The Eclipse Chaser: Those Missing Sunspots - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com

Scientists are particularly interested because of work by the recently deceased astronomer Jack Eddy, who found a period in the early 1700’s where there were no sunspots for decades. That period corresponded to a cool period, at least in Europe, known as the Little Ice Age. Nowadays, scientists monitor the “total solar irradiance” (it used to be called the solar constant, but it turned out not to be constant). It is about 1/10 of a percent less at sunspot minimum than at sunspot maximum, which has to be taken into account in models of global warming. The effect is much too small compared with our human contributions to the atmosphere to be important for global warming calculations, but it should be included in the models.

YouTube - Global Warming : Al Gore-vs-Harrison Schmitt.

Al Gore uses continuously the same argument : there is a consensus in science (of climatology). That is a really clear cut exemple of a logical and epistemological fallacy. First, consensus on a discours, if there is any, is a sociological fact, not a proof of the content of the discours itself. Second, many well founded empirical and rational arguments against Gore and IPCC claims exist. That is the game. It is the only one. And so much for AGW.