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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.
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
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.
Please learn the difference between weather and climate before you embarrass yourself more.
Please learn the fact that "the climate" is as far outside of your ability to predict and thoroughly understand as is your apparent grasp on a sense of humor.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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make install -not war