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Global Warming is a fact. However I don't believe it has anything to do with Greenhouse Gases. I've looked at numerous charts on sun spot activity and they all line up perfectly with global warming and cooling. Imagine that the sun causing global warming?
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Interesting graph. Especially interesting is how the land temperature plot appears to preceed that of the solar activity plot over a good portion of those 300 years. Generally, a system with any sort of inertia will have the cause preceeding the effect. I also have a problem understanding how a plot of cycle length versus time means anything. The solar cycle length in 1800 was 26 years, yet about 10 years later the cycle length is 25 years? This makes sense? Statistical windowing can be useful for finding patterns in noisy data, but windowing time over time doesn't make sense.

I wondered what the authors were thinking, so I Googled Baliunas and Soon and found that the report was done for the George C. Marshall Institute. I found several (many) papers addressing this topic, but nothing with this plot and an explanation.

However, it's always fun to impugne "unbiased" "research" "institutes," so....

Their mission statement follows, emphasis mine.

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The George C. Marshall Institute was established in 1984 as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation to conduct technical assessments of scientific issues with an impact on public policy.

In every area of public policy, from national defense, to the environment, to the economy, decisions are shaped by developments in and arguments about science and technology. The need for accurate and impartial technical assessments has never been greater. However, even purely scientific appraisals are often politicized and misused by interest groups.

The Marshall Institute seeks to counter this trend by providing policymakers with rigorous, clearly written and unbiased technical analyses on a range of public policy issues. Through briefings to the press, publication programs, speaking tours and public forums, the Institute seeks to preserve the integrity of science and promote scientific literacy.


Now, one would think that a purely unbiased, scientific institute would likely publish papers that would fall somewhere in the middle of the laissez-faire industry line and the hard-core environmentalist line. However, looking at their list of publications on the environment, we see that most of the shots are taken at the environmetal groups and conservationist theories.

Additionally, they support a position that they call "civic environmentalism" whereby government regulation merely points to problems and the free-market would provide for "the actual work of environmental protection up to collaborative efforts between industry and local governments." Personally, I trust the free market to make me money, not look after my or anyone else's well being. I also don't trust disparate local governments to stand up to the unified front of national industry groups.

I'm not saying that solar maximums don't contribute to global warming, but it is interesting to see a scientist (Richard Willson in the article in the Space.com link) that accepts a solar cycle contribution but cautions against discounting industrial pollution as a significant factor.



Solar cycle predictions are a very interesting and as of yet not completely understood science. Various methods through the years have been tried to predict the length and severity of the cycles, only to be undone by what actually happens on the next cycle. A fellow that works for my company is deeply involved in this, and one of things noted was that there is some sort of predictor in Earth phenomena that can indicate the severity of the next cycle. Very weird, because it might imply that the Earth is affecting the Sun's cycles. A recent study that was in the news seemed to be able to explain that link a little better, in a way that ties it back to previously unaccounted for activity on the Sun. It's a very interesting topic to my industry, because it affects how we fly spacecraft.

As for CO2 - sat in on a presentation where the analyst (from a project that measured such things) presented measurement observations correlating the increase of CO2 to the number of barrels of oil sold. There were also interesting graphs showing the levels fluctuate in the hemispheres on a seasonal basis - when it's winter in the northern hemisphere there is less vegetation to soak up the CO2, so levels rise, opposite happens in the summer.

For me, on the logic side is this - the oil buried in the Earth contains carbon, the burning of this produces carbon dioxide. We dig up and burn a huge amount of this every day, and demandis only going up. Carbon dioxide is a known greenhouse gas. The tonnage of it our activities are pumping into the atmosphere has to have an affect. To me it's logical and inescapable.

Man's affect on the weather part II - cities and developed areas have been shown to affect local weather patterns. The pavement and buildings and all collect heat from the Sun. This heat warms the air around the city which then rises, causing air to flow inward from outer regions. Local winds and storms are all affected by this.

Pirates of the Chesapeake
WRCRA