"This goes both ways..."

R. Gates says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:59 pm

Lawrie Ayres says:
January 25, 2012 at 6:54 pm
I find myself on the horns of a dilemma; I want a cold period so the great fraud and it’s perpetraters can be destroyed once and for all but fear for the widespread disruption to food supplies that such occurrence would precipitate.
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This kind of thinking should be a huge red flag for you and others. It shows that are not really a skeptic in the true scientific sense of the word, as a true skeptic doesn’t “want” anything in particular to happen. What this kind of thinking shows is that your thought processes are guided by some burning desire to prove your “side” right, which is of course, more politically motivated and exactly as expected for a certain segment of those who would otherwise call themselves “skeptics”, but in reality, are nothing of the sort. You give true skeptics a bad reputation.

Leif Svalgaard says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:56 pm

How about:
1) the sunspot number is artificially too high [inflated] by 20 after 1945.
2) this means that the cycles appear too large after 1945
3) when we correct for that, there is no longer a distinct Modern Grand Maximum
4) it is therefore not correct to associate the modern warming with a [non-existent] modern grand solar activity maximum

R. Gates says:
January 25, 2012 at 8:06 pm

Indeed, but in pointing this out, you are taking away the last best hope of skeptics who’d like to find something…anything…to pin the late 20th century warming on other than the 40% rise in CO2 since the Industrial Revolution. Now, as we are likely looking at a Dalton or even Maunder Minimum in the next few decades, it will be interesting to see how a very quiet sun counteracts the contined forcing from CO2. I cannot imagine a more exciting time to be studying the sun and the climate in general. We live at a very fortunate juncture in history.

And BTW, thanks for your excellent website.

Leif Svalgaard says:
January 25, 2012 at 8:19 pm
Which explains the hostility towards what I say. but that ‘last best hope’ is just wishful thinking [as you say 'something....anything']. One should not let what one wishes to happen control the science [this goes both ways...].
This is a recent invited talk on sun-climate given during a Workshop in Japan for an audience of climate scientists. They didn’t like it either, as the AGW crowd also needs the sun to explain climate variations before SUVs.