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Monday, August 06, 2007
Bill Steigerwald :: Townhall.com Columnist
The Sun, Stupid
by Bill Steigerwald
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Go outside at noon on a cloudless day.

Hold up your arm with your palm perpendicular to the blinding bright spot high in the sky. Feel the heat on your hand? It’s coming from 93 million miles away. Yet it’s so powerful it’ll eventually burn your flesh.

Even filtered by our atmosphere, even after traveling eight minutes at the speed of light, sunshine is so full of energy it can create life on Earth, turn water to gas and melt polar ice.

But the sun can’t cause global warming.

The sun is so distant and so small in our sky we forget how enormous it is -- and what a speck of space dust Earth is. Our home star composes 99.82 percent of the mass of the solar system. The sun's mass is 330,000 times the Earth's mass. About 1 million Earths could fit inside the sun.

The sun is a furnace of nuclear fusion beyond human comprehension. Although just an ordinary star, it produces an incomprehensible 386 billion-billion megawatts of energy per second.

It’s also real hot. Its core is a hellish 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. Its surface is 11,000 degrees. Its corona, which extends millions of miles into space, has temperatures of 1.8 million degrees.

But the sun doesn’t just bathe our tender planet in light and heat. It also blasts us with an invisible hurricane of high-energy electrons and protons that travel at 1.6 million miles per hour.

This solar wind, which extends past Pluto and constantly changes speed, density, direction and magnetic power, can produce auroras like our Northern Lights and knock out electric power grids on Earth’s surface.

But the sun can’t be causing global warming.

In fact, if you believe the global warming hysterics, the sun’s mighty powers to affect our climate have been eclipsed by man’s accelerating greenhouse gas output. Continued...

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About The Author
Bill Steigerwald, born and raised in Pittsburgh, is a former L.A. Times copy editor and free-lancer who also worked as a docudrama researcher for CBS-TV in Hollywood before becoming a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a columnist Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Bill Steigerwald recently retired from daily newspaper journalism..
 
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Crimson2 / Songo I challenge you
Look at the SCIENCE instead of just the philosophical arguments. I challenge you to refute the theory in the following web site which is, in essence, that the human contribution to total greenhouse gasses is less than 1%. Since you are such astute scientists, tell me where THESE scientists missed the mark. I don't think you can!
http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

BTW Crimson, Verizon is the host of the web site. It is not a "Verizon site" as you previously snidely remarked.

DO THE MATH, then tell me you still have faith in the anthropogenic global warming religion.

If the computer models don't fit the reality, Its not the reality that's wrong. GIGO

man made vs Natural
The argument is not if an increase in CO2 will raise tempeture its a question of:
1. Is global warming / cooling a natural cycle?
2.Do man made emissions have a significant effect on this cycle.
3. Are there other natural events that have a much more significanty effect? 4. Given the potential economic impacts a significant reduction in man made emissions would cost is it justified to do so?
5. Would that reduction have any effect?
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