Because the other 50% is the part we can do something about.

I like how you pick and choose from the article you cited. Also how you distorted that 50% figure, changing it from “up to” to “at least.” You exemplify the anti-global warming side so very well.

There is no money to be made in the Cap and Trade market if the sun was the cause of global warming.

We are bad and must be punished for our sins against mother earth.

Liberals dismiss that theory because they cannot control the suns activity, so there is no money to be made. You cant con the sun or make money off of it in any way. people on the other hand are different. You can put together a big steaming pile of nonsense for everyone to buy in to and make a killing off of their stupidity.

Because too many people worship at the feet of Al Gore and now his sidekick Obama

The sun remains a constant in any formula while the variable is the increasing presence of man on the planet which could better be described as a virus.

Everyone lies about everything for their own benifits. Just keep on researching for yourself.

Ah but see, you’re assuming it is true. Wether it is really true or not is irrelevant, we do not have conclusive evidence that says “it is so”. Is it therefore not better to take as many precautions as possible?

Either way, we all benefit from a cleaner air anyway, right?

I too have also wondered this. If the Sun is constantly growing size as it’s fuel is exhausted and converted wouldn’t even a minute amount of a few yards raise the Earth’s temperature as its inch per inch the energy output of the Sun is tremendous compared to anything on Earth?

The global warming bandwagon is largely run by those with an agenda which revolves around money, and those whose voices beg to differ, are ridiculed and put-down. Are we going through climate change? Absolutely. Have been for thousands of years. Are we experiencing global warming? Not at all. It’s the biggest con since Gallileo was muzzled.

The sun may play a role in global warming, but you can’t dismiss people altogether. The constant pour of harmful gasses into our atmosphere certainly isn’t doing any good. I don’t think it’s fair to blame global warming on one single thing because there are many different factors that could affect it.

The short answer: because if we attribute this to the sun, we can’t push our political agenda.

The ONLY way a reasonable person would simply dismiss the sun’s effect is that there is an agenda connected to the other blamed cause.

These people also largely dismiss water vapor in their “calculations.” Water vapor is a more potent warming gas than CO2, but even a relatively intelligent chimp would recognize how foolish it is to think that we could much effect atmospheric water vapor.

Edit: Don’t you love the dodge that shows up when this topic is brought up credibly? “Well, even if we’re wrong, we’re helping things.” — last refuge of people who know their original argument holds no water.

They don’t blame the sun because they can’t tax the sun. That is the same reason they ignore the greenhouse gas that dwarfs the contribution from CO2.

The sun is THe warming agent but needed, Global Warming is an artificial construction of self-induced problems

50% is not 100%.

See this page from the Max Planck Institute, which shows solar irradiance leveling off around 1940, without a commensurate leveling off in temperature: http://www.mps.mpg.de/en/projekte/sun-climate/

It is not news that multiple factors are at work in determining global climate trends. The question is, what are those factors, and to what degree are they impacting the environment, and to what extent are human activities influencing these changes? We can’t exercise any real control over the sun, as we can with greenhouse emissions.

Who, exactly, is dismissing the sun as being any kind of factor? A few misinformed ideologues, maybe, but not the majority of climatologists who are telling us that anthropogenic climate change is a real concern. (The IPCC is the main source of the information cited in the article you linked — what conclusions did the IPCC ultimately draw?)

Edit: Also, recognizing that climate change brought on (at least in part) by greenhouse emissions is not an automatic argument for huge, punishing taxes on anything that burps a little CO2, or nationalizing every energy and automotive company under the sun. Recognizing a problem is not the same as favoring specific solutions which might have an ideological bias (such as socialism or anti-corporatism). Check into some of the stuff done by Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute, who propose several ways of addressing issues of sustainability and climate change in a way that makes “business sense.”

There are ways of doing this that will create jobs, grow the economy, make rich people richer, and all the usual stuff that conservatives love, without a massive amount of legislating. But it would help first if people stopped thinking that accepting the truth of anthropogenic climate change is the equivalent of holding liberal values. The fact that so many conservatives do this (on the subject of evolution, sex education and climate change) has given rise to the saying, “Reality has a liberal bias.” That’s not really true, because facts can’t be political — a person’s response to the facts CAN be political, however.

Also, I’m not saying that liberals never deny facts — lefty environmentalists often make specious arguments on things like genetically modified crops, and people all over the political spectrum subscribe to erroneous beliefs, like the “vaccines cause autism” — but it does seem that on the whole, the right is much more distrustful and dismissive of science.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
This way to the Great Egress!
Pay close attention to this card…

The success of any con is dependent upon controlling the target’s attention.

Because you can’t control it or tax it.Simple.

First of all, NASA is simply quoting the IPCC.

Secondly, it says “Many researchers believe the steady rise in sunspots and faculae since the late seventeenth century may be responsible for *as much as half* of the 0.6 degrees of global warming over the last 110 years (IPCC, 2001).”

Notice it said “as much as” and not “at least”? There’s a big difference there. They’re saying less than 50%, you’re saying more than 50%. And that less than 50% was almost entirely during the first half of the 20th century.

The Sun can’t cause the planet to warm if its output is not increasing. That’s just physics – the mortal enemy of global warming denial.

The problem of attribution comes from to much specialization in the fields of science and because of this there are way to few interdisciplinary generalists to spot where things are getting off on a track leading to false disasters. AGW is as a concept brought about by intense specialization by the members of a new discipline who have deliberately separated themselves from the 5 or 6 convergent disciplines that need to be factored in to moderate their conclusions.

This is why they are reaching some of the ridicules conclusions based on poorly understood data, they have no functional access to relevant historical data and results that would allow more sensible and less frightening conclusions to be drawn from their data. Instead they are fighting these half dozen or so what should be complementary disciplines for mastery over the realm of climate sciences because the complementary disciplines with their longer and more complete records and studies conflict with the conclusions they have come to based on the incomplete limited data they are working with.

As a society we can not afford to have one new immature discipline going the political pressure route to override the calming evidence the more mature disciplines are bringing to the table to illustrate that the situation is not as drastic as has been portrayed and that we are far from having the science to really understand things or to safely change things.

A newly found study focusing on first where does the increase in atmospheric co2 really come from. Second what is the relative effectiveness of co2 to water in heat retention of the atmosphere.
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/ci/31/special/may01_viewpoint.html
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/CO2.htm
http://www.edf.org/documents/1336_co2andtemp.htm
http://www.sciencebits.com/IceCoreTruth
How climate and weather really work
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm#
http://www.indiana.edu/~geol105/

The sun can be dismissed pretty quickly as a cause for modern global warming. That’s because almost every scientific organization that studies the Sun, says that solar activity has been flat for the last 30-40 years, while over the same period global temperatures have been rising.

That’s according to the Solar Center at Stanford, the PMOD in Switzerland, and the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research, for starters.

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/600px-Temp-sunspot-co2.svg.png
http://www.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/composite/SolarConstant
http://www.mps.mpg.de/images/projekte/sun-climate/climate.gif

Sure, if you go back pre-1970s, there’s a beautiful correlation between solar activity, sunspot activity and global temperatures. You can see that in the above graphs.

But sometime around the late 70s, global temperatures stop correlating with solar activity/sunspots. From then on, they only seem to correlate with CO2 build up in the atmosphere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Climate_Change_Attribution.png
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/600px-Temp-sunspot-co2.svg.png

So you tell me what’s happening.

edit bob324:

“As any climate commitment study will tell you, it takes decades to centuries for the Earth to reach equilibrium with a new level of forcing, and that includes the sun”

So how do you explain the fact that global temperatures pretty much moved in unison with TSI until about the late 1970s …..

http://www.mps.mpg.de/images/projekte/sun-climate/climate.gif

…… then stopped, and started moving in unison with CO2 concentrations instead?

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/600px-Temp-sunspot-co2.svg.png

Because then they couldn’t blame mankind!

Because quickly deflecting the question as if it’s ridiculous to even consider the sun as some possible cause is the only defense the alarmists have against a solid case. It’s easier to convince someone that a reason isn’t legitimate because it supposedly already been determined not to be viable instead of actually providing a real reason for why. Once again, the alarmists fail.

Dana wrote
“The Sun can’t cause the planet to warm if its output is not increasing.”

Actually it can–and that is just plain old physics. Certainly, if the Earth had no oceans, no biosphere, and no atmosphere, this would be the case, but the Earth does in fact have oceans, a biosphere and an atmosphere, in case you haven’t noticed. I often hear from proponents that the sun can’t have caused any warming over the past 50-60 years because “TSI leveled off in the 1940′s”. This argument is tired and simplistic.

As any climate commitment study will tell you, it takes decades to centuries for the Earth to reach equilibrium with a new level of forcing, and that includes the sun. Now arguably, the bulk of the response should be within the first few decades of the plateau in forcing, but even CO2 has trouble explaining the dip in temperatures from the 40s to the 70s without bringing aerosols into the equation. A solar forcing would be no different–the initial response would have been delayed by whatever caused the mid-century cooling (aerosols, ocean currents, etc).

Of course, the direct and indirect effects of the sun are difficult to quantify, due to the complex set of feedbacks that would arise from a change in solar output.

And I must mention–these uncertainties in the solar contribution to the recent temperature trends do not and cannot take away from a significant CO2 contribution. They are not an argument against taking action.

——
Edit:
“So how do you explain the fact that global temperatures pretty much moved in unison with TSI until about the late 1970s …..

…… then stopped, and started moving in unison with CO2 concentrations instead?”

I’m not exactly sure what your question is. On its face it looks like something I’ve already addressed. I’ll recap and add on:

-Climate commitment studies, and there are numerous examples, tell us that it takes decades to centuries to reach equilibrium with a new level of forcing.
-The mid-century cooling (likely caused in large part by aerosols) would have delayed much of the solar response, just as it did any response from rising CO2.

Perhaps you are arguing why the CO2 curve suddenly fits “perfectly” after TSI plateaus? Well, it doesn’t. It is misleading to compare them side by side like that–no matter how perfect the correlation looks, without significant positive feedbacks, CO2 alone can account for no more than 30% of the warming seen post 1977. To credibly attribute the rest of trend requires a better understanding of the solar response (and various other factors).

well the sun is a reason the earth is getting hotter but the green house gases are what’s keeping the suns rays in the atmospher in sted of letting some of the rays to get out