Is the Earth warming? The current theory is that all this CO2 emission into the atmosphere is causing the Earth to gradually warm. This is expressed frequently as the "hockey stick", showing a gradual cooling from about 1300 to maybe about 1750, and then after that, a slow warming until about 1980, then suddenly shooting upward, producing a graph that looks like a hockey stick. An example might be this one from the UK. People concerned about global warming are saying that unless we do something about this, irreversible adverse things will happen such as the expansion of deserts and the flooding of coastal cities. Indeed, these graphs show about a 1.3 degree F increase in global temperature in the past 100 years.
We have now a new player in the game, however. The Sun has just passed the supposed minimum of its sunspot cycle and should be rapidly increasing in sunspots, especially at moderately high latitudes. However, for the past year, the Sun has shown almost no spots. What's happened to it? This is not the first time this has happened. In the 1600s, the Sun had no spots for an entire human lifetime. During this span of around 100 years, global temperatures fell about 0.9 degrees F, causing the "Little Ice Age".
Are we entering a new Maunder minimum? If so, the increase in temperatures caused by global warming will slow down or stop. The figures I have cited seem to suggest that the Earth will warm only by 0.4 degrees per century, or 0.04 degree F per year. That would then suggest that instead of preventing global warming caused by carbon emissions, we need to keep sending carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or else we could go into an Ice Age. Further, we will not be able to do this, because oil and other fossil production will eventually (and soon) decline and stop, at which point the ice age will come.
But I see a contradiction in this. The problem is that these figures suggest that the decrease caused by lack of spots is a substantial fraction of the increase caused by human-induced global warming. This should be reflected in the hockey stick graph. Since sunspots usually (and in the past century has) followed an 11-year cycle, that should cause 11-year oscillations in the graph of global temperature. But the graphs you see on warming in the past 100 years show no such oscillations. That suggests instead that temperature changes caused by sunspot changes are a minuscule fraction of the changes caused by human-induced global warming. But clearly they aren't.
Another way of looking at it is to look at the "solar constant", the amount of energy striking the Earth on the average. This is 1365 watts per square meter, and it can vary from 1363 to 1367 watts per square meter. Since the Sun has no spots, I would suppose the 1363 holds now. That translates into a decline of 0.3 degree F over the next few years. This also shows that sunspots cause a substantial part of the change in earthly temperatures, but by not as much as the 0.9 degree change cited earlier. and it does not resolve the contradiction between this type of reasoning which suggests 11-year oscillations in the global temperature and the lack of evidence of such cycles.
Until we resolve the contradiction, we don't know which way the world is going to go. Much discussion on global warming is one-sided, with people arguing unequivocally for one side or the other, both the global warming zealots and the global warming deniers. We need to stop arguing and do some analysis. Will the real global change determiners please stand up?
