Ruh-ro Professor, We're gonna need a new disaster!

The global warming fanatics are going to have to find (i.e. manufacture) a new panic in order to keep those government grants coming in. Scientists have discovered that radiation (heat) from the sun has been increasing and causing the earth to warm up.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/18/ixnewstop.html

Actually, since global warming (in this context, I mean the "man-made" kind) is far more of a religion than anything based upon science; I do not expect the fanatical rhetoric to change all that much based upon hard-cold facts. Most of the far left is on this bandwagon, and their "solutions" all involve economic weakening of capitalist economies and strengthening of communist and socialist regimes. Go figure, eh?

I have heard one person joke that the scientists had to come to this conclusion, since they could not figure out any good way to blame George W. Bush for the planetary warming on Mars.

In terms of the "warm-up" of the sun ... there is no big need to panic, Chicken Littles. From my reading of the article, this is not so much that the sun is getting warmer, just that the sun surface activity (sun spots) is causing more radiation (heat) to hit the earth. This also seems to follow a cyclical pattern, although nobody really knows why.

Nonetheless ... what is fascinating about this is how you can track the political biases of the various "scientists" in response to this research. If you are listen to the lefty religion types ... the effect of the sun is minimal compared to the effect of the greenhouse gases. Unbelievable!!!! The SUN ... the thing that powers everything in our solar system, is less of an effect than MAN??? These guys are nuts!

We could take every atomic weapon, every ounce of oil on the entire globe, torch it all at the same time, and not create 1/1000000th the power of a single solar flare:

(From http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/sftheory/flare.htm):
The amount of energy released is the equivalent of millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding at the same time! (and)
This energy (single flare) is ten million times greater than the energy released from a volcanic explosion.

(by the way ... the energy and "polution" released from a single volcanic eruption is orders of magnitude greater than anything that the populations of the world add to the atmosphere ... but again, this does not give the lefties an excuse to redistribute money to their socialist benefactors ... so we need to ignore these facts in the "global warming" debate)

Granted that only a small portion of this energy directly impacts earth, but it is still orders of magnitude greater than anything that we are able to do. Of note (my observation, not in the article) ... the initial upturn in global temperatures just happens to coincide with the onset of the sunspot cycle that they attribute to the increased radiation. However, the "greenhouse gas" geniuses don't want to be confused with the facts ... particularly facts that can be used to debunk their ideas about looting the American taxpayers and funneling that money to leftist/socialists.

On the other hand ... the anti-"greenhouse gas" scientists are basically saying that this confirms their expectations that the various warming trends that we are seeing are simply part of the natural cycles. This is in line with what scientists have chronicled throughout history by various means: historical records of daily life (old stories), ice core drillings, atmospheric measurements, etc. Throughout the history of the earth (or, more precisely, the solar system), things have changed all the time ... sometimes with incredible fluctuations (by our current standards, relative to recent history). I have seen reports that the natural cycle that we have experienced over the last 100-200 years has been a remarkably "calm" period in terms of weather and other natural phenomena ... perhaps this "vacation" is coming to an end!

Thank God that the idiots that are pushing for Kyoto have failed in this country! Kyoto would have cost us billions and decimated our economy. Now, perhaps we can try an intelligent and measured approach in the solutions to the REAL PROBLEMS caused by the sun, not chasing the phantom "greenhouse gas" problems conjured up by leftist whackos.