Slashdot Mirror
Our Lazy Solar Dynamo — Hello Dalton Minimum?
tetrahedrassface writes "Solar maximum is supposed to be occurring, and everything from satellite communications to your toaster or radio could be affected. The only problem is that this just isn't happening, and NASA continues to revise downward the original prediction. In fact, the new forecast for Solar Cycle 24 is a lot smaller, and is now pegged at almost 40% of what was previously predicted. Recently, two scientists at the National Solar Observatory have followed the lead of a prominent Russian scientist, who almost five years ago forecast a dearth of sunspots and the subsequent cooling of Earth for the next several cycles. With Britain currently experiencing the coldest winter in over 300 years, and no new sunspots for the last week, are we heading for a Dalton Minimum, or worse still, yet another Maunder?"
How much do you enjoy having enough food to eat?
CO2 also acidifies the oceans. Global warming isn't the only result of pumping billions of tons of green house gases into the atmosphere.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
After the holidays I could stand to lose a few pounds. This Maunder diet sounds like the ticket.
The globe is warming!
;-)
I mean cooling.
I mean "climate changing".
(clings to the Book of Al Gore and whimpers)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Britain/Northern Europe does not owe its climate status to spot heating. Britain is usually warmer than it should be given its northern position due to the gulf stream. The oceans serve as blocks to cold air from up north coming south. There are incredible global circulation systems which see warm air rise in the mid-latitudes tot he upper atmosphere then cool and return to the ground at the poles. This is the cause of the cold winds that come down from the north. These winds find it easier to come south over land, which cools more easily than water which retains heat better, has its own top/bottom circulation as well as global circulation. Normally the warm currents keep the cold air away.
Global Warming means global warming. The oceans make 3/4 of the surface area to 4' cooling of the land is easily offset by 2' warming of the ocean. 4 * 1/4 = 1 is less than 2 * 3/4 = 1.5. Do not take any specific location changes to mean global stuff.
What global warming does mean is more intense weather systems. Do not go jumping onto local cooling/warming like Europes/US east coast and claim it is getting colder. You need to look at the whole globe. Not just the areas man is in.
give up burning oil.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yep. And I'll trade-in my 80 MPG hybrid for a gas-guzzling Porsche (shaped like a penis)* that gets a mere 15 mpg. And move to a home 100 miles from my job.
*
*Buffy reference
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Fans of data---as opposed to ideology-driven cherry-picking and quibbling---can verify (via daily satellite updates!) that far-north global warming is still accelerating. The relevant site is Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis
Most people strongly tend to cherry-pick and then draw conclusions from it - yet when it involves an above-average hot summer almost no one concerned about global warming complains because it lines up with their ideology. Well, sauce for the goose... you better hope the Russian is wrong.
It is dumb to draw conclusions based on one winter on one relatively tiny section of the globe. Plus local influences and normal variability often drown out the longer-term signal. Up here in the Pacific Northwest, our mid-to-late winter and (especially) spring weather are strongly influenced by the ENSO ("El Niño"). So far we've been having a colder than normal couple of months, and everyone's blaming the current La Niña - but it's probably not a significant factor given the time of year. Nor is it likely the dearth of sunspots - we just happen to be having a cooler-than-normal late fall and early winter. It happens. If February onward are cooler and wetter than normal, then we can talk.
#DeleteChrome
While you are correct about the religious-like fanaticism, the problem is that some people cite one of these facts and act as though it debunks every bit of science out there. There are occassions here on Slashdot where someone cites a 100-page page-reviewed scientific article on the effect of CO2, and someone else counters with "but the model could be wrong!" and acts like the combined work of 5000 scientists was suddenly silenced by their off-hand remark.
What I find depressing are the amount of people that dismiss the science, because they don't like Al Gore as a politician. It's intellectually lazy and dishonest.
1) Yeah, obviously the Sun is a big driver. And if you keep it's heat in more effectively, that would be an issue.
2) "full greenhouse effect" is obtained on Venus. With a nearly pure CO2 atmosphere. It would appear to be hotter there. Much more so than its closer distance to the Sun would suggest.
3) It's very possible the Earth has been "cooling since 2007", and it makes no difference to a larger trend than the fact that Canada has been cooling since August. The temperature would be this wiggly line on the graph, see, and though there are down-wiggles, they are fewer / smaller than the up-wiggles over the longer term. If it were warmer on Sept 23-27th that it was on September 3-9, would you conclude winter was not coming?
4) There's no chance of current computer models being "correct", the question is whether they are a close enough approximation to be useful for making social policy. The computer models of some 20 years ago were considerably more accurate about today's climate than random chance alone would suggest. That gives them scientific credibility and are the reason that climate researchers have increasingly come to believe them.
Have you considered the possibility that at least some of these claims are not heretical, but simply false; and that the angry reaction from climatologists derives not from any religious fervor but from the frustration of having to refute them time and time again in the face of someone who thinks some reading online gives them expertise equal to years of academic study?
There were nearly no sunspots for 2 years, 2007-9 and that easily confirms we will have real hard couple of winters a bit later down the road. And then a remission of sunspots AGAIN just recently makes it look like we are "bouncing down" the activity curve, typical of a "cycle".
Every time (since Galileo's time 1600) when we have had a minimal or near zero sunspot activity, there have been colder winters, freezing and storms. Hence we have about 400 years of well documented sunspot activity with weather records to verify what happened.
It is amazing to me that out "news anchors", meaning writers in the "mainstream media" are so ill-educated that they can not do simple reading up on what the effects are of minimal sunspot activity.
Instead "news anchors" and writers in the media spout political lines (Al Gore and global warming crowd), instead of pointing out specific facts and what those measureable facts mean short term (cold weather a year or so later) and what it could mean longer term.
The last time I spoke with a person who ran the solar observations from the radio telescopes in the Mojave Desert, he noted they still were not able to predict longer term events as mentioned (Maunder or Dalton type events).
Why are these events hugely important? I don't hear the news researcher/writers mentioning this. Sweden, Denmark and France lost 10% of their population to starvation/freezing in the Maunder minimum and Finland lost about 30%. That is the equivalent of losses in a major world war or WORSE.
You've destroyed the sun.
1) The sun is the biggest driver of the Earth's Climate
This is like saying the Earth is the biggest driver of the Earth's climate. It's an essentially meaningless statement.
2) There is already more than enough CO2 for a 'full' greenhouse effect so more will not make it 'worse.'
You are simply lying with this one. A 'full' greenhouse effect would mean that 100% of heat is retained. That's impossible, but you can look at worlds where heat retention is in the 99% range, such as Venus.
3) The Earth has been cooling since 2007.
Bull shit. Even if it was true, climate is not weather, the same way macroeconomics is not family household planning. Climate change is measured across decades, not years.
4) Current computer models of the Earth's long-term climate are not necessarily correct.
This is irrelevant to historical analysis, which shows a clear warming trend across decades. But unlike yourself, scientists do endeavor to be honest, and refine their model as new data is available. Most excess heat is getting dumped into the oceans.
There are others, of course, but you get the idea. Never say any of the above in the presence of believers.
Because you'll get called out for being the liar that you are.
Adult Role Playing Forum
With Britain currently experiencing the coldest winter in over 300 years, and no new sunspots for the last week, are we heading for a Dalton Minimum
Why yes, it makes perfect sense to conclude things about decadal-scale global climate trends based on a month's data from 0.05% of the Earth's surface area!
For a global view of the temperature anomaly (vs. a 1951-1980 base period), see this GISS surface temperature analysis (that's for November; December data not available yet). So yes, there's a -1 deg C anomaly in Britain, counterbalanced by huge +4 to +10 deg C anomalies across northern Asia and the Arctic.
For a look at the longer-term trends, try this map of annual average temperatures for the past ten years vs. the same base period. Guess what? It's getting warmer, despite declining solar activity.
The GISS map generator is a great tool for exploring these variations.
My 1995 Porsche 911 gets about 28 MPG on the highway if I keep it at under 80 MPH - yeah I know its not 80 MPG but its better than 15 MPG and its a heck of a lot more fun than a Prius or a some other econobox
Then in a few years when our surprise extension runs out, the Greenhouse will be nice and thick for the return to the typical solar cycle, frying us, too late to ever fix or minimize.
Any excuse to ignore the threat should be taken - damn the consequences just a little later.
--
make install -not war
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower; excerpt from The Chance for Peace
:(){
Hale and Pace sketch
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
You're completely ass-backwards. It's the isotopic ratios which prove that the increased CO2 is anthropogenic as our emissions differ from known natural sources.
Here's the music: the sun's output is weaker than expected and yet 2010 looks like one of the hottest years on record. What is this solar minimum proving again?
Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none. --Benjamin Franklin
I haven't been using my fireplace nearly enough lately.
Won't help that much - the carbon sequestered in those logs went in 30-40 years ago. You need to liberate some fossil carbon to get serious, but even at that you're a rounding error (sorry to say).
Perhaps there's a reason it's called "the current ice age"? Cripes, people seem to keep forgetting we're still coming out of the last ice age cycle.
"Oh, the Earth warmed a bit in the past century."
"Yeah - what else were you expecting?"
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I hear it's endorsed by Thomas Malthus.
There's some research on correlation between solar minima and increased volcanic and tectonic activity.
Here's one paper: http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/1989/JB094iB12p17371.shtml
it's in my head
The one from the 70's that said we were going to freeze? 'Global Warming' from the late 90's where we were going to cook. Or the recently changed to 'Global Climate Change' so that it can cover any change at all.
I think you're remembering it wrong. In the 70's scientists started to worry about the rise in CO2 levels (CO2 was known to be a greenhouse gas since the 19th century.) The pioneering studies were published in that decade.
By the 80's there was also evidence of a temperature rise (theory, prediction, data, confirmation! Science! It works bitches!) Scientists began holding regular multi-disciplinary conferences on the topic, and even the non-science media started to pick up on the "Global Warming" message.
Right-wing politicians in the US, and the world over (Reaganites & Thatcherites), started to worry about the traction the scientists were getting with the general public. So they, and their sponsors, began to wage a campaign against the scientists. A Republican spin doctor created the term "Climate Change" after polling showed that, to the public, "Climate Change" felt less urgent than "Global Warming".
This effort to politicise the science came together in the early 90's in the IPCC, designed to ensure the scientists were made subservient to the politicians (unlike the previous science-only conferences.) They even politicised the name! However, by the time they published, two decades of research has started to make an impact and some countries' politicians accepted the problem as both Real and Important. This allowed IPCC, while crippled, to at least include some genuine science.
Another decade ends, and all political progress has halted. A decade of decreased solar activity, which should have resulted is significant temperature decline, but instead had still rising temperatures. Ten more years of... But you don't care. You didn't read this far. Your eyes glazed over, your mind shut down. "All progress halted." If you haven't been convinced by 30 years of continuous scientific confirmation, you won't ever be convinced.
Some fields of research are ambiguous. You can't tell, at the early stages, which way the science will go, which theory will be supported. Other fields are arrow straight, nearly every finding supports the core hypothesis. Quantum mechanics, big-bang-theory, they were like that. So is climate research. Every year we hit more and more of the "Worst case" numbers in IPCC's models; carbon emissions rising faster than expected, ocean absorption of CO2 declining faster than predicted, sea level rises at the top of the range, etc etc. But you don't care. It's not about science, it's... hell I don't know. Why are you so determined to ignore the science? Why do you trust scientists in other areas, but act like a medieval villager when it comes to climate research?
tl;dr? sfw
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
No but the great barrier reef didn't exist either. Reefs and many other natural aquatic things that divers and tourists take for granted in our oh so pretty world didn't exist in times of extremes. We all know there was an ice age and that a large portion of the planet was a barren wasteland because of it. Just because that was the natural cycle doesn't mean we need to go back to it.
The great barrier reef is already experiencing the effects of acidification. Parts of the reef near the northern most tip of Australia which used to have every colour of the rainbow 10 years ago when we went diving there are now barren white plains of dead coral and very few fish.
It snowed in December in New South Wales, Australia in 2010. Southern hemisphere's summer.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
A gradual change can be tolerated. Drastic changes not so much. Let me put this in an analogy that is reasonably easy to understand: You can walk down a flight of stairs from the top of a fairly tall building just fine but jumping off the top floor, falling and then making a splat on the ground isn't so safe. It isn't so much the height that is dangerous, it's the sudden stop after the fall that kills.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/
Lets pull out two real important facts that are used to bash this global cooling myth from that link.
That the global data from the 1940s-70's was new, and not accurate enough to be trusted.
That extrapolating a 50 year trend was not a good idea.
Same two issues are still alive and well today for global warming.
Man made or not, the climate has lived though a lot worse then we currently are in, do we want to push our luck before we know one way or another? my vote, hell no, we could be the 1c that dose push it over the edge, but all the global warming ppl need to get on the historical graphs that look past the current mini ice age and educate ppl that the current warming trend may be lasting longer and peeking longer then it should.
We have the 2nd coldest peek for temp. in the last 500k years, but one of the longest running.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png
Its been pretty cold for the last 3 million years.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png
Or 50 million
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
While I don't defend the "village idiot" you allude to, there is a valid reason why we need skeptics in all phases of science.
Science recently has done a good job of identifying how loose and fast our brains can be with facts. This is how a president like Bush can massively expand the federal government with nary a whisper from Republicans that howl at the first sign of a democrat doing the same thing. Same holds true for a president like Clinton that screwed the unions with NAFTA and got a response from Democrats that I would venture was much different than they would have given a Republican president.
The very instant that something becomes emotionally important to us, beliefs included, the less interested we are in the truth to the extent that it actually affects what information we perceive on a conscious level. It gets filtered out before it gets that far. As an example, years ago NOAA or GISS proclaimed a month to be the "hottest ever". Problem was, due to a technical glitch, they just repeated the numbers from the month before. Viewed skeptically, would it even be possible for the numbers to be EXACTLY the same 2 months running? Unlikely. But it was not the "believers" that discovered this error, it was the "skeptics" or "deniers" if you wish.
In ANY scientific endeavor or theory, it will ALWAYS be the skeptics that have a better chance of seeing the error. Does the above example mean that ALL NOAA data is wrong, or even that their underlying theory is wrong? Of course not. But if you always accept their data and decry the "skeptics" you may end up with more in common with that villager than you would care to admit.
Doc, I'm going to remind you of the words of the Sage of Baltimore:
Now, I'll admit that I was among the people who found "global warming" to be plausible as a threat, but after I saw the code in the climategate material, I concluded that they were cooking the books. ESR did a nice job of describing it here.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If it's important, I verify.
The hell you do. Do you personally redo experiments that prove the effectiveness of medical procedures? Your faith vs. empiricism dichotomy is false. Nobody personally verifies every single thing they're told.
There's nothing blind in seeing, comprehending and accepting overwhelming evidence gathered over 30+ years by renown scientists all over the globe. In fact, blindness would be to deny all of this by throwing pseudo-philosophical arguments into the mix.
No, I'm alarmed by actual damage done by Bush but denied by you Republicans. You're alarmed by imaginary scandals cooked up by you Republicans.
The difference is that I'm alarmed by facts, but you're alarmed by Republicans telling you non-Republicans are alarmists. You're buried in layers of nightmare.
--
make install -not war
Firstly, because the hypothesis is unprovable (we don't have multiple Earth's to experiment with) and secondly the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, in a strict scientific sense. We're now asked to believe that warming causes cooling. The models that we were told predicted the future centuries ahead, didn't predict harsh winters. They do now of course, because there are so many parameters to twiddle with you can pretty much come up with any projection you like (it's called confirmation bias).
James Hansen. The guy who called coal trains "death trains" and regularly pickets against the opening of power stations (not in China of course, in the US and UK). He's in control of GISS and is responsible for the ridiculous smoothing algorithms they use to smudge temperature across thousands of miles with a couple of temperature stations. He's also the guy who started this whole scare with his evidence to the senate in the 1980's.
I agree it will win out eventually. Who was it who said that science progresses one funeral at a time? That's how paradigms get overturned. The question is whether or not this happens before we end up with pointless political fixes, based on implausible chains of inference (as Lindzen pointed out) and a rolling back of the industrial age.
The point here is that two scientists can argue about Dark Matter, or Dark Energy, or Dark Shikari, and nobody is going to raise my taxes and tell me I can't drive a car to work any more. Political activism and Physics are separate, except when you get into the Nuclear weapons arena. But even there, the hypothesis that nuclear bombs are bad is not particularly controversial.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but we aren't living in a greenhouse. The Earth radiates energy into space. Lindzen thinks sensitivity is of the order of less than 1K, i.e. barely perceptible. The catastrophists (political activists) think it's anything from 4K to 16K. None of them know enough about the climate system to make any predictions, but they publish press releases of their model outputs as if they do. Without AGW, most of them wouldn't have careers.
If you’re referring to hockey-sticks and the paleo-climatological record often used as “proof” of current exceptionality, of course I do. If you’re referring to the instrumental record, not so much (Hansen is clearly an outlier at present). I’m not disputing that it warmed by a small amount during the 20th century and has been warming since the end of the LIA. I don’t dispute that climate changes. The reconstructions I’ve seen show that current temperatures and trends are well within the bounds of natural variation (I’m especially thinking about the GISP2 Greenland and Vostok ice cores). There the debate should end. The rest is a hypothesis upon which you can have absolutely zero confidence, because historically temperature and CO2 haven’t correlated well and they don’t at present (again, PDO and solar activity are a stronger correlation). But still, you continue on with the paradigm. Why?
The model is programmed to predict a long-term trend of increasing temperature. I wouldn’t expect it to be “wrong” on that count. But let us take, for example, an economic model. You program it such that it has an inherent “bull market” bias. You make predictions. The predictions show an increase in stock prices. The market is going up anyway. They’re together in lock-step. Everyone thinks you’re a genius. As soon as the downturn comes, you look like a ****ing idiot. And so it goes with climate models. They are right until they start to diverge from reality and then they’re wrong, but as they’re continually being fiddled with, the projections of catastrophe are pushed further away into the future. What value do they have? None whatsoever as far as I can see.
Clearly the polar ice caps aren’t ice-free today and, if the models of 5 years ago are correct, they will be ice-free by 2013 (in the summer). What do you think? 2 years to go.
Yes and the volume of work and literature on the dietary causes of peptic ulcers was enormous. It was all bollocks of course, because someone came along with a microscope and found a little H. pylori.
Of course it will. The debate is about how much. I suspect it’s a few tenths of a degree.
My mistake. I’m slightly dyslexic, so sometimes misread words. The point I’m making here is that this whole debate is over what the world will look like in 100 years time (or 200). Run your climate model backwards, with current forcings as they are understood and your best approximation of the current state, and tell me what the climate looked like 100 years ago, or 200, or 1,000. You can’t. The reason you can’t is because you don’t know the forcings with enough accuracy, you’re ignorant of the feedbacks, and you don’t have sufficient understanding of the interactions of the system as a whole. As an example, your model will probably hind-cast a decrease in hurricane activity, say, 30 years ago, because it’s programmed a priori