The SUN, Sol, RA to the Egyptians, Our Local Star - classified as a Yellow Dwarf, so not very big in the Universe.
But our Sun is the dominant body in our local Solar System, Earth is a mere speck compared to our Yellow Dwarf STAR. The image, needs to be shown in every school, college and university. In addition it needs to be seen in context of all the Climate Alarmism, so frequently reported in all media, government and educational output.
When it comes to planet Earth, the most important source of light, heat, and energy actually comes from beyond our world. It’s the Sun that is the driver of the Earth’s energy balance, rather than the internal heat given off by the planet itself from sources like gravitational contraction and radioactive decays. The energy from the Sun keeps temperatures from freezing all across the planet, providing us with temperatures that allow liquid water on Earth’s surface, and that are essential to the life processes of nearly every organism extant on our world today.
And yet, it’s only within the last 200 years that humanity has even understood how much energy, overall, the Sun actually produces. Considering all of the scientific advances that came afterward, including the development of stellar, quantum, and nuclear physics, as well as the understanding of the subatomic fusion reactions that power the Sun, it might seem like a trivial matter to simply answer the question of “How much energy does the Sun produce?”
In their book "The Role of the Sun in Climate Change" Douglas V Hoyt and Kenneth H Shatten, argue that the forcing "effects" of volcanic aerosols, anthropogenic aerosols, and greenhouse gas warming - are just theories; {see citation after the "READ MORE" section}
"...and we will treat these theories with skepticism, .......as we do for SOLAR FORCING of climate"
"The Role of the Sun in Climate Change" Douglas V Hoyt and Kenneth H Shatten {CITATION}
Sunlight is more than visible light
Today, we take for granted that there’s much more to light than the tiny portion of the spectrum that’s visible to our eyes. But back hundreds of years ago, this wasn’t obvious in any easily provable way. Hot objects, which today we know emit large amounts of infrared radiation, were thought to possess a quantity of heat energy that had no light-based counterparts. At high energies, gamma-rays, X-rays, and ultraviolet light were not known, while at longer wavelengths and lower energies, there was not yet evidence for microwave or radio waves.
The first evidence for the existence of light beyond visible light — especially for light beyond the visible part of the spectrum as being part of sunlight — was uncovered quite by accident. Astronomer William Herschel, the famed discoverer of Uranus (which he found in 1781), suddenly found himself the recipient of accolades, resources, and wealth: largely gifted by King George III of England. He began to devote himself to astronomy full-time, completing what was then the world’s largest telescope later in the 1780s, discovering Titania and Oberon in 1787 (Uranus’s two largest moons), and then turned his attention to another astronomical object of interest: the Sun.
By extrapolating the surface area over which sunlight struck his container to cover the total amount of sky at Earth’s orbital distance from the Sun, Herschel was able, for the first time, to estimate the outputted power of the Sun itself: that value works out to somewhere around 4 × 1026 watts. (Herschel’s value was a little bit lower, as he underestimated the amount absorbed/reflected by the atmosphere.) That means, with each second that goes by, the Sun:
- fuses around 1038 protons within its core into heavier elements,
- transforms 620 million tonnes of hydrogen,
- into 616 million tonnes of helium,
- and releases the energy-equivalent of 4 million tonnes of matter via Einstein’s E = mc².
It turns out that even though the Sun’s peak wavelength occurs in the visible light portion of the spectrum, the majority of the Sun’s total energy really is emitted at infrared wavelengths. This technology was swiftly put to use. By 1870, sunlight was used to create the first solar-powered motors, which developed into different engine configurations and became more efficient throughout the decade. By 1880, the first solar cell was developed, and in the 1950s, NASA began using solar power in space. All of today’s modern applications of solar power rely on knowing how much energy is outputted by the Sun, a piece of knowledge that’s less than 200 years old. Remarkably, now you know how to figure that value out for yourself!
Citations: RT Book, Section
Hoyt, Douglas V; Shatten, Kenneth H; Alternative Climate-Change Theories; Title: "The Role of the Sun in Climate Change" 1997
10.1093/oso/9780195094138.003.0016; SP 0; SN 9780195094138; PB Oxford University Press
ABSTRACT
"So far, we have primarily considered only the sun’s role in natural climatic change. This focus does not imply that the sun is the only cause of climatic changes, nor even the most important one.
In the last chapter, we stated that solar and climatic changes have paralleled each other for the last four centuries and, therefore, on time scales of decades to centuries, solar variations might be a dominant driving force for natural variability.
Many climatologists adamently disagree with this conclusion and suggest that other factors, both in the past and for the future, are far more important. In the future, mankind’s influences may increase and likely will dominate coming climate changes. One hypothesis suggests that the climate system varies randomly, first warming for a few decades and then cooling. Scientists who support this hypothesis believe that external influences need not necessarily cause internal changes. They view the Earth as a thermostat with a very wide interval (or band) of possible temperatures. In other words, the Earth’s mean temperature is not constrained to one precise equilibrium temperature. Several natural experiments contradict this belief. For example, following a volcanic eruption the Earth cools for a few months to a few years; then the temperature returns to its preemption values. This rapid return implies a narrow stable temperature band, with the climate system striving to return quickly to its equilibrium. As the time constant for the climate system is relatively short, it responds quickly to variable forcings. Similar arguments can be made using solar variations.
For this reason, we discount the idea that unpredictable chaotic influences completely govern the climatic system. We will now review three additional forcing functions for climate, specifically volcanic aerosols, anthropogenic aerosols, and greenhouse gas warming. Modern climatologists consider these three forcings the most popular for explaining observed climatic changes. Yet just as the sun/climate connections can be harshly criticized, so can these three ideas, and we will treat these theories with skepticism. We will strive to adopt this same skeptical attitude for solar forcing of climate again in chapter 13."
RD 11/10/2024
UL https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195094138.003.0016