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A Hotter Sun May Be Contributing To Global Warming
no reason to be here writes "The sun seems to be getting hotter. Total radiation output has increased .05% per decade since the 1970s.
This article over at Yahoo! News has the scoop. Though .05% may not seem like much, if it has been going on for the last century or more (and circumstantial evidence suggest that it has), it could be a significant factor in the increase in global average temperature noticed during the 20th century."
don't think me a corporate whore or anti-environmentalist; i'm willing to bet that we have some impact... i just think we don't know enough about our ecosystem and it's interaction with the universe around us to automatically assume that it's all our fault.
You know, back in the 1970s, the Green movement was most worried about global cooling. We're overdue for another ice age, they apparently come every 10,000 years or so. The Green's prescription for staving off this threat was to burn less fossil fuel, cut down fewer trees and so on. Fast forward to the 90s and global warming is in vogue. The cure? Burn less fossil fuel, etc.
It's beginning to look like their agenda all along was to slow economic activity, and concern about the environment was only ever a vehicle for pushing that agenda. So don't feel bad about questioning the Green orthodoxy, because it's changed 180-degrees in the not too distant past, and they probably don't even believe it themselves.
Not that we shouldn't conserve fossil fuels; they're going to run out sooner or later. And pollution is bad, it just makes cities unpleasant. And I like furry animals as much as the next man, and I'd rather they weren't driven to extinction. But fight these things for a real reason, not one that doesn't hold stand up to scrutiny.
On a human timescale, no the earth is not moving closer to the sun. The orbits of the planets in our solar system are stable relative to any conceivable timescale. The sun is exerting some forces on the earth - very slowly decreasing our the rate that we spin on our axis, for example.
In thousands upon thousands of years, the earth will only turn on its axis once per year, always keeping the same face toward the sun as it rolls along its solar orbit. This is "tidal lock" much like the earth has achieved over the moon.
The SENATE voted 95-0 not to implement the Kyoto accords.
Why?? Maybe because it only hurt the U.S. and did not apply to China or India! It had nothing to do with the environment, and everything to do with hurting the American economy.
I read that nature is already doing something like that, as per Gaia theory. It's in the Feb. 2003 issue of Discover magazine, P 17. To paraphrase:
:)
The sun's brightness has increased ~30% since it's birth because of the helium ash piling up. On early earth, there was a larger amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to keep us at a reasonable surface temperature.
As the sun gets brighter, the energy influx increases and so more carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere to maintain a steady temperature.
In about a billion years, almost all CO2 will have been removed from the atmosphere. From there, the continuing increase in energy will cause our oceans to evaporate and then boil. The water will go up into the stratosphere, where high energy radiation will break it into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will escape and earth as we know it will be sterilized. Sounds lovely, doesn't it?
Seeing as the sun will remain stable for another 4 billion years though, I suppose we could use some sort of scheme to (very) gradually slingshot earth farther out into the solar system. For a while we'd probably park 60 degrees ahead of Mars, then commit suicide by trying to fly through the asteroid belt
There is an approximately 70-80 year cycle of Solar output called the "Gleissberg cycle". (I am not an astrophysicist, so do a Google search.) We are approching the peak of the cycle (the last peak was in 1932). During the last minimum in the cycle (late 60's-early 70's) I rememmber a lot of talk about "global cooling".