There is a fact about increased CO2 causing the planet to warm further. Bryce Johnson shows mathematically that the increase is more in the range of 0.3 Celsius additional warming. The "runaway effect" is what many people still think is going to happen. It's an unnecessary alarm bell that rings in people's minds.
Thank you for quoting Wikipedia. Unfortunately the entry you quote is very wrong. Perhaps it was written 10 or 15 years ago.
Sunspot activity over the past two cycle is indeed exceptional: for the LACK of sunspots. If solar active with enough of an influence to compete with greenhouse gases then we would be having cooling right now. We don't.
What we know about solar activity is that it can have as much as 10% of the effect that increasing greenhouse gases have -- and the cycles are temporary, unlike the constant and one-way run-up of CO2. Should we have an extended period without sunspots, like the Maunder Minimum, global warming would be reduced by about 0.3 degrees by the year 2100. So the increase would be only 2.7 degrees rather than 3.0 degrees.
It is not the sun. Flat-out. It has been heavily researched, much discussed. There have not been changes in the sun to account for the warming of the past 40 years and if "it" was the sun, we'd have had significant cooling over the past 20 years.
The issue isn't CO2 vs. solar
It's compensating errors.vs. no compensating errors
People who think the Sun is doing a lot of modern climate change have to argue two things
1) There's some mystery negative feedback that noone has figured out yet
AND
2) There's some mystery influence the sun has on climate that noone has figured out yet.
It's almost religious at this point that people can believe so strongly that these two compensating errors exist in our understanding of climate change mechanisms, and yet they have absolutely no reasonable causation or mechanism for either one.
The Solankie, et al (2004) study I am aware of does not reach that conclusion.
"Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades."
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/sola...
I have a general concern with reconstructing radiocarbon concentrations from tree-rings since the C-14 curve is based on tree-ring data - meaning that those data are not necessarily independent.
More the Sun and gravity than CO2.
Look at the site below for a detailed description on how gravity alters the orbit and composition of other bodies,
If anyone watched the recent T.V. series presented by Professor Brian Cox on the Solar system, and you knew anything about astronomy, you would see that the weather on Earth is affected by gravity, in exactly the same way as Io, a moon of Jupiter is affected. Io is a solid lump of rock the same size as our moon, which, due to gravitational forces, liquefies and causes volcanoes. The same applies to one of the moons of Saturn, the name of which I missed. EXACTLY the same forces that are causing the increased volcanic and earthquake activity here on Earth in the past 20 or so years due to the line up of the major planets and the Sun.
CO2 has no measurable effect on the climate!.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAejrPirG...
IMHO, the sun is the primary driver. sunspot cycles ramping up as they did in the late 20th century turns up the thermostat. You could see this here on earth and on Mars and other planetary bodies in our solar system. Now that the cycles are waning, you see cooling trends beginning on Mars and other planetary bodies plus in the "raw" weather data trends globally we see the warming curve turned an inflection point. i,e, its starting to cool down here as well.
Question is, will we cool down to 1920's to 1930's temps or if the sun goes into a grand solar minema will we see something significantly more dramatic?
OMG It is CO2 The Sun is not the culprit as it is still in a cooling cycle Sun spots and flare ups have nothing to do with GW Wake up and smell the climate!
The Sun, definitely.
Sunspot numbers over the past 11,400 years have been reconstructed using dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations. The level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional – the last period of similar magnitude occurred around 9,000 years ago (during the warm Boreal period).[27][28] The Sun was at a similarly high level of magnetic activity for only ~10% of the past 11,400 years, and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.[28]
taken from wikipedia
