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Big Drop In Solar Activity Could Cool Earth
coondoggie writes "Scientists say the Sun, which roils with flares and electromagnetic energy every 11 years or so, could go into virtual hibernation after the current cycle of high activity, reducing temperatures on Earth. As the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, begins to ramp up toward maximum, scientists from the National Solar Observatory and the Air Force Research Laboratory independently found that the Sun's interior, visible surface, and corona indicate the next 11-year solar sunspot cycle, Cycle 25, will be greatly reduced or may not happen at all."
Take that Al Gore!
Somebody get Al Gore on the phone to make a powerpoint presentation to these "scientists".
... the global warming naysayers are going to have a field day with this one...
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Does this mean that we should be polluting more to compensate?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
The Europeans are going to save us by switching from nukes back to coal.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I plan on us having a completely rational and apolitical debate on the science of the causes of solar cooling.
This is what they said about the last solar cycle, especially since we went into a deep solar minimum, and now the sun is waking up and we have had some nice Geomagnetic storms and solar flares already.
Cash for hybrids, anyone?
Sounds more like the Year of the Jackpot to me.
> Don't we all know the Earth is warming up due to human activity ?
In what way does the possibility that the sun may reduce its output in the future contradict that?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The networkworld (why are we posting a solar/space article from there?) article links to a much better Cosmic Log article: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/14/6857473-solar-forecast-hints-at-a-big-chill
Indeed, I haven't followed it closely, but wasn't the last cycle supposed to be exceptionally weak already? Any astrophysicist around to give us some information here?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Hopefully this balances out all the environmental stuff. The question then is do we call it Global Luke-Warming, or Anthropoheliogenic Climate Constancy?
..for all of this intense activity. It needs more time to rest between cycles these days.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
From the article:
The forecast is based on three indicators thought to be tied to long-range solar activity, the comparative rise and fall of sunspots over the activity cycle, as well as the brightness of those sunspots; patterns in the sun's internal "jet stream" of superheated plasma; and the pace of migration in the sun's magnetic field toward the poles, as seen in the sun's corona.
An unusually low number of sunspots have been observed during the current cycle, and the spots are fainter than average. Scientists say they have seen no sign of a characteristic east-west flow of internal plasma, which usually sets the stage for future increases in activity. And the magnetic "rush to the poles" allears to be slowing down.
The current cycle is still below average compared to what was seen recently.
...the hot air from the 2012 US election cycle will cancel this out.
I love this. You think the existing models don't take solar variation into account? You have reduced a complex, multi-factor system of equations to one independent variable. Congratulations on letting anything that sounds like it agrees with you at all prove all other ideas wrong even if there's nothing contradictory at all. Sun cycles are 10 year data cycles that don't explain 100 year trends in the slightest. If you look at the climate data since the invention of the thermometer, the waves produced are already quite visible. This was the same argument they made in the 70s, when global warming was first introduced as a theory(but it was far less understood then).
Instead of offering useless conjecture about what people are going to say, how about you give us a nice solid hypothesis about how much cooler it will be when, and how that relates to existing global warming projections. I dare you to actually make a meaningful falsible claim instead of putting words in the mouth of people you disagree with.
You really missed the sarcasm tag out there, did you? Have a look at the other half of the thread, where exactly this argument is made, by the way. You gotta weep for humanity if this is a reflection of the nerd community.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
winter is coming?
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
Just randomly doing end of the world predictions. Doesn't this sound perfect for Fimbulvetr, or the winter before Ragagnarok to happen?
No idea, but you should keep your battle axe handy. Never hurts - if Fimbulvetr does not come, you can still go a-viking and have some fun.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Decreased solar output will have an impact on global temperatures, but it will take time.
Greenhouse gasses (Water, CO2, CH4, etc) do not directly interact with incoming shortwave radiation from the sun. Rather, they interact with the longwave radiation coming from the surface of the Earth. With no greenhouse gasses, the Earth would radiate (based on its temperature) and this radiation would be lost to space. What greenhouse gasses do is absorb the emitted longwave which adds energy to the molecule absorbing it. The excited state either results in a temperature increase of the molecule, or the emission of radiation. Some of this re-emitted radiation is directed downward, toward the Earth. The net result is that some energy that would be lost to space is absorbed by molecules in the atmosphere, warming it, and some is redirected back to the Earth, increasing the net incoming radiation.
The effect can be directly observed. If you look at the measured longwave radiation emitted at the top of our atmosphere, the global average temperature you would calculate would not support life as we know it (much too cold). The difference from that and our directly observed average surface temperatures are due to the greenhouse effect (the energy based on those temperatures is not making it to the top of the atmosphere).
Decreasing solar input would change part of the energy budget, but the greenhouse effect will act as a buffer (from absorbing and re-emitting longwave radiation) that would cause a delayed response.
Note that I am not a climate scientist, just a regular meteorologist who has taken a few classes in radiative transfer.
Slight changes in Earths orbit over the Millennia have the best correlation of any factor. These are called the Milankovitch Cycles . This does not rule out a co-factor like a series of large eruptions pushing the climate over the edge. There is about 20K years until the next Milankovitch susceptibility.
Remember the 2008 Rice Shortage?
No. And that tells you everything you need to know about how far we are from the food production precipice.
The effect of the solar flare cycle signal on earth's average temperature is already being swamped by an order of magnitude by mankind's fossil fuelish addiction.
So don't expect any respite by quiescent sun, it's going to get hot, real hot, and the first thing to go is dependable crop yields. Mass starvation is already written in the cards..
dooood, your totally right, i am fully awake now, its clear that all the scientific data gathering, analysis, hypothesizing, and data reviewing were just clever ways to make al gore even richer then he already was, i had totally forgot that global climate change as a theory didn't even exist before al's little movie. Thank you sooooo much for your valuable and insightful comment, we are all that much smarting for having read your post.
Solar activity had nothing to do with "The Year Without a Summer". It was the eruption of Tambora that caused that.
Soylent Green
It's freakin' 107.1F (41.7C) in North Texas... Come on sun, cool us off!
...hmmm why does that not sound right..
What the what? I know I have heard that line somewhere before......
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
Local solar astronomer here - Current global warming trend is definitely not Sun driven. We went through a prolonged period of solar inactivity over the last 5 years and what do you know, temperatures kept going up. We also monitor the Sun in every conceivable wavelength and from multiple angles, so it would be pretty hard to have some significant amount of energy hitting us that we don't know about.
-Bill
Sun cycles are 10 year data cycles that don't explain 100 year trends in the slightest.
Uh, I take it you've never heard the words 'Maunder Minimum'?
The only place that long-term solar changes don't appear to affect temperatures is in 'Global Climate Warming Disruption Change' models. Or whatever they're calling it today.
I dare you to actually make a meaningful falsible claim instead of putting words in the mouth of people you disagree with.
I'd love to see one of the computer modelers making a meaningful falsifiable claim about 'Global Climate Warming Disruption Change'.
Winter is coming.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
For certain First World values of "we".
Oh, I don't have any problem with that. If Johnny Foreigner would rather starve (said Rogerborg) he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The existing models cannot take all factors into account, because it is nearly impossible to even define all possible factors in relation to climate. Hence the whole debate around global warming/cooling/change will never be over, regardless of the current temperature. Someone will create a new model that includes some other factors, but ignores some others, therefore producing lots of data that probably doesn't mean as much as they interpret.
"At some point, we will chew up enough resources that the planet will not recover."
What does that even mean? Not recover? It's "recovered" for worldwide fires and volcanoes and the entire planet being basically a frozen over the top. Tectonic plates shift against one another and consume and excrete land. In a billion years I doubt you'll have much of an idea that our species was even here.
"When we have fished the oceans to empty sea, and the land will no longer sustain crops, only then will we discover how foolish we've been."
And in our starvation the planet will recover. The people that survive (if any) will probably change their ways or... repeat the process but it will take a long time before it matters.
The worst we can do is make this place a nasty place for the existing species. Almost all of said species were doomed to disappear over a long enough timeline anyway. Frankly, I don't think our species is gonna get any wiser about our own impact until something horrific happens so, in a weird way, I'm kind of rooting for it.
The last paragraph of your statement is HIGHLY misleading. No one should be under the impression that the ocean is, or has been since the last ice age, a source of CO2 in our atmosphere. Quite to the contrary the ocean is the largest single CO2 sink in existence, absorbing anywhere from 25% to 50% of the CO2 that is currently actively removed from our atmosphere.
I believe the above poster is referring to the fact that, as of late, our oceans have been absorbing less CO2 than before. This is probably due to a few different factors. I will only mention two of them. Increasing ocean temperatures tend to mean the the ocean absorbs less CO2 then when ocean temperatures are lowering or remaining stagnant. Also, the living organisms of the ocean are in major decline. Although living organisms only play a minor role in the ocean absorbing CO2 it should be acknowledged as a contributing factor.
On second thought it isn't just your last paragraph, your entire post is misleading. No reputable source would claim that latent CO2 would be "activated" by the "sun coming back up to speed". It will just become noticeable via temperature changes once again. Much more noticeable being that a decade from now we will have again dramatically increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
From 10 years of data I can tell you what is definitely going to happen in 15 years, you're obviously not trying hard enough.
Well that sounds like a totally plausible theory that those dastardly scientists might have.
Having the oceans absorb more CO2 would be very bad, that would make ocean acidification worse.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You joke but denialists actually believe something only slightly more complicated. That before Al Gore, it was scientists trying to get grant money (which still continues today), please ignore the fact that the first one to blow the cover on the international hoax would be the 21st century's Einstein.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'd like to see data collected from several fixed weather stations across time (eg. a century) using the same equipment and the same method. As far as I know (and please prove me wrong if I am), the current data doesn't take into account the inaccuracy of older equipments, upgrades in methodologies (the distance from the ground and condensation factor of the surface of the equipment does influence the data collected) and/or bigger warming cycles of our planet. It is commonly accepted that the earh has gone trough several ice ages, but the idea that the warming we are experience is somehow natural and part of a cycle is dismissed as heresy, because we are totally killing the polar bears and the forests and whatnot. I'm not (totally) AGW, but the data available isn't reliable enough and most of the models and theories I've seen resumed are weak, considering they're the argument for a worldwide effort. I do agree that we should move away from oil and from coal, but I think it is funny how some companies are making billions from this "green frenzy" - from recycling companies to carbon credit traders.
If you kill yourself now, you'll remove the burden of you and your future generations. Reduce your carbon footprint the ultimate way!
"do not mess with complex systems you don't fully understand"
You might as well kill yourself now, if you believe that.
There's not much we can do about it except live with it. The AGW people will say the Earth really would have warmed up if only the sun had not done its cooldown thing. The anti-AGW people will say that the Earth never would have warmed up anyway and that the sun is the real driver of the global climate, not the atmospheric co2 concentration.
Wow...
Just because it's been cooler at your house for the last two years, does not mean the earth, as a whole, is not getting warmer in general.
It's perfectly plausible that the average temperature on the planet could rise significantly while a region, like Europe, gets colder. For instance, general warming could result in polar warming diminishing the northern ice caps (as we're seeing). Should those ice caps melt enough, the iceberg melting in the north atlantic would dramatically lesson since no glaciers would spawn them. The atlantic currents would be disrupted, lessening the gulf stream. Winds flowing over those warm waters would no longer carry that extra heat to Europe and slowly the weather in Paris starts to resemble Winnepeg (about the same latitude). The good news for Winnepeg is that it's likely to warm up a little.
That's climate change in a nutshell. General warming. Local cooling. Some areas get dryer. Others wetter. Very, very complicated interplay between systems makes predicting winners and losers extremely difficult.
And I swear, the next time there's a snowstorm and people use that as evidence that there isn't global warming, I'm going to punch someone in the face.
...humans are arrogant to think that our presence on this planet for, what, 200,000 years or so, compared to how long the planet has been around, several billion years....
Carlin on saving the earth
No, science is about "testability". You have a hypothesis and you test it. It can be confirmed, rejected or inconclusive.
The problem for the global warming hypothesis is that when all tests confirm it without any possibility of rejection, then we are living in a world that is no longer capable of sustaining us humans as a species on the scale we have now.
All controversy is based on the shortsightedness of mankind. Whether that is good or bad does not matter. When the climate wanders too far off the current balance, then we will go extinct. Maybe that is a good thing. You might though have some reservations whether you want to get to the point where your offspring is doomed...
An examination of sunspots over the last 10+ years by looking at Fe lines shows that the magnetic fields and temperatures in the sunspots are decreasing. There is apparently a "minimum" value for the magnetic field for a sunspot to form. The average value has been decreasing rather rapidly of late (10 years or so). This leads to smaller and less intense sunspots. If the magnetic values generated are no longer strong enough to generate sunspots, how is the magnetic field of the sun affected? Will it still go through a 22-year cycle (I suspect yes, the lack of sunspots should not affect that cycle)? So simply the 11-year SUNSPOT cycle will be affected.
Further to this, I (as an actual real life scientist) have been looking at the activity of the solar magnetic field. Specifically the transition from a dipolar field (at solar minimum) to a non-dipolar field (near solar maximum) and back again. Given the long relationship the Sun and Earth have had (some 4 billion years) I thought I'd throw in some macroscale effects seen on the Earth for comparison. Very surprisingly, the sunspot cycle and the El Nino/La Nina cycle is actually reasonably correlated (remember, correlation does not equal causation). There is a bit looser relationship better the solar cycle and Typhoons (though this may be more related El Nino) and monsoon rains (very likely correlated to the El Nino cycle).
However, solar variation in radiation is not the cause (this is what is taken into account in climate models) but the magnetic fields and the solar wind appear to play a much larger role (See multiple articles by Scafetta and West for example). The solar wind interacts with polar atmosphere and there is a suggestion (questionable) that is may link the Quasi-biennial ocsillation to solar activity. There seems to be relationship, however, it is not clear what it is or how a lack of solar activity would affect the Earth (or what the "lag time" might be).
Will it get cooler if there is an extended period of low to no solar activity? Yes, there is strong evidence of that based on previous examples (Maunder and Sporer minimums for example). Will the cooling completely counteract the greenhouse gas warming? Good question.
has unlocked billions of tonnes of carbon that was underground into the atmosphere as CO2 over the last few hundred years.
Now only the extreme optimists would think that this has no effect on the planet (all scientific modelling shows signifcant effect to air and sea currents and their stability)...now all the models that people have used could be wrong and you are right.
it might be countered a bit by the sun cooling off (lucky us)...there is very little probability that the planet would be behaving climatically like it is today without us.
The land needed to sustain a family today is a fraction of the land needed in 1816. Not only because of the breaktrough of the pesticides, but also because of targeted additives (not only chemical, but also natural), and in some areas, with transgenics. And today, that land can be anywhere in the world. Rice shortage? That's ok, you can still get beans, cereal grain, corn, sugar ,etc. Wheat shortage? (last year in Europe) No problem, you can still get everything else.
The rice crisis was devastating to the producing countries, and not only financially, but because they still tied to age-old economics and agricultural habits. And yes, the argument they do it because we need it wears fast - look at Mozambique - a 3rd world country where, in some areas, you can get 3 crops of corn a year, without much effort. Imagine that in America or Europe.
The earth's single energy source would be right up near the top in the " ... complex, multi-factor system of equations."
Correct, this is not a theory, like the theory of gravity.
It is an attempt to understand the steady increase in global temperatures over the years. There's plenty of refutable science at work. Researches uncover trending data of global temperatures. Other researchers could show problems in approach, or show data that disagrees.
Modelers make predictions of change over the course of years. The accuracy of their predictions speaks to the quality of the models.
Fundamentally, though we have a problem. It would be great if we had two planets. One where we toss as many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and another where we do everything the super enviro-crazy vegan wants us to do. Then a hundred years later, we compare temperatures. The problem is that we don't have spare planets to play with. So we have a relatively high stakes game where we work with models, and do a lot of falsify-able detailed science to help inform those models. Only in the models can we run the data for 100 or 1000 years quickly and without much consequence.
Oh, and anyone who would blame Bush for climate change is a nut job. Most of the damage done so far was done before his birth, while he was a child, or while he was a drunk and playboy. It's hard to blame him for any of that. But to argue only against the nut jobs is strawman bullshit. You're right though, czars aren't going to help. A carbon tax might (and might help balance budget or free money for other tax cuts). Helping China build cleaner coal plants might (and would be cheaper than retrofitting ours). But yeah, czars won't help much.
"Electrical Circuit Between Saturn and Enceladus"
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia13765.html
With this example in mind, consider Saturn having an electric circuit between every single body within its field.
Replace Saturn with the Sun and the moon with Saturn.
Replace the Sun with "black hole" of our galaxy and Saturn with our Sun.
There are most likely intermediate steps between our Sun and the black hole...
Regardless, with this model, it is assumed that as the Sun moves through it's parents variable EM field, and the differences are moderated down to us through the Sun, electrically, back to Earth. And Saturn.
Yep, maybe now the government will give oil companies subsidies. Imagine that!
Solar activity had nothing to do with "The Year Without a Summer". It was the eruption of Tambora that caused that.
Indeed. Tekrat (the GP) is quite confused.
More about Mount Tambora, which blew its top in April 1815 with enough ejecta to darken skies worldwide and reduce agricultural yields.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Solar scientists have raised the prospect of a new maunder minimum before, and they were mistaken. But they could easily be correct this time. What happens in the sun is apparently still theoretical.
Because 'coondoggie' posts summaries of all of blog articles on here, it seems, with only links back to his blog.
At least Roland Piquepaille learned, and started linking to places other than his blog ... especially as coondoggie's blog spam tends to just be regurgitated press releases with mostly self-referrential links or broken links when he does link externally (eg, whenever he tries linking to the SDO website).
Check Google News -- there have been well over a hundred groups responding to the press -- NatGeo, Space.com ... all are better informed than coondoggie's recycled crap with his own conjecture inserted. (maybe that's why Slashdot likes posting his stuff so much ... because they get more people responding to how mis-informed he is)
http://news.google.com/news/more?hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&q=frank+hill&biw=1169&bih=793&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=d-UvhPYxunMkI0MlB6BfoT_DWec-M&ei=1OL3TZfwLoKisAPG2LzxDA&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CC4QqgIwAA
Discover Magazine had a good article -- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/14/the-sun-may-be-headed-for-a-little-quiet-time/
And let me quote them:
(disclaimer ... I'm actually at the SPD meeting, and I've co-authoried with Frank Hill, but I didn't go to his talk today)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I for one do not welcome our mini ice-age overlords...
So if the sun does indeed miss its next cycle entirely, can we look forward to one or two new smaller suns joining our solar family?
No, no, no, you idiots! Pillage, then burn!
It's already been very well-established amongst the GW chicken littles that the earth's temperature has nothing at all to do with the huge fucking flaming ball of gas in close proximity to it.
Everyone knows the biggest greenhouse gas (something that absorbs/emits radiation in the thermal-IR band) is water vapor. Water vapor is responsible for about 50-60% of the greenhouse effect, but there's not much we humans can do about it since you have the ocean constantly able to refresh the water vapor in the air.
The 2nd and 3rd biggest greenhouse gasses are CO2 and CH4. Although CH4 is a more effective greenhouse gas (about 20x), there's much more CO2 and that currenty has a bigger impact (~15-20% vs 5-10%).
Apparently people think we can do something about that 15-20%, but as most folks are also aware, it's much easier to agree to try to do something than acutally to be able to do something (just google "miss greenhouse gas target"). It's kinda like going on a diet, we know it's good for us, but it's really hard to do.
FWIW, I personally don't think the CO2-reduction thing is really something we can accomplish. We should just spend the resources to try to figure out how to live in a world where the frozen methane escapes from the ocean floor and causes real global warming (not the kind of stuff that we are seeing now). I doubt that even if we sucked all the CO2 from the atmosphere we could prevent this problem as it is a ocean thermal oscillation, not something that we humans have control over as it has happened in the past long before we walked this earth.
"do not mess with complex systems you don't fully understand
Remember the 2008 Rice Shortage?
Yes, I remember the artifical rice commodity scam that happened in 2008. Apparently there was plenty of rice, but the price of oil to transport it became a factor when a continuing drought in Austraila changed the typical global distribution pattern of this commodity causing huge price discontinuities and speculation driving up prices.
Do you remember the 2006 Housing Shortage where here in the US we ran out of houses for people to buy (I mean speculate on)? Were all those people who couldn't buy houses homeless?
Not all shortages are a result of actual shortages, but can also occur due to poor distribution and pricing stability.
Where will I get the energy for smithore mining?!
You think the existing models don't take solar variation into account?
I think the people who've designed the existing models only take things into account when it benefits their cause to do so and neglect to take into account things that wouldn't benefit them.
Since you asked.
What idiot wrote that title? Sunspot activity isn't related to climate, and not even the article linked makes such a stupid claim. I suspect a troll.
and bought 5 acres in Patagonia, AZ as well as 5 acres on Whidbey Island, WA. And just in case the Cascadia fault line breaks I have property on the eastern side of the Cascades as well. All I have left to worry about is an asteroid strike, an eruption of Mt. Rainier or Yellowstone, and the impending energy crisis.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Globally water vapor in the atmosphere has increased by around 4% in the 40 years or so because of a warmer atmosphere. Witness the number of extreme precipitation events we've been seeing lately. Earth is warm because of a combination of factors that includes the mixture of GHG's in the atmosphere. It's true that water vapor causes the majority of the greenhouse effect but CO2 is a significant factor as well (around 20% of greenhouse warming). There wouldn't be nearly as much water vapor in the atmosphere without the warming effect of CO2 since water vapor levels are completely dependent on air temperature (and also dependent on the availability of water to evaporate into the atmosphere). CO2 on the other hand remains a gas at any conditions that exist on the planet.
Thermometers have been very accurate since not that long after they were invented in the 1500's. Maybe modern instruments are accurate to more decimal places than older instruments but they are not necessarily more accurate to the temperature in 1/10ths of a degree.
AC is right, oceans are still a sink of CO2 despite warming water temperatures because of the increased partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Earth isn't warm because of CO2, it's because of H2O vapor.
Increases in CO2 increase temperature which drives increases in H2O vapor which also increases temperature. Increases in temperature also cause solubility of CO2 in water to decrease, so the oceans also release CO2. It's called a positive feedback mechanism, and climate scientists have known about it for a long time.
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Tambora did spew some greenhouse gases into the atmosphere but probably not as much as humans currently do in a year. What caused the cooling effect was the aerosols that Tambora shot into the stratosphere, primarily volcanic dust and SO2. It took a few years for the aerosols to fall back out of the atmosphere. The effect of "liquid hot magma" on temperatures is essentially zero once you get any distance away from the eruption. Kilauea has been continuously erupting since 1983. How much effect has that had on temperatures?
I don't know if they considered this effect and that effect and this possibility, so I'll assume they didn't and all the science is crap and that what I want to be true is true, rather than checking it out and possibly finding out that what I want to be true isn't.
Trust me. Climate scientists are smarter than you give them credit for, and have considered all of those effects, and those possibilities, and have corrected for them, or have convinced themselves and the rest of the scientific community that they weren't causing current temperature changes. You aren't thinking of anything they haven't already considered.
I know that with all the denialist propoganda out there it's hard to find reliable information. http://skepticalscience.com/ is a good place to start. The wikipedia page on global warming is more reliable than most pages on global warming. And on either, feel free to follow back to the original source.
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Well, that and the fact that we were in the middle of the Dalton Minimum.
Seriously, do people just not actually look at the variability of climate data over the Holocene? Just because the Earth doesn't get hot or cold in six week spikes when the sun has a patch of sunspots is vastly insufficient evidence to conclude that a) solar activity is irrelevant (more or less) to global temperatures and b) only CO_2 is responsible for the warming trend post the Dalton minimum, not the directly correlated increase in solar activity!
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Where is MDSolar when you need him?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It will get warmer.
It will get colder.
Repeat.
It is irrefutable.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Unfortunately, I agree. Well, not with the global warming bit -- I think that is a very open question with very little unbiased analysis available. And have I got a global catastrophe for you! The sun begins a Maunder minimum, and it turns out that (due to complicated feedback mechanisms involving geomagnetism and the solar wind) the earth cools significantly, quickly. A big volcano blows -- always a chance, and a pretty good chance given a decade or five to shoot for -- and we add aerosol cooling on top of cooling from reduced solar activity. Suddenly, we have very early winters, late springs, late frosts, and a reduced growing season! Billions starve, another billion or so die in the wars, and yes, economies are brought to their knees in a global depression as Russia, China, Northern Europe, and Canada are especially hard hit. Somewhere in there climatologists who predicted warming throughout the minimum (or at least no drop in temperature) and hence prevented the world from preparing for the disaster are hunted down by hungry crowds armed with torches and pitchforks -- and are eaten. They prove very tasty, but only put off starvation for a day or two as they are suddenly very difficult to find.
All that saves us, eventually, is the perfection of nuclear fusion and the large scale implementation of solar collectors in equatorial deserts that still remain reasonably warm and sunny. That, and global laws regulating human reproduction for the rest of human future history (unless and until we actually get off of planet earth and colonize the local part of the Galaxy).
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I"ll disagree, 2005 to 2010 warming essentially stopped, as differences were in the realm of statistical noise. Except for 2008, the coolest year since 2000.
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003800/a003817/
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/ZonAnn.Ts+dSST.txt
that is false, if you buy a $600 laboratory grade mercury thermometer (yes, they exist and yes I've had to use them), they come with a paper graph of correction factors that range all over from - 0.5 to 0.5 degrees or more over the thermometer;s range. Thus your belief that lip blown hand shaped thermometers could possibly have accuracy of tenths of a digit over there range is utter rubbish.
As long as it doesn't affect the value of my bitcoin collection, I don't see why slashdot is posting this.
Increases in CO2 increase temperature which drives increases in H2O vapor which also increases temperature.
??? Your "model in words" is beyond simplistic and only serves to mislead and confound, not to bring any light to this discussion. You see, more H2O, that is, water vapor, means more droplets of moisture condensing in the skies. You may have heard of this form of condensation, commonly called clouds. Clouds reflect sunlight, shading the land and sea, consequently decreasing temperature.
In the end, these things are really complex. One changing variable feeds into multiple others causing them to change, and so on, and so on, and so on. The models currently proposed predict disaster from anthropogenic global warming. The question is, are the models right? To date they have failed to deliver *the*degree*of*change* they've promised (global temperature plateau, seas not rising as fast as predicted, etc.).
Doesn't mean it won't happen, but I sleep well at night. (Likely, IMHO) Been warmer before, and will get cooler again, same as it ever was. And, yes, changes in the sun are the number one factor in the climate of our planet. Anyone who argues that should go turn out the solar light for 24 hours just to see what happens. Bring a winter coat. Only argument is how variable is the output from the sun *of*energy*that*warms earth*.
sigfault (core dumped)
Warming and cooling have positive feedback mechanisms. As the Earth gets colder, more water turns to ice, which reflects more sunlight into space, which causes cooling. When the Earth warms, the opposite happens. There are also some negative feedback mechanisms which cause the warming and cooling to stop.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You are right. Maunder or Dalton Minimum, little ice ages, and so forth -- no one who's convinced that we are destroying or even changing our climate seems to think the sun has ever had anything to do with climate change in the past or present. No one cares. Because that would be "inconvenient" for their beliefs, proving that they are, even partially, wrong, or worse yet losing them their multi-million dollar research grants.
Just wait another 35 years until researchers start to get grant money to investigate the effect of the sun on the earth's climate and how we can control sun cycles *rolls*eyes*
sigfault (core dumped)
I dare you to actually make a meaningful falsible claim instead of putting words in the mouth of people you disagree with.
Sounds an awful lot like what global-warming skeptics have been saying for a long time ;-)
Yes, the Dalton Minimum had its part to play in the Year Without a Summer as did several other large eruptions (~VEI-4) in 1812, 1813 and 1814 but the April 1815 Tambora eruption, a VEI-7 event, was the straw that broke the camels back and led to snow in Upper New York to Maine in June of 1816 among other things. You could say the pump was primed by those other things but it wouldn't have been half as bad without Tambora.
To respond to your straw men:
a) Solar activity is of course completely relevant to global temperatures and you can see the effect of variations in insolation in the temperature record. But it hasn't been changing enough to account for all warming and from the 1960's until this recent minimum it was relatively constant from one cycle to the next. That's why climatologists discount the effects of the Sun for the warming since then.
b) No one who knows his stuff is saying that CO2 is responsible for all of the warming since the Dalton Minimum. Before the 1960's warming was more due to the Sun coming out of the Dalton Minimum and the lack of large volcanic eruptions in the first half of the 20th century. Since then increased GHG's have taken over to as the larger cause of increasing temperatures.
How does that make any difference? Decreased sun making it to the planet's surface is the same thing, regardless of whether it's due to decreased solar activity or increased sedimentary interference.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
"At some point, we will chew up enough resources that the planet will not recover."
As near as we can tell, that's simply not true. There have been what... five mass extinctions for life on this planet? The Great Dying was about a quarter billion years ago, wiping out 90% of all species. We don't have the power of taking the whole show down forever. Even if we made the environment so bad that we died off, life would shake itself off and start rebuilding.
To quote the late Mr. Carlin, "The planet isn't going anywhere. We are."
Ok, insolation can decrease for several reasons. In this case the cold summer of 1816 wasn't because of some drastic reduction in solar output that year. The Sun was already in the middle of the Dalton Minimum which was a factor but Tambora caused the extraordinarily exceptional weather of that summer.
"You are completely right. We can burn all the fossil fuels we want forever and it will never change the temperature of the planet by a single degree."
Being a skeptic about global warming/climate change/whatever you're calling it today does NOT necessarily mean a person has a selfish reason, such as wanting to burn more fossil fuels with a clean conscience. I think we need to burn less gas at least for the pollution since I've seen the effects, having had to live through smog alerts before.
"However, unless you believe that the Earth is some sort of oil factory that we can crank up at our convenience, you must know that eventually there won't be anymore."
True, but we've become jaded by the false predictions of the chicken littles. We were supposed to have run out of oil by now -- run out of food too. We were supposed to be doing a Soylent Green by now according to them.
Water vapor is not water droplets. One is gas, the other liquid. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. I've seen a few climatologists claim that more water vapor will cause more clouds, which will have a cooling effect. I haven't seen any data to confirm this cloud formation and cooling, though.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
That's what's been happening. Solar output has dropped and warming has continued. You can see the solar cycle variations and instrumental temperature record for yourself. It's as if something besides the sun is causing warming. What could it be?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I wish I had mod points. I believe global warming is real to some extent, but I have yet to see many falsifiable predictions from the global warming religion. Well, ones that weren't falsified the next year. My Magic 8-ball has a better record, frankly.
Look, if everything is as certain as can be, why can't we predict a warming trend that will match up with both historical models plus the next few years? I'm sure it has been done a number of times, but if there are 1000000 models out there at least a few are going to get lucky. Show me the one consensus model that the rest of you are watching.
Yes, we clearly have a problem we need to deal with, but it's hard to know just what to do when you don't have a very idea of where we are heading except "warmer".
And don't get me started on the folks who just want to "do something" without being honest about the consequences. "We need to stop burning fossil fuels, but I don't like nuclear, and I'm not willing to admit that we have to reduce our standard of living and pay more for electricity. I want solar and wind to work, so therefore they will."
Hmm. Well, here's a hypothesis: the claims made by global warmists will not not come true.
Winner!
http://www.ipcc.ch/
Word!
When you're measuring temperature change the precision, that is how well the instrument repeats a reading given the same temperature, is more important than the absolute accuracy, that is how well it give the true temperature. Precise thermometers that could be read in 1/10ths were available quite early in their history. They may have been off by 0.5 degrees but they weren't off by +0.5 degrees one time and -0.5 degrees the next.
Reminded me of a book where the environmental movement over-reacts so drastically they cause an ice age, yet still blame human activity (specifically technology, iirc).
Burn moar coal to get CO2 now!
no the sun always goes threw this. every 11 years it goes from very activ to not doing to mutch. we have started entering its activ phase a wile back in fact there was just a massiv solar flare a few weeks ago i bet its just settling a bit from that. there saying in 11 years it will go to not doing mutch again and thats normal.
solar input has done this for billions of years. it goes from a stable not doing mutch state aka less input to its unstable massiv flare tossing state every 11 years. this is just a normnal cycle of the sun written up to be news.
Thus solving the problem once and for all!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Trusting someone's opinion just because they are considered "smart" is stupid. Most of the data I've seen provides from 2 sources - measurements made with different methodologies and different equipments across time, and extrapolations made from models based on wild life (plants/trees, etc). While I don't argue against the concept that the earth is indeed warming up, and that mankind activities do contribute to that effect, I don't see conclusive proof on the data collected, and the iminent catastrophe some scientists talk about. A model is just that - a somewhat simplistic mathematical approximation to what it is believed to be the accurate data. The accuracy of the model is bound by current scientific knowledge and precision of the data available, but part of that data was aquired with different precision and accuracy. Do you see the problem?
And then we have a somewhat obscure field of science, that has received massive funding the last years because the conclusions drawn from the scientists that benefit from that funding.
What I've learned from recent history:
Smart people used radio and other radioactive products to treat all sorts of illnesses
Smart people used leeches and advocated ethnicity inferiority based on antropomorphic measurements
Smart people screamed about the next ice age "any day now" in the seventies. And screamed about overpopulation with numbers and solid data and models, "any day now" - 40 years ago.
Smart people warned about the oil disappearing as soon as the beginning of the 90's, with models and solid data.
So yes, I won't trust blindly on conjectures and hipotesis formulated based on flawed data and non peer-reviewed models. That doesn't mean I'm a denialist.
The problem is that the data was collected with different thermometers, and probably with different calibration methods. If all the readings at a location were made by the same thermometer, shure - even if the calibration of the device wasn't accurrate, the variation between successive readings would be. But that is not the case, and many data tables used as proof of the warming trend are mean monthly reads, with variations between the years of usually less than 0.5 degrees, measured since 1880.
The sun is more than a billion earth years old it orbits the milky way in 200 million earth years and we are statistically calculating minimums and maximums in a 100 year period ?? small minded humans
as it is eaten so it shall pass
What, are you daft? Do you not understand the water cycle, which I was taught in the 8th grade? Sheesh.
Allow me to explain said water cycle. An increase in water vapor at lower altitudes won't immediately condense into cloud droplets, but there's this scientific phenomenon called mass transport (yeah, I know, a chemical engineering concept, but please try to keep up) which means that increased water vapor down low is transported through diffusion and convection to higher altitudes. At altitude, the atmosphere is cooler so this vapor condenses to form, you guessed it, water droplets, which make up clouds. Ever see puffy cumulus clouds "boiling" up from below? That's caused by the convection of warm, moist air into much colder layers higher above the ground where the moisture condenses into clouds. Water vapor also makes it to even higher altitudes via mass transport. Without this there could be no cirrus clouds, for example. How else to explain moisture getting into the atmosphere at 20,000+ feet? What source of moisture, natural or man-made (prior to the jet age), is there at that altitude?
One hopes you see my point.
(Surprisingly, the Wikipedia article on cirrus clouds lists them as a positive feedback mechanism. I grant you that they don't provide, as do lower elevation clouds, shadows which cool the surface, but don't those high clouds reflect some sunlight back into space? On first principles, it seems to me that even simple climate controlling mechanisms are confusing. Depending on how you look at it mechanisms could have positive or negative feedback effects....)
sigfault (core dumped)
"Instead of offering useless conjecture about what people are going to say, how about you give us a nice solid hypothesis about how much cooler it will be when, and how that relates to existing global warming projections." Well, what I do know is this. If you look at the IPCC predictions from the 90s, now 20 years ago, we are below the "low" estimate for heating. So how am I to produce a working model when the IPCC can't even do it themselves?
You miss the point of solar cycles. With 75% of the Earth's surface being water, and water having a high specific heat, they act as giant heat capacitors. And as any one knows, in a fluctuating (AC) current capacitors smooth the wave form, and delay it a bit. I say the same is happening with the oceans. They are still reacting to changes from long ago. Also, the oceans are big enough to modulate all these smaller 11 year cycles into a much slower trend, much like how an FM signal is converted to drive a speaker.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
You missed the point.
With 75% of the Earth's surface being water, and water having a high specific heat, they act as giant heat capacitors. And as any one knows, in a fluctuating (AC) current capacitors smooth the wave form, and delay it a bit. I say the same is happening with the oceans. They are still reacting to changes from long ago. Also, the oceans are big enough to modulate all these smaller 11 year cycles into a much slower trend, much like how an FM signal is converted to drive a speaker.
It is not that sun shine = hot Clearly that works on an almost instant time scale. Rather it is sun shine gets collected in a huge capacitor ans released over time. The reason why the sun is attributable is because without the sun, there is nothing being delivered to the system. the oceans act as a low pass filter and capacitor.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Well *I* laughed.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Before the 1960's that were marked as the center of the largest, longest, hottest Grand Solar Maximum in eleven thousand years, since the very beginning of the Holocene? A maximum that peaked with solar cycles 19, 21 and 22 (although 18, 20 and 23 still get honorable mention in the all-time highest category)? Relatively constant at the highest level ever directly observed or inferrable from nearly the entire interglacial record?
Gee, I'm sure that didn't have anything to do with the perfectly lagged-coincident temperature peaks that occurred across the same period of time, now that you and climatologists have reassured me that it is ok to discount this data. And that's even before I note that we don't have even approximately reliable records of global temperatures prior to perhaps the 1980s (certainly none before the 1960s) and satellites designed to measure it, and before I note that the thermal records they have produced since then disagree by almost a degree and don't always even vary together to produce a lot of confidence in their ability to produce accurate deltas.
I'm not precisely certain how you can refer to points a) and b) above as "straw men". I just wrote a short reply to a Defender of AGW that, in fact, just claimed (again) that Solar activity is completely irrelevant to global temperatures. Further, you agree that it is relevant -- we disagree only about its "constancy" -- perhaps because I look at the actual data and see a rather enormous variation from the Maunder Grand Minimum/LIA to the currently ending Global Warming Grand Maximum (thus I name it, so that we cannot pretend that it was in any sense "normal" or "constant" on a millennial scale).
We also apparently disagree about an important mathematical detail. Your response suggests that it you accept it as implicitly true that the climate responds immediately to changes in solar state. Note well that I do not just refer to changes in insolation -- other factors change along with solar state, and some of those factors and their effects on climate are not well-understood and indeed are the subject of active speculation and research. After all, this is your argument -- even though the sun was at its highest level of activity since the invention of agriculture and clovis spear points, it was nearly constant at this level, and yet, strangely, the temperature kept going up. In fact, it kept on going up -- or at least held its own and stayed up -- for over a decade after solar activity came off of its all-time high peaks and dropped to merely one of the fifth or sixth highest peaks in four hundred or more years.
How certain are you that CO_2 is the only possible explanation for this? How certain are you that the enormously non-Markovian, chaotic, multivariate, integrodifferential equations that describe the real time evolution of global temperatures do not have an integral kernal that averages over (say) the last three or four solar cycles, not just the current one, so that global temperatures (like the temperatures of an ordinary house) take a while to come up to their peak temperature when one turns up the furnace, and a while to come down off the peak when the furnace is turned down? Especially given that the "house" in question has known multidecadal cycles of oscillation that stretch out over multiple solar cycles and yet could only be driven by those solar cycles and that affect things like precisely how the house sets its curtains and windows and how effectively heat is transported from the hot upstairs to the cooler downstairs?
If you are honest, you will acknowledge that your knowledge, certain or not, is derived from some rather simplistic variations of the heat equation. Insolation in. Loss out. "Sensitivity" to control feedback, and a parameter to control "trapping" due to CO_2. This ODE (and its many variations) is lovely, except for one little thing. It exhibits none
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
The REAL effect is more rapid growth of plant life. In my lifetime, I've seen much faster growth of vines, weeds and undergrowth, as well as trees. This is the greatest effect of the CO2 increase, and it's a good thing which -- provided all the (rain) forests aren't cut down and burned -- provides feedback to help limit increasing temperatures and CO2 in the atmosphere.
sigfault (core dumped)
Late reply here, but I don't like to leave legitimate concerns to things I've posted unnoticed
Existing models DO take as many factors as can be recorded into account. There's two sides any decent model. You have the simulation side, where we take all the physical laws we can simulate at a reasonable accurate level and perform those, then you have the multi-factor emulation side where you take all known independent variables and generate a best fit equation for the differences. You build your model on one set of years, and perform hypothesis verification on another set.
Even when we don't completely understand the direct effect of every factor, we can have a model that gives a mostly accurate picture of what happens. It's like the relationship between newtonian mechanics and quantum physics. We don't have to model perfectly to get very accurate results.
I asked the GP for a falsible hypothesis, because attacking percieved flaws in one area of your oponent's argument(when they're arguing rationally, not logically that is) is trivial. It's incredibly easy to poke holes(that frequently aren't holes) in arguments where they seem counter-intuitive in any way. This isn't intuition, though, it's science.
As an alternative, find a SCIENTIST'S hypothesis about global warming that has been invalidated in the past 5 years, That wouldn't mean global warming is false, depending on the hypothesis, but it could invalidate some arguments people are making. My increasing concern is that even scientific laymen aren't taking this approach.
I'll put myself out there and make a claim: in 5 years, if atmospheric CO2 has increased at least 10%, average summer temperatures (over a 3 year period to factor out el nino and la nina) will have increased at least 0.05 C. It's a trivial claim, but one I can be reasonably confident in based on global warming trends.
Solar flares lead to more cloud formation which leads to more reflection of regular light, which leads to colder temperatures.
You may laugh, but this will be a Republican talking point a year from now.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ah ya beat me to it.
If only we had some method of regulating temperature on earth... to use a farming analogy, when winter comes, have some sort of greenhouse like ability...
By the 1880's thermometers were quite accurate. The mercury thermometer was invented in 1714 I believe. The production and calibration techniques were well refined by that time. When you combine many measurements from many instruments the errors tend to average out.
I can't speak for pigeons, but reports of people eating raccoons isn't even close to an indication of people starving. There are reports of people eating raccoon right now. I know many people who have eaten raccoon. None of them say it was a good quality meat, but most of them said that if cooked right it was palatable.
That would be great if the next time there is a hurricane, or drought, or flood, we don't have to hear that is is proof of global warming.
Venus might be usable as a model to prove that CO2 follows warming from the sun, but not the other way around.
There is a natural limit to any positive feedback mechanism where the feedback ceases or is balanced by a negative effect. Feel free to inform us as the the nature of the negative feedback mechanism and to let us know at what temperature it will stop the warming.
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Your "model in words" is beyond simplistic
Of course it's simplified. I'm not writing a graduate level text on theory of climate change. I'm responding to a message on slashdot. So I just mentioned the dominant feedback. I didn't mention the positive feedback of ice loss or of methane release due to melting clathrates. And I didn't mention the negative feedback of cloud formation. I didn't, because those are minor effects.
In the end, these things are really complex
and therefore we don't know anything. The mating cry of the denialist.
There hasn't been a global temperature plateau. The thermal energy stored in the oceans keeps rising. The sea level keeps rising almost faster than predicted. The models have done a very good job of matching *the*degree*of*change*.
And, yes, changes in the sun are the number one factor in the climate of our planet.
See, things like this show that you are deliberately lying, and that you probably don't really believe any of what you are saying. Anyone who can use Google can find out that this is false. The sun is responsible for less than 10% of the temperature change since 1700.
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Surprisingly, the Wikipedia article on cirrus clouds lists them as a positive feedback mechanism
Not surprising to a physicist, astronomer, or a climate scientist. Ice crystals in cirrus clouds are forward scattering to visible light, so most of the light scattered by cirrus goes towards the ground. The clouds are, however, more opaque in the infrared. Droplets in other cloud types are also forward scattering, but the clouds have higher optical depth, so more sunlight will get scattered into space. They are also opaque in the IR, but the effect is complicated by warming of the cloud environment by condensation. In addition to being a greenhouse gas, water vapor is an effective heat transfer mechanism. But I really don't want to see the storms that would result if the all the excess heat content of the atmosphere were carried to high altitude in water vapor so it could be radiated away.
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If you don't see consistent proof about the data or the accuracy of the models, it's because you either never looked for it or, when you found it, decided to ignore it because some blogger paid by an oil company told you to ignore it. The data is not flawed, even though you have concluded it is without any evidence. And the models have been peer reviewed. Go ahead and cast your aspersions against strawman "smart people." And rest assured that you don't fit into the "smart person" category, and that you do fit into the denialist category, unwilling to look at evidence because it doesn't fit the conclusion you've already made.
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Ah, yes. "Flamebait". "I don't agree with you, so I will mod you down so that your opinion is never heard.".
Climate change is not a theory. It's a religion, and it demands its tithe of obedience, it's tithe of cash, and silence from the unbeliever. It is structured as a church, with its priests, its enforcers, and its inquisitioners. I'd almost rather deal with jihadists; at least they're honest about their hatred and have the balls to sacrifice themselves in the fight instead of dispatching lawyers and cops to take the risks.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
you are making shit up hoping it is true. Gabriel Farenheit took the coldest temperature he could make with icewater and salt and called that 0. He took the termperature of the human body and called that 100. He divided his lip blow hand shaped tube into 100 increments. If you happen to know about melting ice with salt, and the temperature of the human body, you can already see his crude "hermoscope" was hardly accurate
Clouds reflect sunlight, shading the land and sea, consequently decreasing temperature
If it were only that simple. Clouds can not only reflect sunlight back off the Earth but they can reflect or absorb the Outgoing Longwave Radiation that arises from the surface of the planet. At night that is the dominant effect of clouds. Also near the terminator between the light and dark sides of the planet they can reflect sunlight toward the surface. The net effects of clouds on global warming is currently thought to be slightly positive.
It's also on the free book list over at Baen books. Not a bad read - decent story though a little (well, a lot) contrived.
"You'll be a much better skeptic if you learn a little about the subject"
Automatically claim your opponent is ignorant, check.
"Then people will point to the fact that we still haven't run out as if that proves we never will"
Falsely portray your opposition's opinion, check. I just stated it will definitely run out, yet you post that.
So, the data is not flawed because you say so? And if the models have been peer reviewed (and assuming they are correct), why don't you have a consensus from the scientific community? And why everyone that asks questions is automatically labeled a "denialist"? So, if I believe that the world is warming up (and all the data suggests so), but I don't believe that 1) the models are accurate; 2) many scientists envolved aren't pulling their own agenda; 3) the problem is exclusively caused by human activity, I'm a denialist, and suddenly I read oil blogs? And if I swallow all the crap with blatant number manipulation, misinformation and hypotesis that pass as proof, I'm suddenly a "smart person"? Really? You kow, you can script that kind of argumentation, you don't need to type it yourself everytime you use it.
Meanwhile have a look at the origin of the LHC to understand the difference between model, hypotesis, proof, and reality. Think of the billions they could save hiring some climatologists and skipping the proof part altogether.
When I said the production and calibration techniques were well refined by that time I was referring to 1880. I'm sorry I didn't make that clearer. It was pretty late when I replied. The instrument temperature datasets that climatologists use generally don't go much earlier than 1850. By that time thermometers were plenty accurate for their purposes. I challenge you to prove otherwise.
Damnit, you out-smartassed me.
And I thought I was being so clever. :(
I guess Global Warming is just too complicated for me.
-Styopa
Before the 1960's that were marked as the center of the largest, longest, hottest Grand Solar Maximum in eleven thousand years ...
This graph says otherwise. It looks like we're at the highest solar maximum in eleven hundred years though.
And that's even before I note that we don't have even approximately reliable records of global temperatures prior to perhaps the 1980s (certainly none before the 1960s) and satellites designed to measure it, ...
I'd like to see you justify that statement more fully. One of the first thing scientists did when they decided they wanted to calculate a global temperature was examine the existing instrument temperature record that goes back to early 1700's in some cases. They found that since the mid 1800's or so the temperature record was accurate enough and widespread enough to be useful, maybe not perfect but useable. I'm sure there are papers that address that in detail but I'm not taking the time to look them up. Of course the number they calculate for global temperature is not the same number you would get if you integrate the instantaneous temperature of every square millimeter over the whole surface of the Earth but as long as they are consistent in the way they calculate it you get an indication of how the temperature is changing over time.
Of course satellites don't measure temperatures directly like a thermometer does. Instead the temperature is calculated using known correlations between temperature and the radiative properties of various layers of the atmosphere (I guess you could say that bulb thermometers use known correlations of the expansion properties of certain liquids to temperature so maybe it's the same thing :-). I don't see how satellites are more reliable than a well made thermometer. They still have to be calibrated. On top of that satellites have been measuring the Sun for a similar length of time and haven't found enough variation to account for observed temperature changes.
I'm not precisely certain how you can refer to points a) and b) above as "straw men".
I got the implication that you felt everyone on my side of the issue agreed with those statements which is simply not true. That's why I called them straw men. Maybe I read too much into it. If so I'm sorry.
The statement you replied to was my post that said "Solar activity had nothing to do with "The Year Without a Summer". It was the eruption of Tambora that caused that.". Perhaps I should have qualified that better by saying "Changes in solar activity had practically nothing to do with TYWaS". Other years with similar levels of solar activity had much more normal summers so I don't see how you can say the Sun was a significant factor for that unusual summer.
Climate does not respond immediately to solar variation. There is a lag time of 6 months to a few years. If there were other factors of the solar state that were significant I think we would have at least figured out there was something wrong by now. But the known factors appear to sync pretty well with the observed reality so at best your other factors are 2nd order effects.
You read too much into what I said if you think I said CO2 is the only possible explanation. It's not a binary question. There are many factors that go into what the climate is, CO2 merely being one of the more important of them (but not most important, that's the Sun). Some of those multidecadal oscillations may have much to do with the natural resonance of the topology they operate in and the physical characteristics of the medium as they do with solar cycles. Some of those mysterious other factors that you talk about.
Hum.... You have a rather simplistic view of climate modeling. GCM's include the trapping due to all known greenhouse gases, the dynamics of water vapor in the atmo
He probably uses a spectrometer, I'd imagine.
Yes. Save the planet - burn a tire! ~
You've dodged making an actual hypothesis. That's sad, I really wanted to have a projection that represented a concrete, numerical perception of what you think is happening.
Your analogy on the other hand is tremendously flawed. On several fronts.
1. Within the context of your analogy oceans would operate like traditional capacitors, they hold heat volume, with no varriance in their capacity based on the suns intensity. If we're pretending the sun is an AC current, the oceans would operate like resistors, diminishing the importance of this cycle at all. A fluctuating capacitor would be an entirely different component.
2. Assumption of an AC current for your model would depend on "effective charge" becoming negative, otherwise the rules become very different and operate a lot more like a DC circuit.
3. The sound of the speaker is powered by a seperate source from the signal, usually a battery or a wall socket. The only (non-trivial) source of energy in the earth's atmospheric temperature is the sun.
4. Most importantly, at no point have I seen any science indicating the behavior of our atmosphere shares any part of a scientific model of a circuit. Realize what you've done here, you've simultaneously dismissed out of hand the models based on evidence and refinement built by climatologists, and substitued your own based on intuition and electical engineering. This is not how a model is built. At the very best you have a framework for an alternate hypothesis of climatology. But you haven't even gone as far as making a testible prediction. You have simply claimed your model is right and moved on.
I don't mind that you disagree with me, and disagree with what I believe to be the most correct science regarding the relationship of carbon dioxide and global average temperature is, but the manner your present your arguments in I take serious issue with. You don't offer alternatives explanations for existing data, you don't offer a hypothesis that seperates your idea from what global climate change theory projects. What's something that the science claims that's wrong, what's your alternate claim. Something numeric and falsible is all I ask.
You're looking for something concrete and testable on Slashdot? Who is the crazy one now? LOL.
I'm not as far off as you think.
1. I don't believe their capacity varies. What they do is transport the heat via circulation to different areas (Europe is warm due to heat collected in the Caribbean) and depths. Thermal energy is stored and released.
2. No, it doesn't have to go negative. Assume temporarily everything starts is in balance but at capacity. Drop the sun's output and you'll get some additional capacity. Now ramp it up to the other side of balanced. You'll eliminate the capacity and hit a point where it can't be absorbed anymore. This causes a "delay" in experiencing the warming.
3. You missed the point. It's not about driving a speaker, it's about modulation. Frequency modulation to amplitude modulation. A fast signal to create a slow one.
4. Everything is a circuit. Everything is a cycle. Electrical circuits have feedback. Climate modelers are always worried about feedback. Never heard the term climate feedback? Things like albedo. Hell, AGW theory is based on CO2 feedback.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
When did I call you crazy? I think you're wrong. I think you're not making a logical argument. I think you're trying to equivocate analogy with fact. In general, I believe these to be points that can be resolved by cogent argument. It's a relatively simple point I'm driving for here, where do you get your evidence of your correctness? How do you validate that you're right? Climatologists have gone through (at this point) excessively many iterations of this. If you can cite specific hypotheses that have been invalidated in climate change theories that would be a huge step towards making a meaningful conversation happens.
Can't we hold ourselves to a high standard of debate than cheap shots at those we disagree with?
If you look here:
http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrsp-2008-3/
You will see (in section 4.4) a table (from a 2007 study) listing the lengths of the 19 Grand Maxima in the Holocene. The one that has just ended is the fourth longest. If you look in section 4.1 you will see a graph that quite clearly indicates that the one just ended was the strongest peak since 9000 BCE when there was a double peak (basically one protracted event) following closely on the heels of a similar set of events around 9500 BCE that quite possibly were the proximate cause of the end of the ice age. The events around 6700 BCE were of slightly longer duration but much lower magnitude.
Not to get into duelling experts, but these are rather current results and the review paper covers the science used to obtain them in detail. Usoskin is a Solanski collaborator, so I would have to say that the 2007 results supercede the 2005 results. I'd also say that either way there is no doubt that the twentieth century Grand Maximum was unusual in both its duration and its strength. This is a confounding factor that is universally ignored -- seriously -- in the arguments for GHG-mediated AGW. One of the most basic premises of AGW is that the heat we are experiencing is "unprecedented" (a word frequently used) on a millennial timescale, because if in the past it has been just as warm without CO_2, it confounds the entire argument. This is why so much of their conclusion has depended on "erasing" the Medieval Warm Period -- if it was even close to being as warm in the MWP as it is now with nothing but solar variability (through mechanisms known and unknown) as a cause, CO_2 stops being primary and risks being dropped to secondary -- as you say, responsible for only a relatively small part of the warming of the last century, barely enough to compensate and leave us reasonably warm as the sun returns to its normal state (which is much less active).
To put it in the simplest terms, the argument as usually presented is: "The temperatures are abnormally warm. The Sun's state is normal. CO_2 is abnormally high -- the highest in recorded history. Temperature linearly responds to (correlates with) solar state and CO_2 concentration. Therefore CO_2 is the proximate cause of the abnormal warming."
This argument is obviously, if not deliberately, misleading. The correct statement is: "The temperature is abnormally warm. The Sun's state is abnormally active -- the highest in recorded history. CO_2 is abnormally high -- the highest in recorded history. Temperature responds nonlinearly to changes in solar state and probably to CO_2 concentrations as well. It is therefore probable that both are the proximate cause of the abnormal warming."
The thing about the second argument is that it reveals two serious weaknesses in the hypothesis "CO_2 is responsible". First of all, it makes it clear that this is almost certainly not true. Both are almost certainly factors. Second, it introduces a rather huge degree of uncertainty into the discussion. You clearly have a lot more faith in GCMs than I do, given that they have almost no predictive power and damn little explanatory power. Ultimately, they are nonlinear parametric curve fitting routines that fail to extrapolate. One of the key parameters is the climate sensitivity, which is basically unknown. They are not capable of predicting global temperatures across thousands of years from just solar data because there are so many confounding factors -- it is quite probable that global oscillations such as the PDO are major factors in mean heating and cooling with multidecadal timescales and that those oscillations undergo more or less random/chaotic shifts to completely different modes every thousand years or so, with significant perturbations of the existing modes along the way. We are (in my opinion) far from understanding
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Well I'm glad you're engaging me in this debate, rather than writing me off, so first, thank you.
I don't know why you put such faith in Climatologists. Lets look at the IPCC predictions from the 1990s Are they close to accurate? Well they were, but they are falling. And when compared to the CO2 data (the last chart), the correlation with CO2 is breaking down.
I do have contempt for climatologists because its not actual science. Mythbusters does small scale and then full scale. Climatologists cannot run an experiment on any scale. The small scale lacks real-world complexity and the large scale is impossible to do. Still I hope one day we do develop a model which is able to come close to approximating reality. They get to make predictions with impunity, and 20 years later we get to test the result. But even then, I am betting you find some way to ignore the predictions of the 1990s, which have not come true. So given that IPCC failed to make a prediction that is valid in 2011 (and actually, they are diverging from reality at this point) how do you get to treat them as gospel? Obviously with a falling correlation, their model is leaving something out. But what is it? Do we continue to believe in a model that is failing? I'd have given them credit up to 2007, but now, we know the model is wrong.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Actually the point made by that blog post is pretty well refuted in its first comment. The data streams the author was using do not agree with the hindcast of the predictions in question. Using such data isn't going to invalidate a hypothesis like that. Far more detail than that is in this link. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/2010-updates-to-model-data-comparisons/
Essentially, the refutation there is from cherry picking, and doesn't really mean anything at all. I've taken a splash of meteorology classes myself, and believe me when I say labratory experimentation IS a major part of underlying theories in climatology, On the grander scale, models and simulations do get invalidated, improved upon, and tested. It's not ex nihil here.
If you pull up meteorlogical prediction software, you'll get different interchangable modeling algorithms, because different ones have had better historical success making predictions about particular kinds of weather than others. They're never 100% accurate, but there's a reason why it used to be you could get the same accuracy in 1 day forcasts that we now get with 5 day forcasts.
I never claimed current theories are gospel. The claim I'll make is that they make more accurate predictions than anyone else about temperatures, sea levels, and ice cover. The rub of it is, people who don't like global warming theories never give very useful null hypotheses.
common ones:
temperatures are stable: quite certainly not consistant with what we see on a year to year or century to century basis
temperatures are proportional to solar output: works year to year, falls apart decade to decade
natural cycles(always seems to be unspecified): doesn't provide any useful mechanism for making a prediction, going back to my original request for one from you.
As a side note, can you please respond further on my journal? I can't stand this javascript-induced monster of a thread anymore.
There is an enormous consensus within the scientific community. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying for political purposes.
Support SETI@home
Sorry to not answer sooner but I went to a Jethro Tull concert Thursday and got busy a work Friday.
Interesting paper. Thanks for that. But even Usokin himself says not to read too much into it in regards to climate science. To quote from a comment on RealClimate:
Ilya Usoskin responded to yr considerations as follows:
“Dr. Ladbury is right. No statistically significant conclusion can be drawn concerning the shape of the distribution of the Grand Minima shape. But the matter is that the division on Maunder-like and Spoerer-like minima has been done much earlier basing on only a few minima. Our present result is consistent with such a division, although a long-tail continuous distribution cannot be excluded. I also agree that hardly any direct implication for climate studies is apparent, and we were primarily interested in observational constraints for solar dynamo models.”
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=502 coment 168
The last glaciation started ending about 20,000 years ago. It ended because of changes in insolation but that is probably due more to Milankovitch Cycles than changes in solar state. 9500 BCE was the end of the transition from glaciation to an interglacial. While it is a factor it's not likely that changes in solar state by itself drives the cycles of the ice age.
Hmm... It doesn't appear that Dr. Usokin considered Milankovitch Cycle changes into his work. I wonder if it would change much if he did.
I've never seen any evidence that climate scientists have tried to erase the MWP. Looking at Dr. Usokin's Figure 17 it appears that solar activity wasn't particularly high during that period. That would appear to support that contention that the MWP was more of a regional rather than global phenomenon.
Is it linear when temperatures rise about the same amount for each doubling of CO2? I didn't think that was a linear relationship but you're obviously better trained in statistics than I am so maybe I'm wrong.
GCM's are primarily physical models. Some things that are not well understood are parameterized but the fundamentals are based on known physical relationships. It don't think it's fair to say the climate sensitivity is basically unknown. Oscillations like the PDO may well be a neutral factor over long enough periods as the positive and negative phases cancel each other out. Happy is not a word I would use regarding proxy reconstructions. I would just say they are the best information we have at the moment and are more useful than assuming we know nothing.
Individual scientists and small groups can certainly fall victim to bending science but as the group becomes larger that becomes much more difficult to pull off. Given the global nature of climate research I find it difficult to believe that such a conspiracy could hold together for such a long period of time over so many different research groups. Scientists are too competetive for that. You focus on the MBH vs. M&M controversy but ignore all of the similar reconstructions (at least 10) since then from different researchers using different proxy data that basically support Mann's original graph. Even applying the suggested improvements in statistical analysis didn't change Mann's graph much. It's time to move on.
Until the middle of the 20th Century solar variation was likely the primary driver of temperature changes from the Maunder Minimum. CO2 levels had only risen from about 280 ppmv to 315 ppmv by then. Since then it has risen to 390 ppmv.
I don't think I've ever heard climate scientists use the terms usual or unusual regarding the solar state. They just contended that since the mid 20th Century that solar activity hadn't changed enough to account for the observed warming. And it's true that the last 4 or 5 cycles until the present one have been about equivalent to each
You might try actually reading some of the climategate emails or the comments in the MBH code or some of the published email excerpts from conversations that have been revealed from outside of climategate. There is an interesting little article here: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/19/lawrence-solomon-wikipedia-s-climate-doctor.aspx
If solar activity drops back off the the present Grand Maximum and temperatures cool then obviously that information will have to be incorporated into the science but if as climate scientists contend the temperatures continue to rise despite dropping solar activity that kind of supports their theory. We'll find out, won't we?
Agreed. In about five to fifteen years we should have an indication, in about twenty (well into the "missing" cycle) we should have a much more solid understanding. We might have figured out a bit more about solar dynamics, too. Personally I think we are missing a major factor associated with the Sun's magnetic field. I'm not convinced by the GCR-cloud model (although there is evidence supporting it) but there may well be other modes of energy transfer or alteration of energy trapping mechanisms we haven't figured out yet.
As for Milankovitch cycles -- yeah, but no. Yeah they appear to be a contributing factor, but there are a bunch of other factors all with different periods that apparently constructively and destructively interfere, and once again even models built with all of those factors don't quantitatively agree with the data. You won't like it, but some of the work associated with the series of GCR articles by Svensmark and others find an interesting correlation between temperature and the solar system's bobbing up and down through the galactic plane. As of last time I looked nobody had a convincing model that was able to retroactively explain the geological temperature record in terms of only Milankovitch cycles or predict things like the end of the current interglacial. Using the simplest of models -- the past is like the present -- we are probably living in borrowed interglacial time already; the current interglacial is one of the longest and hottest of the last five or six, at least, stretching over the last half million years plus. Given the general precipitousness of the plunge and the fluctuations preceding it, there is almost certainly at least bistability in the climate feedback cycle. If one simply does a fourier analysis of the temperature curve and looks at the periods of the major factors, one can easily see significant components with timescales of centuries and millennia. Climate transitions look very much like very slow second order critical phenomena, with a lot of chaotic fluctuation near the change. On this scale, the MWP, the LIA, the current warm period could all be part of an approaching critical instability in the climate. Personally, I think all of this is extremely interesting in a completely objective sort of way. Remove the hysteria, the doom and gloom, and what the Earth and Sun are doing is quite fascinating. What could possibly cause century-scale periods of low to no solar magnetic activity? What makes it extremely active at other times? Are there correlations between improbables such as solar state and volcanic activity (that is, is there sufficient coupling between the relatively rapidly varying solar flux and the Earth's conducting core to enable a direct transfer of energy such as the one that melted the asteroids during the early history of the solar system)? How chaotic are the major oscillations? How important is the "oceanic conveyor belt" in establishing -- or flipping between -- bistable or multistable climate states?
I tend to think that we are largely clueless about much of this, because the problem is so very complex that simple models fail, leaving us with tantalizing but incomplete correlations. Correlations, of course, are not causality, but in many cases they are all we have.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I have read the climategate emails that got all of the attention. I find nothing in them incriminating. If you want to talk about specific ones give me an example.
I just scanned through the MBH code (you can see it here in the multiproxy.f file. From the parent directory you can see all the the work for the 1998 hockey stick graph). I didn't find anything controversial. The comments in the climategate emails had nothing to do with MBH.
Maybe we are missing a major factor in solar dynamics but you'd think with all of the study over the past half century we'd at least have a hint that something big is missing. That can only be true if they are wrong in a big way about some other part of climate science. Of course you believe that to be CO2 but all I ever hear is "It can't be CO2!" and no good science to explain why it should react so differently in the atmosphere as it does in the lab.
Perhaps the solar system bobbing up and down through the galactic plane does affect temperatures but that only happens twice per galactic year (225-250 million years) so it's not likely to change things much on century or millennial time scales.
Last I heard it looks like then end of the current interglacial is estimated to be (if we don't prevent it) in 20,000 years or so from an examination of Milankovitch Cycles. Of course MC's themselves are not the whole story regarding the ice age cycles. There are feedbacks that reinforce the warming initiated by them, most notable probably being CO2 and water vapor.
Looking at this graph I don't see anything that makes me think the current interglacial is the longest or hottest (maybe) or that the end of it is imminent.
... what the Earth and Sun are doing is quite fascinating.
On that we can agree :)
I tend to think that climate scientists are reporting their findings honestly. I think that there is an enormous amount of knowledge yet to be learned about climate but it appears to me that we've got most of the big stuff figured out more or less and are filling in details for the most part. I could be wrong but I don't think so. GCM's are not built on correlations but on models of the underlying physics (the causality) with some parametrization where the underlying physics are not well understood.
As we agree, we will find out. I just hope I live long enough to say I told you so (that's rather juvenile of me considering I'm 60 years old, isn't it).
As we agree, we will find out. I just hope I live long enough to say I told you so (that's rather juvenile of me considering I'm 60 years old, isn't it).
Well, I'm 56, so yes, living long enough to find out would be lovely...;-)
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
It was good conversing with you. I learned some things. Good luck to both of us.