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Originally Posted by evansm76
Since the world as been in a slight cooling trend for the past 10 years and some scientists are predicting a mini-ice age for as many as the next twenty years, how will that affect demand for vehicles like the Aptera? In any event it's good news for those concerned about global warming and it shows once again that climate change is affected most by solar irradiance and not CO2 levels.
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To make it brief: "Categorically No." To make it long:
1) According to not just a scientific survey, but an actual peer-reviewed survey,
97% of published climatologists accept anthropogenic global warming as a fact. To put it another way, there's several times as large a percent of people who believe Elvis is alive than there are published climatologists who don't believe in global warming. The closer a person is to the field, the more likely they are to accept the reality of global warming, with the general public the most skeptical, and climatologists (who have spent their entire lives studying the climate) the least skeptical.
2) Anyone who pushes that "cooling for a decade" claim is either grossly ignorant (most of the cases) or deliberately trying to deceive you (an unfortunately large percent of cases). First off, there are three main temperature series used in climatology. Two of the three show 2005 as the hottest year, not 1998. So right there, you're seeing cherry picking. Secondly, 1998 was an extremely intense El Nino event.
El Nino is caused by the weakening or reversal of the Walker Circulation, a pattern of winds over the equatorial Pacific. These winds encourage the upwelling of cold, deep water off of South America, and spread it out over the Pacific surface. When the Walker Circulation weakens, less water is drawn up, the ocean surface temperatures become warmer, and they heat the atmosphere more. When the Walker Circulation strengthens (La Nina), you get more cool water, which cools the atmosphere. These together are called ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation), and are the primary source of year-to-year noise in the climate signal:
See those black dots? See how wildly they fluctuate from year to year? Most of that is due to the ENSO status of that year. As you can see, 1998 is a huge noise spike that
doesn't at all reflect the trend. It was one of the most intense El Nino episodes on record. Climate is not the noise, however. Climate is the signal, the averages. The trend is obvious when you look at the graph. Here's another way to make it obvious -- a list of the hottest years:
In short: You've been had.
Now, why would someone deceive you like that? Well, sadly, there's an annoying human trait, to want to be privy to great secrets that all of the "sheep" out there don't know. People *love* to think that the great unwashed masses are getting something wrong, but they know the truth! The reality is that climate science is not for amateurs. It's incredibly complex. You just happened to pick one of the myths that's almost pathetically easy to disprove.
The people who told you this were probably just repeating what they had heard from someone else. Unfortunately, there are people who are literally paid to spread misinformation about this. Exxon-Mobil, for example, offers honest-to-god cash prizes for people to publish papers against global warming.
As for the sun? The sun is, bar none, the single most intensively studied object in the universe right now outside the Earth. There is absolutely no way -- *zero* -- that the amount of energy the sun could be sending to Earth could be changing in a way that we don't know about. The sun is *intensively* considered in all of the climate models and in the IPCC reports -- we're talking hundreds of papers on its role in the climate system.
One final parting word: looking at graphs of temperature *downplays* global warming. First off, half of the CO2 we emit gets absorbed into the ocean. The oceans cannot hold an infinite amount of CO2 (and what gets absorbed causes acidification, but that's an entirely different story); however, for now, they're halving the effect right off the bat in that manner. They then halve the effect again because half the heat from warming ends up in the oceans. The oceans are a massive heat sink. Again, though, this is just delaying the warming. Can you see why this is such a big problem?
If you want to know what will happen to our planet, you don't have to speculate. It's happened before -- 56 million years ago, the planet briefly but rapidly "belched" huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, at a rate similar to what human activity is now emitting. You can read about the effects
here. Thankfully, it "only" took 170,000 to 200,000 years to get all of the excess carbon out of the system; however, it left the world such a radically different place that it became classified as a different geological era. We're now making our own new era of similar scale -- the Anthropocene.