In the Christian Science Monitor this week Peter N. Spotts doesn’t say sunspots and cosmic rays have nothing to do with global warming. But after a bit of head-scratching he leans heavily toward saying it’s not much. This is a lot better and more intellectually honest than to dismiss the evidence in order to tamp down further enthusiasm from the skeptic crowd for non-CO2 explanations of recent hot weather.
The story lets the readers know a bit about the complex stew of factors that alter climate, and about the history of such studies. Spotts assures them that sunspots are among them and that cosmic rays are in fact plausible suspects. But, it says here, the bigger crowd of well-credential experts still says it’s mainly fossil carbon and hence our fault.
-CP
Other solar news: Wall St. Journal‘s Robert Lee Hotz looks at the other kind of space weather — the solar storms and various effusions that interfere with radio communication, satellites, and similar tools of civilized discourse. There isn’t any doubt about this solar-terrestrial connection. One source tells him that as the sun heads for another round of sunspot activity early next year, “We are set up for a nasty surprise.”
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