The policy significance of this issue is clear: if we are headed to a mid-20th century solar minimum, or a Grand Solar Minimum for the next two centuries, this will offset greenhouse warming to some extent. The extent of the offset depends on whether climate sensitivity to CO2 is on the larger or smaller end of the range of estimates, and the magnitude of the solar impact. But the sign of the solar offset is becoming increasingly clear: towards cooling.
One of the reasons I’ve been skeptical about claims that carbon will be catastrophic is the willful insistence on ignoring the sun, and I can’t think of any reason to do it than because we don’t understand it, and therefore it can’t be included in the hysterical modeling, and it can’t fit the narrative. I continue to believe that what we don’t understand about climate is much greater than what we do.
[Update a few minutes later]
Is the dam bursting? Climate researchers who have previously denigrated solar activity as being insignificant are now warning of a new mini ice age.
I really have trouble taking any of this seriously.
Nicolelis is in a camp that thinks that human consciousness (and if you believe in it, the soul) simply can’t be replicated in silicon. That’s because its most important features are the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells, Nicolelis says.
“You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you can’t compute it,” he says. “You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.”
I’ve always believed that there is no law of physics that makes it inevitable, that it’s a matter of learning how to continue doing the cellular-level repair that occurs when we’re young. But here is an article that says it is caused by thermal chaos.
Not sure I buy it (it still doesn’t take into account artificial techniques for doing error checking in transcription), but it’s an interesting read.
Glenn describes the dangers of the complexity of the current sociopolitical structure.
It strikes me as a dangerous situation, what Perrow has described as a tightly-coupled complex system, that is vulnerable catastrophic collapse. He was describing physical systems, such as nuclear plants, but social systems can have similar failure modes.