Sunspot Minimum or "Is the sun going to sleep?"

[IndySam]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

I'm not a climate scientist. I haven't spent a lifetime drilling ice cores out of Antarctica, monitoring thousands of weather stations, designing complex mathematical climate forecasting algorithms, mapping the hole in the Ozone layer, recording the cyclical ocean temperatures of El Niño, measuring the accelerated extent of the shrinking glaciers and rising sea water, or any other of the highly specialized tasks that these scientists do every day.

As such, what qualifies me as being more competent than they are at drawing conclusions from their climate data? Subjective arguments and logical fallacies? I'm not a climate scientist, or even a meteorologist. But they are. And the vast majority of them (including the IPCC) all agree that global warming is not only real and observable, but that activity from humans has been primarily responsible for this current rapid upswing. (Note they are not stating that humans are solely responsible, since climate shifts obviously occurred in the four billion years prior to humanity.)

If Global Warming, which is the currently held scientific theory among the majority of scientists worldwide, works well enough for those which devote their entire lives to studying the climate, then it's good enough for me. Letting politics or personal ideas get in the way of science is like when Indiana tried to pass a law rounding pi to 3.2 to allow one to "square a circle", even though it had already been proven impossible with primitive actions.

But at the same time, if enough scientists find sufficient telling evidence to refute or alter the currently held theory of global warming (which at the current time is pretty unlikely, but not impossible), and if the majority of scientists worldwide support these changes, then I'll support those alterations.

Now as for the sunspots, there have been long lulls before, and subjectively they seem to line up with generic climate trends. But the only way to be sure is with data, numbers, with which we can run statistical analysis with decimal-point precision on it, and with a certain degree of confidence, make conclusions mathematically about whether sunspots have anything to do with our climate, or if it's just another textbook case of "correlation does not imply causation".

When I was your age all the "experts" said we were in a period of global cooling and were also predicting that we were heading into the next ice age.

My biggest question is why don't the global warming experts allow scientist with opposing viewpoints make presentations at the global warming conferences, what are they afraid of?

Global warming, or now what they call climate change because the earth has stopped warming in the 21st century, has become too much of a religion and not a science. Until experts like the Prince of Wails stops predicting that the earth will be ruined in ten years or the Chief High Priests of the Church like Al Gore stop calling non-believers Nazis I won't take them seriously.