{"id":618139,"date":"2023-03-15T09:48:57","date_gmt":"2023-03-15T14:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/15\/all-the-ways-the-most-common-bit-of-climate-misinformation-is-wrong\/"},"modified":"2023-03-15T09:48:57","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T14:48:57","slug":"all-the-ways-the-most-common-bit-of-climate-misinformation-is-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/15\/all-the-ways-the-most-common-bit-of-climate-misinformation-is-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"All the ways the most common bit of climate misinformation is wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Enlarge<\/a> \/<\/span> Is it natural, or is it us? (It’s us.)<\/p>\n

Andriy Onufriyenko\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It starts as a reasonable question: If the Earth’s climate changed before humans existed, how can we be so sure the current change is due to us and not something natural?<\/p>\n

To answer that question, we need to understand what caused the natural changes of the past. Fortunately, science has a good handle on the causes of Earth\u2019s natural climate changes going back hundreds of millions of years. Some were cyclical; others were gradual shifts or abrupt events, but none explain our changing climate today.<\/p>\n

A zombie claim<\/h2>\n

With energy policy and elections in the news, the claim by some<\/a> politicians<\/a> that climate change is natural is once again bubbling up from the disinformation swamp. So I asked some scientists a very unscientific question: What would they buy if they had a dollar for every time they heard it?<\/p>\n

\u201cA heat pump for my house,\u201d said professor Mathew Owens of the University of Reading. \u201cA time machine to\u2026 convince policymakers to act on climate decades ago,\u201d said Professor Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Anja Schmidt of the German Aerospace Center and the Universities of Munich and Cambridge would make a movie to explain that \u201cvolcanoes are not to blame,\u201d while Professor Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter would \u201clobby governments to teach this stuff in school.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI love cycling, so I\u2019d probably buy another bike,\u201d Professor Michel Crucifix of University of Louvain in Belgium told me. \u201cI would probably buy some solar panels,\u201d said Professor Jeremy Caves Rugenstein of Colorado State University.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, these scientists also had a lot to say about the natural forces of climate change and their non-role in global warming today.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the Sun<\/h2>\n

The Sun is the source of energy on the surface of our planet, so it stands to reason that variations in solar activity might cause climate changes. But solar activity has been declining<\/a> over the past few decades as our planet warmed, so there\u2019s no link. Although solar energy is immense, its variations<\/em> are tiny.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was called the solar \u2018constant\u2019 for a long time because you need extremely<\/em> sensitive instruments to see any variation in the Sun’s energy output,\u201d said Owens. Over an 11-year sunspot cycle, the solar energy reaching the top of the atmosphere varies by about 0.15 percent<\/a>, but it rises and falls every cycle, so it can\u2019t drive climate trends like ours.<\/p>\n

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NASA-JPL\/Caltech<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In addition to these 11-year cycles, the Sun also goes through \u201cgrand solar minima\u201d and \u201cgrand solar maxima\u201d of activity that last decades. One of those, called the \u201cMaunder Minimum,\u201d was once thought to be the cause of a cold period between about 1300 and 1850, called the Little Ice Age.\u201d But \u201cit just doesn’t add up,\u201d Owens told me. \u201cThe temperature starts to drop long before the Maunder Minimum happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Maunder Minimum may have contributed a fraction of a degree<\/a> to the cooling during the Little Ice Age, which evidence has since indicated was mostly the result of volcanic eruptions and human land use changes.<\/p>\n

The Sun also regulates the dose of cosmic rays inflicted on our atmosphere. These are mostly protons that originate in space from things like supernovae, and there was an idea in the late 1990s<\/a> that they might affect climate by seeding cloud formation. But the data shows no correlation, Owens told me, and experiments with the CERN particle accelerator<\/a> show that cloud seeding by cosmic rays is weak<\/a>. \u201cThe growth rate of droplets is just too small to really do anything in the atmosphere,\u201d said Owens, so it can\u2019t explain the Little Ice Age or modern climate change.<\/p>\n

Owens is underwhelmed by the Sun\u2019s current activity: \u201cWe’re ramping up into solar cycle 25. It’s looking very, very average!\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Ars Contributors<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Enlarge \/ Is it natural, or is it us? (It’s us.)Andriy Onufriyenko\/Getty Images It starts as a reasonable question: If the Earth’s climate changed before humans existed, how can we be so sure the current change is due to us and not something natural? To answer that question, we need to understand what caused the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":618140,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1923,22742,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-618139","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-climate","8":"category-common","9":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}