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A Hotter Sun May Be Contributing To Global Warming
no reason to be here writes "The sun seems to be getting hotter. Total radiation output has increased .05% per decade since the 1970s.
This article over at Yahoo! News has the scoop. Though .05% may not seem like much, if it has been going on for the last century or more (and circumstantial evidence suggest that it has), it could be a significant factor in the increase in global average temperature noticed during the 20th century."
He also mentioned that Michigan was buried under about a mile of ice at one time too.
These weather changes were long before man came on the scene. I'm all for Michigan becoming tropical again but that is likely to cause problems for the southern part of the US.
Dyslexics Untie!
The article says
so, no, this
Note, for instance, that the article also says
(emphasis mine).
I.e., they have only observed it over a approximately 20-year period, so they don't know whether it's been going on for a century or more, but if it hasn't, it wouldn't make a significant difference to the climate.
I was gonna go for the sarcastic comment... of course it's ultimately the sun's radiation which is warming the planet. The problem is that while the atmosphere is losing its ability to filter radiation, the radiation is slightly increasing.
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Free your mind.
"And pollution is bad, it just makes cities unpleasant."
Unpleasant? Isn't that a bit of an understatement?
Or is death merely an unpleasant experience, like having to stand in line too long at the grocery store?
"But fight these things for a real reason, not one that doesn't hold stand up to scrutiny."
You've got a long way to go buddy if you are seeking out real reason. Claiming pollution doesn't cause any harm... Ha!
I'm not an environmentalist, but it's quite clear you've drank the anti-Environment koolaid.
I was an adult during the seventies (still am, for the most part), and I don't remember anything about global cooling coming up. People were most concerned about the possibility of running out of fossil fuels, and the loss of habitat for many species of animals. Since then there has been much speculation about the possibility of global warming causing glaciation in some parts of the world by changing the ocean currents.
No matter how much we humans think we can figure out about our world and the universe, there's always some phenomenon that we don't account for yet we plod forward anyway. This is not to say that humans are not contributing to global warming, but we should be looking more into the natural physical phenomena that could be contributing to a problem that affects us.
How about looking at the geological and fossil record for some evidence? In the recent past (geologically speaking) there have been 4 ice ages and 4 "thaws", and before that the temperature of the Earth was erratic at best. Also, homo sapiens are only 40,000 or so years old, and industrialism that we think is causing global warming and whatnot has only been around about 100 years.
The Earth and life was here before humans, and most likely will go on after we are gone.
It is not, primarily, the cow farts, although they alone probably cause more global warming than any 0.00005/year change in solar output. Carbon dioxide, from whatever source, forces heat that would normally be radiated into space to remain in the atmosphere. The extent is very easy to quantify, and it's a hell of a lot more than 0.05% per decade.
This article is just more fossil fuel apologist crap. It makes SUV drivers feel a little bit better about sending all that cash to Saudi Arabia when they fill up their huge gas tanks.
Bush and Cheney have been using gas "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but is not a sound basis for energy policy" on their own people!
Let me say it again. Look at these graphs. The data, taken from ice core studies, shows four ice-ages in the past 400k years. For each dip of the CO2 graph there is a similar dip in the temperature graph showing a high degree of correlation. The extended CO2 graph shows an enormous increase in CO2, over the past century, well outside the range of the past 400k years. This recent rise is almost a vertical jump, indicating we may be changing the climate drastically.
It is possible that the sun has some effect in triggering these cycles but these graphs show such a large correlation between CO2 and temperature that it is impossible not to believe the scientists of the IPCC. Yes, human activity is causing global warming. (In the UK we experience this now as global wetting - with increased heavy rainshowers).
To me your reaction sounds just like those "smoking doesn't cause cancer" line from the 1960s. Don't kid yourself.
This is the crappiest discussion on /. I've seen in a while:
Couple of facts:
There is (currently) no model to simulate neither weather nor climate. not regionally nor globally.
There is, at this point, no proven hint that human-released co2 has had any impact on earths climate. (see point 1)
In fact, there is no reasonable explanation for earth cooling down 'til the late 17nth century an then getting warmer.
My god, this list could continue forever....
The data that everybody else has been talking about comes from multiple satellites and spans several decades. And no, there is not "considerable day to day variation." Most of the variation comes on a monthly cycle, the approximate amount of time it takes the sun to rotate once as seen from Earth. Your "upward trend from 1996 to 2000, and then some dropof" comes from the last solar maximum. In considering long term trends, it is far better to have data from more than one solar cycle, and the recently released data was used to compare the average solar irradiance during two consecutive solar minimums.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
To counteract a 0.05% increase in solar output, you only need to block 0.05% of the sunlight from hitting the earth. This is not as much as you might think, since the earth presents a face of 4000^2 * Pi square miles. This is about 50M sq miles, so 0.05% of that would be 25K sq miles. Mylar today is commonaly available in 1mill (0.001") thickness. So, assuming we put this into the space between us and the Sun, you would need a packet of mylar sheets 1 mile square by 2' thick.
Putting aluminized mylar into space was tried for a different purpose by the Echo satellite. Some nice people have already calculated that a single shuttle flight could carry a 700 meter balloon up. Some more efficient lifting technology would be very welcome for this project. Thinner Mylar would also be a great help.
Hydrogen already escapes. The atomic weight of H is very low. The kinetic energy of normal temperature (earth scale) is already enough for escape velocity.
The following links have graphs and images. Here and here.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
wow.. some totally obvious, and humerous in my opinion, sarcasm.... and still someone finds a way to throw in some U.S. bashing.
... I should specify that like all good americans I'm quick to criticize my gov and society,, but I do make an effort to keep it related to the subject at hand.
Before I start some more of it
Yet fooling the press and the anti-scientific does not fact make. Those who dispute global warming are like Flat Earth types and creationists, rallying around fallacy and refusing to consider facts they find inconvenient. It's all Cargo Cult Science.
Some /. readers are probably adept enough at math to review the raw data and decide for themselves: solar irradiance data has been tracked and known for many years and is built into climate models that show, unequivocally, the consequences of human induced climate change. Even Bush finally admitted it.
Will the earth survive such changes? Of course it will. Will the human race survive? Probably. Will the long term cost of continuing to burn fossil fuels exceed the short term cost of switching to low carbon-load alternatives? Almost certainly.
But when evaluating the arguments of anti-environmentalists, which seem so utterly out of sync with even basic science, one must remember that, like their spiritual mentor James Watt, those that believe that Armageddon is around the corner will do nothing to protect the rights of future generations.
Source
In short, global warming could be happening, and it is possible that man even plays a part in global warming. However, there are certainly less controversial reasons to cut back on our oil consumption. Narrowing the argument to global warming simply hurts the cause of environmentalists.
Citation, please? This page, for example, says
so either
Basically, hydrogen has such a low density that it drifts to form a fog from about 1000 to several thousand miles above earth, where it gets carried off by the solar wind.
Despite the tone of Yahoo's article, and despite the fact that unfortunately physicists are resorting more and more into spectacular announcements (and I am a physicist), the issue is not settled. This search at the NASA's ADS will show you a bunch of papers on the topic (even tough some entries are unrelated). Just browse the abstracts, you will see that not everyone in the astrophysics community agrees that variations in solar radiation are the main cause of global warming.
Because it is natural?
You know something the scientists don't?
Because it was happening long before humans were using fossil fuels
This is the centerpiece to the anti-environmental/conservative/libertarian argument. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of simple logic, though; because A caused B in the past, it does not follow that ANY occurence of B must have been caused by A. To put it in elementary logic, (if A then B) does not equal (if and only if A then B).
This cant be a sustained effect. If the sun were continuously increasing its output by .05% a decade, the sun had a total output of 1 watt ~ 1.25 million years ago.
Hmm. I suggest you read the article before posting. Where exactly did it say it was continous over the entire history of the sun? I think they are more talking about recent history. Anyway, this article was not pro oil. The scientist believed that this may be a part of the warming trend, and emissions may still be a factor.
Or just increase the albedo locally, and reflect excess. No floating space junk necessary.
The U.S. didn't sign the Kyoto treaty because parts of it would violate our Constitution (specifically, the 4th Ammendment). The government CAN'T sign a treaty that violates our Constitution.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The BBC had this story in 1998.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/56456.stm
Of course, back then climate research was marginally less political since Clinton had already declared global warming to be caused by human influences (it is funny how otherwise intelligent people throw the scientific method out the window on this topic...The whole "greenhouse gas" panic is the finest example of 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' logic (err illogic) I have ever witnessed.)
If you really care about this debate from a scientific perspective you should read Dr. Sallie Baliunas (who has real credentials as opposed to many of the chicken little crowd who in the April 28, 1975 issue warned us that we were causing the next ice age and semi-advocated melting the polar ice caps by covering them with black soot)
Besides, if there was a real consensus about CO2 being at fault Kyoto would have been about reducing CO2 emissions and not about redistributing US wealth by having us "buy pollution credits" from third world countries.
Dan
Sun's Output Increasing in Possible Trend Fueling Global Warming
And another:
NASA Study Finds Increasing Solar Trend That Can Change Climate
What, you mean like this?
Well, there's the small matter of having a pair of the world's largest solid fuel rockets strapped to the whole contraption as it climbes skyward.
Otherwise, you're partially right. It'd be good if water wapor was indeed the only way to combine oxygen and hydrogen, but unfortunately the high temperatures involved will give rise to some H2O2 (Hydrogen peroxide). I seem to remember another, but cannot recall it now.
Stefan Axelsson
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2880845.stm
Two interesting points here:
It is intended that this will be the UKs first 'UK only' space mission.
The mission is not slated to take place until 2023.
You are suggesting that the average car only travels 2.5 miles per day? It is easy to calculate that each gallon of gasoline produces 18 pounds of CO2.