Beware, He’s Armed With Science!

Republican Ron Johnson is running for the U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin against Russ Feingold. It’s another one of those suprisingly close races and Johnson is giving Feingold a run for his money. Johnson may not have gotten as much attention as other nutty GOP Senate candidates like Sharron Angle or Rand Paul but he certainly belongs in that group. He talked to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about how climate change is really the sun’s fault:

Johnson:

If you take a look at geologic time, we’ve had huge climate swings. We’re sitting here in Wisconsin. Had it not been for climate swings, we’d be sitting on a two or three hundred foot thick glacier. Man wasn’t around back then. So no, I absolutely do not believe that the science of man-caused climate change is proven. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I think it’s far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity, or something just in the geologic eons of time where we have changes in the climate.

The Middle Ages was an extremely warm period of time, too. It wasn’t like there were tons of cars on the road. So it always strikes me as a little absurd for anybody to think, Okay, this is the sweet spot in geologic time for climate. And it’s such a good place, that we have spent trillions of dollars, and do great harm to our economy, on a fool’s errand. I don’t think we can do anything about controling what the climate is.

I wonder if the countless scientists studying this issue ever asked themselves whether their scientific models allowed for the possibility that they were erroneously designating this moment geological time’s climate change “sweet spot.”

The sunspot argument is a popular one in the denier community. Blogger Steven Andrew shows why this argument is wrong (the blog post is about a different denier, with the same claim):

That bold statement is not only wrong, it is 100% wrong and he knows it. Below are the sunspot and solar irradiance cycles plotted on the same graph by year courtesy of NASA.

As you can see, both sunpots and solar irradiance move together and both are just barely coming out of a deep minimum. The sun has been in the coolest part of its cycle, with the least number of sunspots, for the last two or three years (2010 is not complete yet, but the events so far are yet another reason record heat on earth is so worrisome).

Oh well, there goes that talking point. Or it would go away in a sane world. Since we don’t live in a sane world where facts matter I’m sure they’ll keep repeating this talking point.