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Originally Posted by The Oyster Guy  ...yes, the sun *does* heat the earth, that is a given - but it isn't responsible for GW because the sun's power output doesn't significantly change. The weather isn't cloudy one day and sunny the next because the sun decided to crank it up a notch: it's almost exclusively the atmosphere (its effect on the ability of heat to transfer to/from space and earth) that's responsible for establishing the temperature of earth. |
Now you're talking in terms that global warming supporters DON'T like - local comparisons versus long term trends. Of course it is atmospheric changes that cause it to be cloudy one day and sunny the next. But it's not true that the sun's output is constant or that differences in its output pose no significant differences to temperature on earth. The sun goes through several different output cycles, some of them brief, some of them longer, and they do correlate to temperature changes here on earth - the little Ice age, the medieval warming period. (They also create other changes - periods of lesser and greater activity permit periods of greater and lesser cosmic ray activity).
We weren't pumping hydrocarbons in the atmosphere then, but these same changes could clearly be attributed to solar activity.