Extropes,
I didn't read that UN report very carefully, so then just a
couple of small comments.
In general, I would keep an open mind and show a little bit of
healthy skepticism about bureaucratic reports giving statistical
analysis and trends regarding global warming. It's a complicated
topic and models are not up to the task to do a good job yet, and
the statistics is usually not well-done either.
Most long term climate "normals" were established in the 60s by
analysis of the first half of the 20th century - so as a result
there are often "100 year" storms, floods, droughts etc since the
statistical basis was unrepresentative of the more normal natural
variability.
The variation in the sun's energy output has far more impact on our
climate than the tiny increases of various chemicals. Eg. doubling
the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere has the effect (on our climate)
as increasing the solar irradiance by 0.1% more or less...
There are mechanisms including absorption by interplanetary dust
that need to be taken into account in any attempts at modeling the
long term climate behaviour too.
You'll find these arguments (mine and my old Stanford solar physics
group), here: with pros and cons
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/varsun.html
hope this is helpful,
Amara
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Amara Graps email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: finger agraps@shell5.ba.best.com
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
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"Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain
consciousness." --Ashleigh Brilliant
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