When they’re not saying warming would be good, or that it isn’t warming at all, deniers really want to blame the Sun for climate change. So while we wait for the Sun to set on Pruitt’s tenure as EPA admin (the impending confirmation of coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler would serve as convenient timing…) let’s take a look at some solar-based climate denial.
For example, the other day WUWT had a post, based on a 2014 paper which doesn’t appear to ever have gone through peer review, claiming that “solar-driven global cooling is in our future.” Which, perhaps in the absence of greenhouse gases, might just be true. But we live in a world with greenhouse gas emissions, so the imminent global cooling warning was just as bogus in 2014 as it was in 2008, 2007, 2006 and 2005.
And here in 2018, it’s still unlikely. Even though, according to a post from the obscure space-focused blog “Behind the Black” crossposted to WUWT and Climate Depot, sunspot activity crashed in March. Which supposedly suggests an exceptional new solar minimum, and therefore a new cooling trend in global temperatures.
It’s true that the Sun has a 11-year cycle of sunspots, relatively cool spots on the Sun’s surface that can be seen by telescopes here on Earth. But deniers believe that these sunspots are what’s driving warming, except they seem to get it backwards. Sunspots are cooler and darker than the rest of the burning surface, so more of them would mean less light and heat from the Sun, and therefore cooling. A lack of Sunspots would mean it’s firing at full capacity, which could potentially be an explanation for a warming trend.
But in deniers’ desperation for anything but carbon dioxide to be responsible for climate change, logic goes out the window. So they believe a lack of Sunspots will trigger a cooling trend, because they believe that a period of relatively few sunspots was responsible for the Little Ice Age.
Somehow a cooler, darker Sun could feasibly cause warming, but the emissions of hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere couldn’t.
So regardless of the relatively minor ups and downs in Sunspot activity, as long as we’re still emitting greenhouse gases, Earth’s temperatures, like the Sun, also rises.