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Fox
News
Earth
Warming, Sun Heat to Blame?
Feb 02, 2013
The
Earth has been getting warmer
-- but how much of that heat is due to greenhouse gas emissions and how
much is
due to natural causes?
A
leaked report by a United
Nations' group dedicated to climate studies says that heat from the sun
may
play a larger role than previously thought.
"[Results]
do suggest the
possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the
stratosphere
than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may
lead to
significant regional impacts on climate," reads a draft copy of a
major,
upcoming report from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change
(IPCC).
The
man who leaked the report,
StopGreenSuicide blogger Alec Rawls, told FoxNews.com that the U.N.'s
statements on solar activity were his main motivation for leaking the
document.
"The
public needs to know now
how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been
undercut
by the IPCC itself," Rawls wrote on his website in December, when he
first
leaked the report.
Rawls
blames the U.N. for burying
its point about the effect of the sun in Chapter 11 of the report.
"Even
after the IPCC
acknowledges extensive evidence for ... solar forcing beyond what they
included
in their models, they still make no attempt to account for this
omission in
their predictions. ... It's insane," he told FoxNews.com.
Some
skeptical climatologists say
that the statement in the U.N. draft report is important, but not
game-changing.
"The
solar component is real
but not of sufficient magnitude to have driven most of the warming of
the late
20th century," Pat Michaels, the former president of the American
Association of State Climatologists, and current director of the Center
for the
Study of Science at the Cato Institute, told FoxNews.com.
The
U.N. report also says that the
effect of solar activity will be "much smaller than the warming
expected
from increases in [man-made] greenhouse gases."
An
estimate from NASA said that solar
variations caused 25 percent of the 1.1 degree Fahrenheit warming that
has been
observed over the past century.
But
Michaels said that if the U.N.
increases its estimates about how much the sun affects Earth's
temperatures, it
might help the U.N. get its prediction models back on track. While the
Earth
warmed over the last two decades, it did so more slowly than the U.N.
had
predicted…
Read
the rest of the article at Fox News
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