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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (6900)	4/4/2009 2:02:12 PM
From: RetiredNow	Respond to of 86356

Well, my own theory, which is so far backed by most of the reliable data that we have, is that sunspots are indeed a major cause of the sine wave oscillations we see in temperature over time. However, those sine waves oscillate around a trend line that is rising at the rate of about .5 degrees Celsius per century. So the longer term trend is up. This is very similar to the stock market. The trend is up over the long run, but we certainly do have up and down cycles over the short run. Again, a sine wave hugging an up trend. So to get to the root cause, you have to look at what is causing the long term trend, not the regular fluctuations around the long term trend. This is why I do indeed think sunspots are part of the equation and do impact temperatures over short term cycles, but that the prime driver of longer term temperature trends is most probably something else, maybe CO2. That's the best theory we have going right now, that most closely fits the data we have.