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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.
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.
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*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.
By the "global warming crowd" you mean the vast majority of climate scientists in the world?
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.
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
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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)
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.
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.