Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: "Solar constant VARIATION" - that's the catch

re: "Solar constant VARIATION" - that's the catch
ER — (archived)

That's the point. Has anyone actually measured a variation in the solar output (after correcting for geometrical effects like the variation in the earth-sun distance)? I hear a lot of talk about this but I hear no numbers. Don't we have satellites monitoring the sun right now? Do our records from the past support the level of variation we suspect may be significant? For example, can the bolometric data we have from say, the turn of the 20th century, be legitimately compared to figures from current solar observatories?

If we are going to postulate solar output increase as a cause of global warming, we should be able to determine that there has been indeed a variation in total solar output. I understand this is a very simplistic approach, the sun is highly variable at some frequencies, and different wavelengths may have different atmospheric consequences, but even the grossest, most obvious solar variation, the sunspot cycle, has never been conclusively shown to have a climatological effect.

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