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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (6822)	4/3/2009 10:01:28 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

How do you figure, Hawk? Sunspot cycles move in 11 year periods. So how would being at the bottom of the sunspot cycle with increases in sunspots likely in the next few years mean that we're headed to 20-40 years of cooling? I think it is entirely possible that the sunspot maximums may be less than normal in the future due to the conveyor belt theory, but what if rising CO2 offset that cooling and we actually see a rise in temperature? That would be the biggest confirmation yet that CO2 is the prime variable of concern. I think you are a making the mistake that most non-statisticians typically make. You'll take one variable and imbue it with all the relevance. However, what is more likely is that there are many variables in play. I find it striking, for example, that in past decades we have seen warming across the globe, even as sunspot activity came to it's cyclical minimums. That tells me that there are other more highly correlated variables in play, such as potentially CO2 feedback. I don't doubt that number of sunspots are an important cause of temperature fluctuations, but I also think CO2 levels is another variable in the equation, perhaps with an even bigger correlation to temperature. It's really easy to run a regression analysis on this data to know for sure. I wish I could find a scientist that has run one using the following formula to figure it out: temperature = f(# of sunspots, CO2 levels) If anyone finds an analysis like that, with R-squared and other telling bits of information, please post it.