I could use a little help
A weekly newspaper that is published where I live includes a column entitled
Ask the Everyday Scientist, in which an MIT educated physicist answers questions submitted by readers. This week's column is entitled
Solar Effects on Climate, and the submitted question runs as follows:
Q. Could you explain how the events listed here affect climate change?: distance between the Earth and the moon (which I believe is increasing); solar activity; and the magnetic field of the Earth (which I believe is in a constant state of flux).
Before proceeding, I should point out that the question was not submitted by me, and also that the author of the column is a skeptic with regards to climate change due to human activity, as evidenced by answers given to climate change questions in previous columns (I do not share the author's skepticism, by the way). With that out of the way, I'd appreciate it if someone here could give me a "second opinion" on some of the claims put forth in the column.
After briefly explaining that the Earth/moon distance will not have an effect on climate, the author proceeds to the subject of solar activity. The gist of his argument goes like this. Cosmic rays ionize molecules when they enter the Earth's atmosphere, and "these ions become nucleation sites around which water molecules accumulate and form tiny droplets, which are the beginnings of clouds." Solar flares create magnetic fields in space, which act, in the author's words, as "scattering centers", causing the cosmic rays to lose energy, thus causing less ionization if they later enter the atmosphere and hence, fewer clouds. So basically, the argument is that ionization of molecules in the air and subsequent cloud formation is inversely proportional to solar activity. The author continues:
But since more cosmic rays make more clouds which reflect away incoming sunlight, you might expect the climate to cool under such conditions. There is evidence that this actually happened. Three centuries ago, the coolest part of the "Little Ice Age" coincided with a time known as the "Maunder Minimum", when there was a minimum number of sunspots over several years.
Thus, solar activity has an indirect but very important effect upon the Earth's climate.
The author continues by saying that we don't hear about all this in the climate-change debates because it's "too complicated", and that reporters aren't going to "go into details". He asserts that current knowledge about climate isn't good enough to "attach numerical values to any of the climate change mechanisms and say 'this one is most important'", and that "computer models totally ignore solar activity, and are nowhere near able to include all the natural factors that affect climate."
In the concluding paragraph, the author laments that "far too much attention has been given to human influences on climate" and winds up by saying, "It's comparatively easy to discuss one factor that we might have something to do with, while ignoring things we can't do anything about. Reality is far more complex. Variations in ocean currents, solar activity, etc., will continue to change the climate erratically in future years, centuries and eons."
Yes, friends, we have a climate-change denier using a newspaper column as a bully pulpit.
If someone would take the time to post an informed rebuttal to the claims outlined above, I'd really appreciate it.
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