Re: "Washington Post Accidentally Admits Earth at Coolest Point in the Last 485 Million Years"

Chris Buckley wrote:

On 2024-09-28, William Hyde <wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:
...

Changes in ocean circulation can have a strong impact on regional
climates and can occur quite rapidly, as we may discover later this
century.  Ice age climates are even more variable, with the younger
Dryas cooling setting in over less than five years in the Northern
Hemisphere, cooling winters several degrees C, while leaving summers
unaltered.    There is some reason to believe that this event was set
off by volcanic cooling.   But at the moment that's just an idea.
>
Solar.  While this doesn't seem to ever amount to much, it does exist,
and if it adds to the above, which it may have done in the little ice
age, it can be significant.
>
But none of these processes is active now.

 Hmm. I thought we had entered a period of solar output actively
affecting climate.
 The reduced solar output is very minor and obviously no overall
temperature reduction is occurring now in this time of global warming,
but I did think it was active.

Correct.
I should have said "sufficiently active".  Current changes in solar output act to cool the planet, though only by a tiny amount.
Various paleoclimatic reconstructions, though not most of them, show solar variability accounting for more climate change in the past.  The problem being that the proxies used for solar constant change are not particularly robust, and the more exact knowledge we have in the period of direct observation does not agree with this view.
As to the current warming the question is academic, as the pattern of warming shows us clearly that this is not due to  an increase in solar output.
William Hyde