There is new evidence that seems to prove something that only a trained climate scientist would not find obvious—sun activity and climate change are closely related. And a picture speaks a thousand words. The graph below is from the UC Berkley Earth-Surface Temperature Project. It shows what is a very tight relationship between changes in solar radiation and temperatures for the contiguous United States over a 160-year period.
According to climate scientist Dr. Willie Soon from the Solar and Stellar Physics (SSP) Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and statistician and meteorologist William Briggs reporting in the Washington Times on recent research they have done:
The close relationships between the abrupt ups and downs of solar activity and of temperature that we have identified occur locally in coastal Greenland, regionally in the Arctic Pacific and North Atlantic; and hemispherically for the whole circum-Arctic, suggesting that changes in solar radiation drive temperature variations in at least many areas.
They go on to note that:
Pictures like these cannot be drawn for temperature and CO2 concentration. There just is no such close match between the steady rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration and the often dramatic ups and downs of surface temperatures in and around the Arctic, China and the United States.
More locally, a good deal of research has been done on this topic by Duke Research Scientist Nicola Scafetta . To view a presentation on the topic by Dr. Scafetta made to the John Locke Foundation please click here.
