Agreed. My first tech book was done in MS Word 6 (yeah, it was a long time ago). It was a nightmare. We had several production problems when it was time to produce the PostScript to send to the pre-press machine. Ugh.

The next books were done in LaTeX (my editor insisted on it for the 1st one, then I was sold). Sure, it's a bit of a learning curve, but the flexibility and control given by LaTeX are worth learning the tricks. Plus, Lamport's LaTex book is actually a well-written tutorial. Aspiring tech books authors would be well inspired to study its style and organization.

LyX reportedly goes a long way to making LaTeX easier to use. I haven't used it myself, though.

"Everybody knows that there is solar variability."

. Everyone, apparently, but the authors of the various global climate models, none of which currently include it.

Not true. There are models which include variation in the radiated solar input (that's sunshire for us laymen). Some even achieve a measure of success in reproducing the observed climate changes over the last few centuries. But as every other model, they don't explain everything and they cannot reproduce all the observed changes.

Moreover, to account for the most striking recent climate change episodes, these model presuppose a solar variation that is not backed by independent evidence. For example, the Medieval warming could be explained with solar activity increase, but we lack independent proof of it.

On the other hand, the climate change (cooling) that led to the demise of the Mayan empire can entirely be explained by solar forcing (that is, solar activity changes were the main cause), and this has been amply documented.