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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."
I strongly doubt that there is enough evidence to support such a claim at the present time. The era of satellite observations of the sun has only really just started, and any rise may be simply noise from a short duration sample, or due to the decreasing minimum signal capable of being detected.
It's an interesting claim, but the authors are going to have to do a lot of convincing, and in the meantime this news will be twisted to support those opposed to, say, the Kyoto treaty.
Is this just another saying that we son't need to cut down on oil consumption? That air pollution really isn't a problem? No matter whether global warming is due to excess CO2 production or increased solar output, fact remains that our addiction to oil is completely fucking up our climate
now let the americans mod this down.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
The problem is that solar-type stars may vary on timescales of hundreds and thousands of years (in addition to the known sunspot cycle of our Sun of about 11 years), dominating the long term weather patterns here on Earth. It's still a highly debated point, though, mostly because we've only head modern instruments doing accurate solar flux monitoring for the past 50 years or so, and before that we have to rely on indirect methods, such as historical records of large groups of sunspots seen with the unaided eye.
One of the longest running experiments in modern astronomy has been the monitoring of solar-type stars at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Southern California. I was fortunate enough to meet the people who run this experiment - it's not too often you see papers with 40 years of data from the same instrument!
Dr Fish
don't think me a corporate whore or anti-environmentalist; i'm willing to bet that we have some impact... i just think we don't know enough about our ecosystem and it's interaction with the universe around us to automatically assume that it's all our fault.
You know, back in the 1970s, the Green movement was most worried about global cooling. We're overdue for another ice age, they apparently come every 10,000 years or so. The Green's prescription for staving off this threat was to burn less fossil fuel, cut down fewer trees and so on. Fast forward to the 90s and global warming is in vogue. The cure? Burn less fossil fuel, etc.
It's beginning to look like their agenda all along was to slow economic activity, and concern about the environment was only ever a vehicle for pushing that agenda. So don't feel bad about questioning the Green orthodoxy, because it's changed 180-degrees in the not too distant past, and they probably don't even believe it themselves.
Not that we shouldn't conserve fossil fuels; they're going to run out sooner or later. And pollution is bad, it just makes cities unpleasant. And I like furry animals as much as the next man, and I'd rather they weren't driven to extinction. But fight these things for a real reason, not one that doesn't hold stand up to scrutiny.
On a human timescale, no the earth is not moving closer to the sun. The orbits of the planets in our solar system are stable relative to any conceivable timescale. The sun is exerting some forces on the earth - very slowly decreasing our the rate that we spin on our axis, for example.
In thousands upon thousands of years, the earth will only turn on its axis once per year, always keeping the same face toward the sun as it rolls along its solar orbit. This is "tidal lock" much like the earth has achieved over the moon.
The SENATE voted 95-0 not to implement the Kyoto accords.
Why?? Maybe because it only hurt the U.S. and did not apply to China or India! It had nothing to do with the environment, and everything to do with hurting the American economy.
I read that nature is already doing something like that, as per Gaia theory. It's in the Feb. 2003 issue of Discover magazine, P 17. To paraphrase:
:)
The sun's brightness has increased ~30% since it's birth because of the helium ash piling up. On early earth, there was a larger amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to keep us at a reasonable surface temperature.
As the sun gets brighter, the energy influx increases and so more carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere to maintain a steady temperature.
In about a billion years, almost all CO2 will have been removed from the atmosphere. From there, the continuing increase in energy will cause our oceans to evaporate and then boil. The water will go up into the stratosphere, where high energy radiation will break it into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will escape and earth as we know it will be sterilized. Sounds lovely, doesn't it?
Seeing as the sun will remain stable for another 4 billion years though, I suppose we could use some sort of scheme to (very) gradually slingshot earth farther out into the solar system. For a while we'd probably park 60 degrees ahead of Mars, then commit suicide by trying to fly through the asteroid belt
Scientists have been studying sunspot activity since the 1300's. For the past few hundred years there has been a regular pattern of peaks and quiet.
In the last few decades though, that pattern has changed to where the sun's sunspot activity is MUCH higher than it has ever been and the activity period has been going on without stopping or having very short quiet periods.
The whole "global warming is caused by humanity" argument has a few merits, of course, but it's a miniscule drop in the bucket compared to the power of the sun.
On the plus side, it gives humanity something they can combat, instead of watching helplessly while the sun goes nova and wipes out life on earth.
It might actually explain why earth has had no contact from alien civilizations: If you extrapolate even a very conservative version of the Drake Equation, and then look at the amount of time it would take for even ONE space faring civilization to completely colonize the galaxy, we should be bumping into aliens constantly.
The fact that we haven't might mean that even on a planet where intelligence eventually evolves, that habitability-period of the planet is never long enough for the beings living there go get off of their world before either their sun goes nova, they get wiped out by a killer asteroid or they destroy themselves.
If we look at the earth as being an average planet in the universe, then we know that all those scenarios are possible.
Sort of makes you reflect that we should be developing ways to colonize space and spread our proverbial eggs from this one basket instead of waging useless wars on each other that only produce suffering.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Well, actually we can. Areas around cities tend to be several degrees warmer than the surrounding areas. This is called the urban heat island effect. If we can affect temperature on a local level, why is it so outlandish to think we can do it on a global one?
Now climate is affected by a huge number of variables. One of them is the chemical composition of the atmosphere. That is not in dispute. We can, and have, changed this composition especially as regards carbon dioxide levels. This is also not in dispute, as it can easily be measured. So, the conclusion that we cannot possibly cause climate change is ridiculous on its face. To claim it is "arrogance" to think so is merely a way to avoid addressing the point.
Because the physics of the problem are different between the local and global scenarios. For example, while the urban heating effect you mention is well established, you are assuming that such an effect is cumulative and does not further interact with the adacent weather. However, that same temperature increase will cause a local low pressure area, and associated updraft over the city. As the air rises, it will cool (due to the temperature inversion) and much of the thermal energy will the absorbed by water vapor in the air (water being an exceeding efficient heat sink). The rising column of air and low pressure will bring in local winds from the outlying (cooler) areas, effectively reducing the temperature in a natural feedback system. The whole point is that the regional and global weather system is infinitely more complex than the local weather, and making a generalization about local phenomena does not necessarily carry over to global phenomena.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
And even if 'global warming' is not being caused by pollution, we need to reduce it anyway.
Where I live, we've just had 2 weeks or so of high-pressure dominated weather. This time of year, this tends to mean a stable atmosphere, and a temperature inversion. Also, winds have been moving from the south east (i.e. coming in from Europe and the UK).
Visibility has been down to less than three miles in *smoke* because of pollution that's blown in from the UK and Europe. Normally our air is very clean and clear, coming in from the west with only Ireland in the way. But the inversion (trapping the pollution) and not much energy in the atmosphere to disperse it means we've been stuck in a pot with a lid on containing not only us but Europe and visibility has been getting worse as the days have gone on. Our normally clear air is currently getting close to as poor as Los Angeles air.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
There is an approximately 70-80 year cycle of Solar output called the "Gleissberg cycle". (I am not an astrophysicist, so do a Google search.) We are approching the peak of the cycle (the last peak was in 1932). During the last minimum in the cycle (late 60's-early 70's) I rememmber a lot of talk about "global cooling".
New Scientist published, in their paper weekly, years ago, that *Earth's temperature disconnected from the Sun's temperature/cycle in the mid '80s*.
Also, it seems that in natural temperature-cycling of Earth's climate, temperature-change happens-before CO2-change, but we poured billions-of-tonnes of CO2 ( I can't even imagine that correctly ) into our atmosphere lately, so...
using this as 'proof' that global warming is just some liberal propaganda, as some other propagandists would want/need to do, don't wash... ( I'm using world-context, rather than just some specially-limited context, for this discussion, obvaneously )
Solar temperature and Earth-climate-temperature cannot be defined out of being actual.
It's like how someone who actually measured the current-flow in the northern Atlantic discovered that in '99 it was flowing in .. the wrong direction ..
( originally N m/s one way, now some other 'n' cm/s the other direction ).
-shrug- change the thermal masses, change the way they interact, displace one-another, flow, etc.
making-believe that our long-committed actions don't have capability to touch us, because .. what, because our make-believe is immoveable power?
our climate is crashing.
El Nino broke from a 6-8y cycle in the '70s, now is on a 2-4y cycle.
Previous 400 000 years we know it hadn't been on a 2-4y cycle ( from entrapped atmosphere taken from ice-cores off Vostok Antarctica ).
Some thermal energy shunted from thermal, to kinetic, energy in the '70s: the bottom of our atmosphere became violenter.
That means that looking at the planetary temperature doesn't show the energy-increase, it only shows the energy-that-remained-thermal increase...
This one was discovered by seismographs(sp?), showing the background waves-pounding-against-continents noise jumped, globally, then.
The disconnect from Solar cycle, in the '80s, I already mentioned.
The loss of 2000 cubic kilometres of ice from Antarctica, between '95 and '02 ( inclusive, I believe ) means our planet isn't reflective so much as it was...
IIRC Antarctica lost 215km of radius of ice, in the ?70 years before 1950 ( profound loss of reflectivity of heat, perhaps? )...
There's a particularly huge ice-plain that's now expected to collapse quickly, but They don't know when, but They know it'll rather-likely mean a 6m or 7m increase in ocean-level.
It's now believed very likely that there isn't going to be ANY ice in the Northern hemisphere, in the summer, by the end of this century ( again, lower reflectivity? also, earthquakes from the melting glaciers, and rebounding Greenland, and Iceland crustal plate, etc. )
'Deal with it' seems the only choice now...
Either proactively, or, after we've had our WWIII/tantrum, what's left of us will deal-with/be-in what remains.
...
Coupla reasons for knowing the tantrum's perfectly inevitable:
1. ecology-break instantiates 'wars', always. ... ~5000 years. This suggests that few remained to loot thoroughly, without getting dead ( contrast with the huge temple in Egypt, that's totally missing, now: every last speck of it is gone, except for the twin quartzite statues that once stood astride its doorway ).
Look at Uruk, now Iraq, ~5000 years ago... huge metropolis, that broke its local ecology, and it broke sooo quick, some have gone through the Iraqi desert picking up coins, that've lain there for
2. Political Religions, Intolerance of Community/Harmony, And Other Predator/Agression-addiction/Cancer-modes:
If one cell-type within your body decided "Me First!", say muscle-tissue, and it killed-off your bones, kidneys, and neurons, YOU wouldn't be likely to survive. This is usually called cancer, when it happens within one's body.
Messages to/for me ( in me journal )
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. Therefore, the solar variance is not continuous, it must be cyclical. We dont know where in the cyccle we are except to know were in the upswing portion. In 10 years it may go down again. The fact that the sun is contributing to global warming should be seeen as something that points us TOWARDS restricting carbon emissions, not away from it. If global warming has multiple causes, its even more important to restrict the human controllable ones to prevent environmental change.
Global warming is caused by filtering we would like to avoid.
The greenhouse effect is caused by the fact that IR electromagnetic radiation is absorbed by "greenhouse" gasses, trapping energy on our planet that if these gasses were absent, would reflect harmlessly into space.
The ozone layer, on the other hand, filters out harmful UV radiation that generally is not trapped even by greenhouse gasses.
You say
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 [bovik.org], from whatever source, forces heat that would normally be radiated into space to remain in the atmosphere.
But clearly cow fart consists mainly of methane (which in turn is an even stronger greenhouse gas than carbondioxide, yes).
it could be read as underlining the importance of controlling the output of greenhouse gases by technical civilization. The greenhouse gases are not just capturing more of the available solar radiation, they may be capturing more of the INCREASING solar radiation. Consequently, this would indicate that it is more important than ever to control greenhouse output. Facts are not apologist crap. Interpretations however may be.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
It's about bloody time that the "hotter sun" concept breaks into the mainstream. That's what I have been repeating over and over about the reason why the best computer climatology models fail to reproduce known climating history, and hence prove their uselessness. It's because they are based on a "solar constant" (about 900 W/m2 at equatorial peak if I remember correctly) but the solar output is not a constant.
(Hey, sounds like this old Murphy's law of programming: "Constants aren't".)
Two years ago, the Science magazine carried a paper explaining how researchers examined sediments in Yutacan and proved that solar output increase, with a cycle of about 208 years, forced a drought on the Maya that was probably the last straw and destroyed their empire. Findings are correlated with other data. See "Solar Forcing of Drought Frequency in the Maya Lowlands" by David Hodell et.al. Very important paper for anyone who wants to understand climatology.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Bingo. The Kyoto Treaty is bug a symptom of the same anti-Americanism that's currently wishing for America's destruction while supporting a vicious despot in Iraq.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
>"Modern" nuclear energy is too risky, period.
Risky? Hardly. I can't think of a single fatality resulting from a CANDU reactor, apart from those not related to the fact the plant is nuclear.
Or did you mean "OLD" nuclear energy, like Windscale and Chernobyl? These poor designs should never have been put into production, and people have suffered as a result.
Nuclear energy, done right, is far more safe than any other energy production method. The risks for an installer of solar panels are likely higher than the risks of working at a CANDU reactor. Certainly more people have died as a result of energy dam accidents, and I can't even imagine the numbers that die as a result of toxic smoke spewed from coal and gas fired energy generators.
In fact, CANDU Nuclear Reactors are so safe that even this anti-nuclear article, try as it might, can't find a single death resulting from any accident at a CANDU reactor. Not one. Nada. Zip. Zero.
I'd feel safer working there than programming. Programmers get RSI. I think I'll move to Pickering and see if I can get a job at the reactor. That way I don't have to worry about on the job lethal accidents.
IIRC, there was a posting some time ago that added up the entire waste output from all nuclear reactors since day one. They estimated it would fit in three football fields. At that rate, we'll be able to perform cold fusion before waste management becomes a problem.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
"The US is and claims to be a global leader. It should set the standard on the environment. The fact that it doesn't live up to that is puzzling."
:-)
A leader is only a leader if they have followers. If the US sets the standard on the environment, then other countries have to comply with that standard if we are to consider it leading. The problem is that since those countries see this problem as smaller for them, since they don't produce the vast quantities of greenhouse gases that the US does, the effect is really that the US has to change things while those other countries just watch. This makes the earlier argument of this accord just being a way to hurt the US economy a potentially valid one, since only the US businesses have to spend huge amounts of money on reducing greenhouse gas production.
Also, by saying that developing countries don't have to worry about this problem, you are encouraging them to do whatever it takes to become an industrialized nation just short of actually becoming an industrialized nation. They get to the point where they can spew out the stuff and not deal with the problem because they're not industrialized nations, even when they get to the point that they really are, but don't quite produce enough product to be considered such. Furthermore, they may never do so, just to avoid having to deal with emissions restrictions. This could stagnate their development. If restrictions are to be imposed, they should be imposed on all that sign, equally. Those that have a larger problem already have more to deal with, as far as this accord goes.
Of course, I'm talking out of my a$$, which only increases greenhouse gas production, but at least I don't have to wear an exhaust scrubber like so many factories do....
actualy I'd assume that the curvature of the earth would be significant, a square meter of sunshield at 45 degrees latatude would only be .707 as effective as over the equator, at the poles almost ineffective. So the obvious solution is for everybody to buy a solar pannel and use it to energize a laser to beam the excess energy back into space. Idealy the color of the laser should be one that breaks the mollecular bonds in CO2 along the way.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Yes, I'm a git.
The thing is that I am trained on the fine points of quantum mechanics, and the rest is sort of lying unused in the back of the head. I instantly regretted posting it, when I thought about it, but I'd already hit the post button.
Now the mods have given it visibility, and I regret it more.
But I stand by my point. The sun's output *is* the primary reason we have weather at all, and fluctuations in that output should be considered, and have not been considered to my knowledge.
And it is a very scary thought that if dramatic climate change occurs because of the sun, and not our impact, as is generally thought, we can do very little to stop it.
You say
Shouldn't be replying to any of these, but I'm bait today for a little argument...
Reflectivity issue: Yes, you lose ice. But, in a warmer atmosphere, there tends to be be more clouds... and WOW... clouds also reflect, don't they? And those clouds will tend to be around the tropics, where there is a lot more solar insolation to reflect back over the course of a year. The role of albedo (reflectivity) in the climate system is so highly indeterminate that its futile to attempt to make any argument either way without further evidence one way or another.
Sea level increase rate: Dan's comment here is very appropriate. I forgot where I read it, but some administrator in the Netherlands was asked what they were planning on doing if the sea level should rise. He calmly shrugged and replied, "We'll build our wall taller."
CO2 is NOT all bad: The thing which always gets me is people are constantly tossing up graphs of CO2 from 1700 to now. But, go further back in our planet's history. Like around the Jurassic, maybe? During those periods with all those plants and dinosaurs and all sorts of life, CO2 levels were 10 to 20 times current levels. Yep... life was in ALL sorts of trouble then, now wasn't it?
The point is that we don't want to change, so any change is "bad". That's fine and dandy, and a perfectly understandable thing to want. But, the thing which bothers me is this stigma that "we're ruined" because of increased CO2. Look at where humans are living right now. Deserts? No problem. Tropical areas? No problem. Tundra and arctic? No problem. We're one of the most adaptable species this world has ever seen, and we're worried about a changing world ruining us? PUH-LEEZE.
More CO2 implies more plant respiration: It has been conclusively shown that increased CO2 leads to more plant respiration... up to a point. Nitrogen is a BIG limiting factor in those reactions. So, don't assume that the biosphere will be able to counteract all this. And, in fact, the whole carbon-climate system feedback is an area of VERY active research. In fact, it is well known that this is one of the most important areas of climate change, but its magnitude is SO incredibly unknown (depending on the model and parameterizations you use, you can get 2000-2100 temperature increases from anywhere between 1 and 7 degrees Celsius). There are SO many different feedback mechanisms in the atmosphere that trying to even determine what MIGHT happen is fuzzy at best. Another pair of model runs I once saw found a very impressive bifurcation point in their biosphere/atmosphere interaction scheme. By very minutely tweaking a parameter that dealt with plant growth probabilities, they were able to go between a state where the Amazon basin dried up significantly and became grasslands and another state where the Amazon rain forest slowly became wetter and wetter to the point of being a rain forest/swamp. Insomuch one can believe these parameterizations, it's amazing that a little change like that could produce such entirely differing results.
Sun's effect: As for the article, I haven't read it, since that's been hypothesized for a while. But, the problem, from what I remember, is that the error bars on measuring solar power are larger than any of these trends, meaning that there's a possible chance that there is no trend, just errors. However, that could have changed since the last I've heard about it. *shrugs.*
(Disclaimer: Yes, I'm an atmospheric scientist. Yes, I know a lot about this particular subject. No, I'm not studying climate interactions, but we just had two colloquia on climate studies: carbon-climate interactions and cloud/moisture feedbacks.)
-Jellisky