To carbon or not to carbon? That’s the question.
Is C02 as important for the fate of our climate as we think? New scientific work of an extraterrestrial nature might drive us to reconsider what has now become an assumption.
Media reporting on science would have you believe CO2, emitted by humans, has the predominant impact on our current terrestrial climate. Warming and cooling would be caused by the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This dangerous oversimplification -which no scientist would make- is bad enough, but while the overly politicized discipline of terrestrial climatology debates their models and predictions, or tries to, some scientists could not help but wonder if it pays to look at what is happening outside of the orbit of our planet.
Strangely enough, looking at the climate of other planets, Mars and Jupiter are showing signs of warming in the last couples of decades. We see it in the measured melting of the Martian polar caps and the increase in tornado’s on Jupiter. It is obvious that human emissions on Earth cannot cause an increase in the temperature on these distant planetary bodies.
It is true that several mechanisms might result in a similar change in climate on those bodies as on Earth, but the question remains whether there might exist another single cause of warming that impacts all of these planets at the same time, irrespective of human activities.
Curiosity
Well, logic and curiosity dictate it could pay to investigate what is going on with the sun. After all, with its large mass, it gravitationally bonds all of the planets and delivers massive amounts of energy to all the bodies of the solar system. Changes in the sun would therefore directly affect the energy balance at all loci in the solar system.
Today one would often read that any theory linking the sun to terrestrial climate has been debunked. But the observation that prior art supposedly has been debunked, is pointless with regards to the recent work of the astrophysicist professor below who has no interest in the climate debate.
Professor Valentina Zharkova developed a newer method of observing the sun, that does not rely on the quite arbitrary art of sunspot counting, and which seems to result in data and the creation by her hand of mathematical tools for analysis with a highly predictive quality.
Not only can it reliably and elegantly predict recent solar cycles and cyclical solar behavior in the past, which current models are very bad at (including a reproduction of the maunder minimum); but it also seems to make predictions about the future which might have an impact on calculations regarding how much warming any C02 increase would produce. Also, the clear predictions made by the model -precise values of solar output- can be reliably tested with observations to be made in the next couple of years.
Since any scientific research that might have an influence on the current climate debate runs the risk of irking almost everybody, I will not draw conclusions for the reader. I will simply present Professor Valentina Zharkova’s november presentation which, in my humble and -of course- uneducated opinion, does present a very impressive bit of scientific investigative work with regards to our sun.
Many scientific objections you might have with regards to the influence of the sun on our climate are addressed in the Q&A section and some are even flagged by the professor as requiring further investigation. Still, the work is of such a profound nature and quality that it might change some people’s opinions about ‘multiple things’.
When you indeed take the time to watch this 1h33min. presentation till the end, the result might be that you would even support further investigation and duplication of the efforts made by this professor and her students.
In any case, her model -which might e.g. have an important role in helping governments decide on future precautionary agricultural and food policies- stands or falls with observations in the coming years:
Further reading (formula’s and graphs):
