Patrick Moore Admits What He Left Out of His Congressional Testimony

I asked Patrick Moore, in email (identifying myself as a journalist), why he left out of his Congressional testimony the fact that the Sun's intensity is increasing by about 1% every 110 million years -- and so was about 4% lower 450 million years ago. His response:

If you had 5 minutes in the Senate I’m sure you would leave a few things out too.

Of course, that's a very major thing to leave out of the story. It's a HUGELY important fact to leave out of the story -- the most important thing, by far.....

Yet Moore left it out.

That's what he told me. Though his email was pretty confused, as you might expect:

Or, at least, it sure seems confusing to me.

Frankly, I don't believe Patrick Moore knew that the Sun was much weaker in the past. I think he had his (false and incomplete) CO2 story, and was going to go with it no matter what, not because he knew there was more to the story, but because he didn't, and was mostly ignorance of a deep understanding of deep time.

By the way, some scientists think that the dawn of the age of plants sucked enough CO2 out of the Earth's atmosphere to help cause the Ordovician–Silurian ice age. But Patrick Moore finds that too complicated to think about, I'm sure -- let alone mention to the U.S. Congress.