Latest RightWing Junk Science on Global Warming: "It's the Sun, Stupid"

[Canuckistanian]

I happened upon a rightwing show hosted by a fellow named Larry Kudlow. Wikipedia-ing him, one finds that he was some minor operative in the Reagan administration, is some kind of economist, converted to Catholicism, and provides such scintillating commentary as "I want to win in Iraq" (but, like the others of his ilk, none of the Kudlows apparently wants to win badly enough to volunteer).
~snip

The tobacco industry "invented" the strategy behind junk science, hiring some scientists who could never make it on merit, pay them gobs of money, and have them "publish" in journals that do not require scientific review. The industry is, after all, selling death--lung cancer, emphysema, stroke, heart attack, to name just a few, and they had to convince about 5000 children per week to take it up to grow their markets. If you can convince society not to regulate that, as they did for 30+ years AFTER the surgeon general's report linking cigarettes to those diseases was published, it is mere chickenfeed compared to getting people to dismiss global warming or, for that matter, to vote an insecure, incuriousn'er-do-well "son-of"into the White House. According to the tobacco apologists, the link between cigarettes and those diseases was "only" statistical. The Bush administration recently did their bidding by reducing to nearly trivial a multibillion dollar judgment the US government was poised to obtain against the tobacco industry.

If the tobacco industry sells death one person at a time, the hydrocarbon and other dirty industries sell it one planet at a time. George Bush's own Pentagon, (yes, under Rummy), published a report indicating that global warming could result in a greater threat to the United States than terrorism. It was ignored---certainly by Bush, but also, shamefully, by the US press.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/latest-rightwing-junk-sci_b_45538.html

Just read the conclusion.

[lvx35]

1. When will they learn its the predictive power of a model that counts, not what it can explain in...

..retrospect? The fact is the same crowd saying this today were calling global warming a hoax for years when it was predicting the current observed phenomenon. Global warming will continue, it will get worse. What exactly does this sun model predict? Anything at all?

[kestrel91316]

2. This is more of the crap George Noory parrots on talk radio, lol.

I don't know where these folks think all the CO2 is going. It's NOT an inert gas.

It ain't the sun, sportsfans.

[Canuckistanian]

3. Look at this chart

Do you see a clear correlation between sunspots and global temperature?

An informative site here:
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html

[NickB79]

4. Since 1960 sunspots have been trending downwards

In that same period, CO2 concentrations and temperature have been trending upwards. That one big sunspot spike right around 1955 didn't seem to have much influence on global temps at all, just making a little bump instead of a corresponding spike.

Based just on this graph it looks like, under 320 ppm CO2, sunspots had a noticeable effect on global temps. However, above 320 ppm, CO2 became the driving factor, overshadowing the effects of sunspots and making them pretty much irrelevant.

[BrokenBeyondRepair]

5. wouldn't hurt to check out the temps on other planets

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/pluto.html

[Viking12]

6. That link kills the "The sun did it!" talking point

Jay Pasachoff, an astronomy professor at Williams College, said that Pluto's global warming was "likely not connected with that of the Earth. The major way they could be connected is if the warming was caused by a large increase in sunlight. But the solar constant--the amount of sunlight received each second--is carefully monitored by spacecraft, and we know the sun's output is much too steady to be changing the temperature of Pluto."