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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."
The sun has been causing global warming? Now who would have ever expected a giant ball of uncontrolled nuclear explosions to change at all and have any effect on the warming of our planet.
I'm still believing it's the cow farts.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Sun Microsystems is WHAT?!
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.
And no, this isn't an excuse for the rabid dogs on either side of the environmental debate to start jumping up and down either for or against human contributions to global warming, nor is it our only problem. I hope this discussion doesn't turn into this, though I fear it will.
i always thought it was arrogance to suggest that, to the exclusion of all other factors, humans had the greatest impact on global warming.
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.
woof!
...some country have a scientific comitee (*cough* US *cough*) use this as an argument there isn't global warming due to pollution and that one don't really have to reduce CO2 emission or other Serre-effect gas ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Watch the environmentalists whinge about how all our use of fossil fuels is contributing to solar warming.
I think Al Gore has a new plank for 2004...
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
The EVIL sun and its weapons of mass destruction must be stopped! If the sun does not capitulate and give up its weapons of mass destruction, a coalition of the willing will be led to rid the earth of this tyranny! Support Earth! Donate your Ice cubes. If you are not with us, you are with the EVIL Heat producing SUN!
We've got to force the people who live on the sun to stop using styrofoam boxes for their Big Macs!
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Due to the large amount of ore that must be refined to build SUV for Americans, the magnetosphere of Earth has deformed and is now causing the Solar Corona to expand. This expansion is causing increased radiation, and hence, higher ambient temperatures on Earth.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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.
more logical than what they have been saying about global warming being caused by "greenhouse gases" and whatnot.
"Global warming" is a documented scientific fact. Without the greenhouse effect our planet would be uninhabitable.
Now whether this effect has been exacerbated by human creation of greater atmospheric carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, etc., that's up for debate. Personally I think since we're not sure, we should err on the side of caution and try and cut emissions as much as possible.
The sun is increasing output just to keep up with our solar power demands. Soon the oceans will start rising from our wave-power harvesting generators, and the earth is already spinning slower due to wind powered turbines! People of the earth unite: stop using these dangerous alternative fuels! Petroleum-based fuel sources are the only way to keep our planet safe for our cihldren and their SUVs!
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
Since there's enough evidence to suggest that burning fossil fuels affects climate change, and also the sun is getting hotter, this is all the more reason that we must control our consumption (the former variable, within our control). Anything less would be reckless.
If the Sun is indeed warming, then we may still need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The last thing you want to do on a hotter stove is clamp the lid tighter.
Sigh. If Greenies had just concentrated on the fact of global temperature increase or decrease, the debate would be simply on technical solutions. Instead they made it a religious issue. Now any time something like this comes out, those of the other religion will start demanding sacrifices of oil.
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!
It was found that 100% of so called 'gun related' deaths were actually caused by the Sun!
Charlton Heston remarked "Get you're hand of me you damn dirty ape!"
Yes, which is why the scientist said that it would be significant if it's been going on for a century or so. That would be a 5% increase (actually more, due to the wonders of compound interest), which certainly would be important.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I'm prepared to believe that CO2 is the primary culprit, but I regard as a question of science, not blind religious faith. The mindset you and "aepervius" seem to have, that CO2 must be treated as the cause of climate change, regardless of what new facts emerge, is, well, embarassing.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I have always thought that global warming was caused by something other than humans. After all we've gone through a couple of ice ages so far, which tells me that it's completely natural for slow (albiet drastic) temperature changes.
Unless the theory is that dinosaurs also used aerosol cans, leading to their own demise. Asteroid theory, ha! The pieces start to fall together...
Note to moderators: The first paragraph is insightful, the second is an attempt at humor.
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 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.
that man's activities have had little or no effect on the climate of the earth, and the fossil record *proves* the average temperature of the earth has been much higher and much lower in the past, that the size and shape of ozone hole is purely due to solar cycles, and insolation is the key to climate?
The oceans are suspected of contibuting to global humidity.
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
Quick! Call Mr. Burns!
The problem in the world today is communication. Too much communication - Homer Simpson
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.
--------
Free your mind.
Wouldn't it be nifty if they found that the sun is turning to a red giant right now, and we have 50 years before we are cooked.
no
but I need hot pockets and spongebob videos.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Someone posted a link to this article. We have less than six years. That's good news for people who hate Enterprise since it definitely won't be still on in 6 years.
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
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
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!
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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.
A Hotter Sun May Be Contributing To Global Warming
Really. Did they figure this out themselves, or do they have a team of monkeys working on it?
Yeah, science sucks. I refuse to believe anything that doesn't offer logical and consistant explanations for everything in the universe, with ample evidence to back it up. That's why I'm sticking with Christianity.
I'm sorry everyone, but global warming is caused by my Nvidia FX card.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
All we have to do is file a patent on global warming, then sue the sun to stop violating our patent. Easy as pie.
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
But why is it getting hotter? Well, here's one to send in to your local "science" reporter:;)
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
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
Please ... will someone think of the penguins?
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.
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".
The sun has been causing global warming? Now who would have ever expected a giant ball of uncontrolled nuclear explosions to change at all and have any effect on the warming of our planet.
;)
Its a lie. Its the Republicans, plain and simple. And if it IS the sun, then the Republicans are who made the sun hotter. And if the sun is hotter due to a natural phenomenon, then the Republicans sped it up with their capitalism. If we didn't drill for oil, the sun wouldn't be so hot. The sun is heating up because of greenhouse gases. Its the Conservative's fault the sun is hotter, it was the tax cut that caused it. SUV's. Too many in on the planet causes more tidal friction on the sun, so its the SUV's fault, which is the Republican's fault because they own stock in the companies that make the SUV's, who are being irresponsible for giving the public what it wants, since everyone knows only Hollywood types should drive SUV's, not these damn soccer moms and farmers. Its because of the decline of endangered species. The sun is warming up because of drilling in ANWR, which hasn't started yet. The sun is part of the vast right wing conspiracy. Its the Republican's war causing it. Its because the sun is angery at us for our ways.
Ok, did I leave any out? Just wanted to help and get the new talking points out for the libs
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
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.
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
Accu-weather, a commercial concern controlled by commercial interests, knows which side of their bread is buttered. Instead, you might consider the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which directly attributes the observed tmeperature increase to radiative forcing of greenhouse gasses.
This is the misinformation that pisses me off the most. I have been in direct telephone contact with the pair of so-called scientists from Huntsville, Alabama who published this crap. Their measurements of cooling above the troposphere are completely consistent with global warming in the troposphere, where radiative forcing keeps heat trapped at the surface of the Earth. Guess where the Huntsville team gets their funding? NASA. Guess what agency pumps carbon dioxide equivalent to driving a SUV two million miles into the atmosphere every time a shuttle launches? NASA.
Take another look at the r^2 value on the curve fit graph of atmospheric CO2. That value means that all but about 1% of the variation of that curve can be explained by those four numeric parameters of that logistic sigmoid curve. One thing that isn't uncertain is that if we don't start wholesale conversion to wind power pretty damn soon, there will be twice as much atmospheric CO2 in 2060 as their was in 1500. Did you know that less than 150,000 modern wind turbines could supply the entire U.S. power grid demand?
Oh, PLEASE! Water vapor, unlike CO2, becomes reflective (clouds are white) when it condenses from vapor to aerosol, which it does under temperature increase conditions (greater transpiration at greater temperatures raising humidity.) This tends to nullify water's heat trapping over time.
Both halfs of that statement are a baldface lie. The "prior to 1940" statement directly contradicts the observed data, and anyone who thinks greenhouse gas emissions "upsurged" after 1940 needs to take another look at the graph and/or read up on the history of coal mining.
Pathetic.
Don't forget that people who voted for Ralph Nader are also partly to blame. Their ballots apparenly split the sun's gravitational field, which obviously contributed to all this overheating.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
Had nothing to do with Bush's "quick draw" decision? Maybe, just maybe, Global Warming (TM) really does have more to do with solar output than greenhouse emissions. Dogma isn't science, it is superstition supported by conformity. I get the impression some of you guys would rather sweep inconvenient facts under the rug less it undermine your little religious crusade.
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.
I vote for monkeys.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
Seems to me we (earthlings) could put up a filter between the sun and the earth and attenuate/reflect the amount of energy reaching us, therefore cooling the earth down. I'm sure there must be some technical reason this is a crazy idea, so someone please fill me in!
- Well, that explains it, off I go in my SUV.
- Bull, all the SUVs are the worst part.
- Other
And, of course, the comments that fall into 'Other' will be the interesting ones.Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
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
Well, if you're going to throw theories out about what the graphs mean, why not turn them around. What if the source of the reduction in temperature (another side-effect of solar energy) caused a reduction in CO2. Just imagine, the worlds flora gets less solar energy, and can't produce as well, and can't produce CO2 as well. Incidentally, the temperature goes down, which doesn't help the plants either. When things go the other way, both graphs spike.
;)
Oh, and as to your heavier rain showers, particles in the air cause heavier rain showers, too. Ever hear of cloud seeding? My city is large enough to cause local weather variations, too. I've seen blizzards split around the city - clouds and snow in all directions, and a partially clear sky above. It looks really cool on weather maps, but I'm not attributing that local variation to global warming, either.
I'm not saying I believe this, but you can't take two disparate elements, and guess you know what the whole ecosystem was doing.
All the scientists are guessing, to one degree or another. They don't have 100% certainty with most of the big things, wich is why the theories keep evolving. Obviously, there is one right answer, and we might even find it. The likelier option is that more than one thoery is partly right.
Of course, we may never know, at least until we've been able to collect a decent sample ourselves. Personally, I'll keep guessing.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Sun's Output Increasing in Possible Trend Fueling Global Warming
And another:
NASA Study Finds Increasing Solar Trend That Can Change Climate
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/
So maybe now the global warming activist kooks will proceed to go after the Sun's government and leave the US alone. I will help fund the construction of a spaceship to send all these kooks as ambassadors to Sun-land.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Well, if you're going to throw theories out about what the graphs mean, why not turn them around. What if the source of the reduction in temperature (another side-effect of solar energy) caused a reduction in CO2.
I would tend to agree with your prespective that one should be very cautious before determining causality from the graphs discussed in the parent posting. It seems to me that a giant icesheet smothering 1/3 of the Northern Hemisphere would tend to put a pretty good damper on CO2 emmissions from natural decay of plant matter in what today is largely forests and grasslands in Canada, Europe and Siberia.
It scares me to think that someone who claims to be a chemist (and therefore supposedly educated) thinks that seasons are caused by changing distance between the Sun and the Earth. This isn't like misunderstanding the fine points of quantum mechanics. It's like telling people that on the moon things float away, or that rockets can't travel in space, because they have nothing to push against. Is it really possible that a person can get a chemistry degree without realizing what causes summer and winter?
Of course it is, at least as far as many current industries are concerned. This is not a deep dark secret, it's a simple fact.
Beyond that there are two camps. The first believe that green industries will more than make up for the reduction in economic activity in polluting industries. The second (much smaller) believes that reduced economic activity in general is desirable.
So don't feel bad about questioning the Green orthodoxy, because it's changed 180-degrees in the not too distant past,
Scientists don't know for certain whether CO2 emissions at current or future levels will cause global warming, global cooling, or not have any effect. There are plausible models predicting all three effects (although global warming is by far the most widely accepted model). And if climate change occurs on a massive change, plausible models say that it will be very damaging and costly.
The greens just take a conservative approach, which simply says: massive greenhouse gas emissions are a very recent phenomemon; since we have plausible models predicting grave consequences from this recent phenomenon, let's limit them to remain closer to historical levels until we know more.
It's ironic that the self-proclaimed "conservatives" are the ones most pushing for such a dangerous experiment on a global scale.
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.
A human being emits CO2 that they produced from sugar and oxygen that was itself produced by the opposite reaction using sunlight and so is a part of a sustainable carbon cycle. The CO2 from your car engine is a rapid release of CO2 from a huge reserve of carbon that the biological systems of this planet are not currently equipped to deal with.
2.5 lbs per day + 3.5 lbs per day is apparently too much. Do you propose that instead of reducing the amount of CO2 produced by cars that we instead begin simply culling the drivers?
maybe we're all just getting smaller and easier to heat?
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
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.
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
The Republican's black hearts are decreasing the earth's albedo, which causes it to absorb more solar radiation and thus increase temperature. Bet you didn't think of that one.