Soon is going out on a limb and making a prediction: the sunspot cycle means that we’re in for some cooling, this year.
“When the energy input to the Earth from the sun is lower, you can easily imagine then what the first effect would be — heating less of the ocean’s surface. This promotes less evaporation of water vapor from the ocean, reducing what we all know to be the major green house gas, water vapor, in contrast to atmospheric carbon dioxide. Then, you would say that if the sun provides less energy to warm the ocean’s surface, and there is less of this water vapor and less of the water vapor greenhouse effect, then the Earth begins warming less…
Dr Soon needs to take a leaf from his opponents book. Making a prediction about the next twelve months is very risky. It’s much better to predict the weather in 2100.
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A connection between temperature and activity of the sun? Whatever will they think of next.
who knows… maybe a connection between the sun and this phenomenon called “daytime.”