Climate Change Debate Video: CO2 not to blame but sun may cause cooling

CHIP Helium-1 Image of sunspots from Mona Loa Obs.  UCAR

A war has been waged on Carbon Dioxide and scientists that defend it.  On one side are politicians, activists, and some scientists proclaiming a doomsday for the planet.  On the other side are climate scientists with legitimate proof showing both natural forces regarding the planet and defending CO2.  This is represented in the video below. Recently I wrote about the public's waning support for Global Warming and how Arctic Sea Ice shows a recovery but NASA is not telling you.  Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held a Full Committee hearing entitled, “Legislative Hearing on S. 1733, Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act.  This may be boring political stuff, but a lot of money and potential jobs are riding on legislation acting to fight a battle that may not exist.  While CO2 may not have caused the warming of the last century, other forces like the sun might very well result in a dramatic cooling.  This could mimic the mini ice age from the 1600s and 1700s. 

This debate seems to be gearing up for the world leaders conference in Copenhagen in December.  My purpose here is not to get political.  That is not my area of expertise.  However this debate has become political and opposing scientists are being ridiculed and ignored. See these recent stories, just a few of many similar events:

• Read scientists open letter to congress: You are being deceived about global warming
• Why did the EPA smother a scientific report that questioned global warming?

Just this morning, the AP ran a story that Yahoo! News featured prominently on their web page:  AP Impact: Statistician reject global cooling  In it, Seth Borenstein has an obvious distaste for anyone who argues misleading data.  He clearly has seen the Skeptics Guide to the Climate Change Handbook.  This clearly shows how data has been misrepresented to the public and the artificial warming from flawed weather stations.  Borenstein also takes a shot at Dr. Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama who pioneered then perfected the technique for measuring global temperature from satellites. But there are other scientists besides him.  Many others.  I wanted to share a video that has pinned the opposing notions on climate since a legitame debate has been requested countless times, but ignored by the Global Warming crowd.  In it are clips from Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth vs. Climate Scientists in the Great Global Warming Swindle (see a video clip) that aired on The UK's Channel 4.  How about Global Cooling or an Ice Age bacuse of the sun?  More on that below the video:

Global Cooling from the Sun:

Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov Head of Space research laboratory of the Pulkovo Observatory, Head of the Russian/Ukrainian joint project Astrometria.  In a 2009 Senate report, he states:

Over the past decade, global temperature on the Earth has not increased; global warming has ceased, and already there are signs of the future deep temperature drop... We should fear a deep temperature drop -- not catastrophic global warming. Humanity must survive the serious economic, social, demographic and political consequences of a global temperature drop, which will directly affect the national interests of almost all countries and more than 80% of the population of the Earth. A deep temperature drop is a considerably greater threat to humanity than warming. However, a reliable forecast of the time of the onset and of the depth of the global temperature drop will make it possible to adjust in advance the economic activity of humanity, to considerably weaken the crisis.

What could he be talking about?  It relates to the sunspot activity (see slide show below).  Normal 11 year cycles of the sun have been tracked for hundreds of years.  The spots are actually storms with cooler temperatures and look dark agains the sun's bright background.  These storms emit more radiation and energy into space, which some in turn is captured by Earth.  When the sunspots are absent, our planet tends to experience very cold periods, and perhaps ice ages themselves develop.  Marc Marano of ClimateDepot.com recently explained the so called Maunder Minimum used for reference today.  Using a reconstructed record dating back to 1611:

English astronomer Walter Maunder in 1893 came to the conclusion that from 1645 to 1715 sunspots had been generally absent. Over the thirty-year period of the Maunder Minimum, astronomers of the time counted only about 50 spots. Usually, over that length of time, about 50,000 sunspots would appear. Today, it has been established that such minima have repeatedly occurred in the past. It is also known that the Maunder Minimum accompanied the coldest phase of a global temperature dip, physically measured in Europe and other regions, the most severe such dip for several millennia, which stretched from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries (now known as the Little Ice Age).

See more in the slide show below. The extreme of a new ice age may be far fetched, but it does clearly indicate that there is a lot more involved in dictating our planet's weather. An open debate has not been entertained, but I think it's about time that it is.  The science is not settled, and while I like many others want to protect our environment, we may be throwing money away at the wrong cause.