Slashdot Mirror
No, We're Not Headed For a New Ice Age
purkinje writes "Unusual calm in the solar cycle — called a solar activity minimum — has sparked claims that the Sun will cool the Earth, leading us into a new ice age. While Europe did experience a Little Ice Age during a solar activity minimum three centuries ago, the connection between sunspots and climate is a lot more complicated, and it's unlikely this change in the Sun's activity will cool Earth down — or even affect the climate at all. Plus, any cooling that might come from this would be less than the global warming that's been going on. So don't pull out that parka yet; a new ice age seems more than unlikely."
We're currently in an interglacial period of the current ice age, so it's not a matter of moving towards another one, but how long the interglacial period will last, and how if we're moving into a glaciation period will humanity be effecting that.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
Of course we are not headed for a new ice age. You can't have an ice age without mammoths.
Nobody is working on cloning mammoths, right?
Who is ignoring solar forcings? They are in basically every model. Straight out denial that ignores basically the whole literature on the subject is not "healthy skepticism"; by the way. Calling it such besmirches the name of every true skeptic out there.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Shun the non-believer
Shunnnnnnn
I'm not believing anything until Al Gore says it's so.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Science never has everything figured out. You should be skeptical of science. But most arguments I've seen against global warming have nothing to do with healthy skepticism; they generally use made up evidence or faulty reasoning. In any case, we will need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions no matter what, because fossil fuels will not last forever. The only question is how quickly should we reduce them. Personally, I think it makes sense to reduce fossil fuel now use simply to reduce demand and avoid energy prices spiraling out of control, and to have sources of energy that do not depend on stability in the Middle East.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Radiative forcing is one of the first things to go into climate models; nowhere does it say 'ignore the huge nuclear furnace' since it's pretty much.... where the vast bulk of the energy comes from. To suggest that articles like this are what drive skeptics is just not really accurate. Skeptics are going to be doubting the results for any number of specific reasons, not just due to solar cycles.
That's an interesting claim. That's the fabricated evidence I usually see in arguments against global warming. In fact, 2010 tied 1998 as the warmest year on record according to the NOAA. You can see the instrumental temperature record to see the warming of the past several decades. If there were good evidence against global warming, you wouldn't need to fabricate any, would you?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
This is because people are bad at quantitative analysis. Look, solar irradiance averages about 1366 W/m^2 and a has a variation of about 1 W/m^2 (using a one-year moving average). That's 0.073%. If the Earth's temperature was entirely determined by solar irradiance, then the temperature variation would be about 0.2 C. That is, you'd see an 11-year temperature cycle corresponding to the solar output cycle with temperatures varying +/- 0.1 C from the average over the course of this cycle.
There. A tiny bit of research on the Internet and some math and you too can put bounds on how much influence sunspot cycles have on Earth's temperature.
And yes, climate scientists are familiar with this. The sun has been kind of important to climate science since Arrhenius figured out the greenhouse effect in 1896 and used the Stefan-Boltzmann law to estimate the Earth's temperature dependence on CO2.
In the summary (emphasis mine):
...has sparked claims that the Sun will cool the Earth...
The Sun does not cool the Earth, nor did anyone claim that such was a possibility. It may simply warm it less, should the recent concerns pan out, but cooling it is out of the question. It's a giant ball of fire in the sky, not a giant A/C unit in the sky.
False.
The ability to predict solar activity has nothing to do with climatologists. Climatologists don't predict what the sun will do, they look at past solar activity and past temperatures and past human activity and a whole host of other data and develop models that explain what the climate will do based on what any of the others will do. (e.g. if the solar activity is X, the earth's temperature will respond Y, etc).
If the sun goes into an unexpectedly deep minimum, that doesn't mean climatologists "don't have everything figured out" because it has nothing to do with climatologists.
If the Sun does cool and earth does cool as a result, exactly according to climatologist models, I predict that the climate change deniers will still not notice.
Why does this always have to fall into politics.Frankly the global warming faithful are getting annoying. Before anyone has a freaking stroke let me lay out the facts as I seem them.
1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
2. Over all we have been seeing a warming trend.
Conclusion: even if the warming trend is not caused solely by the increase in CO2 gases reducing emissions is a good thing.
There is is minus the politics and religion. I would even bet that CO2 is the primary cause of the warming trend.
It is really that simple.
Now for the true believers that are blaming global warming for everything from Hurricane Katrina to it snowing in Iran... Please learn the difference between climate and weather.
This article sounds as bad in it's way as crap from FOX news does the other way.
Here is nice little bow for yourself.
"1) Claims of an imminent global ice age are at best exaggerated."
Probably but that is opinion and not science. But then I have seen heard some pretty stupid things from the Church of Global Warming.
"2) The link of global cooling to an extended solar magnetic minimum is tenuous, and almost certainly needs something else to force it to occur (like lots of volcanoes)," Gee that sounds just like what the anti climate change people are saying. Yet when there are fewer sun spots the earths climate does cool. "This is from the very same piece"
"Having said all that, the sunspot cycle may have a very small effect on climate. You might think that since the spots are cooler than the solar surface we’d see a drop in light from the Sun and a corresponding cooling of the Earth during solar max. However, it’s actually the opposite! Sunspots are surrounded by a rim called faculae, and in this region the temperatures are actually higher than the average solar surface. This more than compensates for the cooler area of the spot; sunspots are about 1% dimmer than the solar surface, but faculae are 1.1 to 1.5% brighter. On top of that, faculae emit more UV than the solar surface does, and that wavelength of light is preferentially absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere, increasing the efficiency of heating.
So, bizarrely, sunspots tend to warm the Earth. That jibes with the idea of a cooling trend during solar minimum; fewer spots means fewer faculae, so the Sun emits less Earth-warming radiation.
But when you look at the numbers, again, it’s not so simple. The effect from faculae is very small, not enough to significantly change the Earth’s temperature on their own."
Except that little ice age did seem happen during that time. That is a fact. They may be unrelated but a change in the sun and the climate being unrelated seems like a very bad bet in my book.
You see the conclusion I find odd. We have seeing a MASSIVE decrease in sunspot activity. We have never seen such an change in modern times. I really question just strongly he is pushing that conclusion. We are also seeing other changes in the suns magnetosphere as well. Since we have never seen such such a thing when we could study it as well I think he is making some massive leaps and throwing in "probables" here and there.
This actually seems like a knee jerk reaction. It is probably a reasonable fear that some people will say "well lets burn more coal to stop this" but that doesn't stop it from being bad science. I think we are going to learn a not about the Sun in the next few years and I wouldn't be so sure about the outcome as this author seems to be.
I wouldn't panic but then I never do.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yup. But /. had to counter that bad story earlier that might have caused a few of the faithful to stray from the One True Religion and rags like Discover can be relied upon to provide rebuttal to any evidence that might bring AGW into question. Real scientists studying the the Sun come out with a "This is unusual, we didn't expect to see this. This might have consequences so we are putting out a press release so others can come look at our data." type report and a few days later we are reassured by purkinje that "any cooling that might come from this would be less than the global warming that's been going on."
We aren't told who purkinj is though, what his degree is in, who is financing him, etc. How many carbon credits or solar projects he is invested in, nothin. But we can trust him because he is Faithful. Also note that this guy seems to have a straight pipe to the submission queue and never participates in the comments.
Meanwhile the IPCC is in yet another fresh scandal where it is learned that they allowed a Greanpeace activist to be the lead author on a section of their report on alternative energy and repackage his own earlier work with zero peer review or oversight.
Democrat delenda est
I kinda wish that scientist wouldn't just ignore crazy theories (Leaving people to think, that they are just making it up) that are popular but come up with tests that can prove or disprove them. And show them the results.
For global warming don't just show us a graph that shows a line shooting up. When we come up with different things show it off, prove to us that is wrong. Science had been lucky in the past, the average Joe took everything face value. But with rapid media, and some big mistakes in "Science" people are more distrusting. It is time for the Science Institution to change and regain peoples trust again.
What? No. I don't think you have a good grasp of how science works.
Scientists should be doing science. If your theory isn't falsifiable then it isn't science and therefore not their field at all. If your theory is falsifiable but does not match the current data, then it may have already been disproved and there is no need to waste time on it unless you can show that the data is wrong somehow. In the instance of global warming, scientists have disproved a few crazy theories and they have shown the data, but crackpots do not listen to evidence; that's why they are crackpots in the first place. The fact that you either haven't sought out or accepted the available proof shows that you're not really much interested in the truth yourself. This is not the fault of scientists; they've upheld their half of the bargain. You have to be open to the evidence.
As for science making mistakes: that's an important part of the process. Science is all about trying things, making mistakes and correcting them. It's a slow progress toward the real truth, not a pre-determined truth to which facts are shaped to fit. Admitted mistakes aren't a sign that science isn't working; quite the opposite! That's how you know that science is trustworthy. Anyone who claims to have all the answers and never be wrong is the one you should be distrusting. Whether people recognize this is not the fault of, nor a problem for, scientists; willfully ignorant people will remain so, by definition, and it is entirely their own fault.
It was better the first time before the "fixing".
I am a scientist. You should be sceptical of all science - that's how science *works*.
However, as the GP points out, 'being sceptical' does not mean simply disagreeing and arguing your point with made up evidence or ignorance of the facts which is almost always the case with politically sensitive science issues (climate change, stem cell research, nuclear energy etc).
In the instance of global warming, scientists have disproved a few crazy theories and they have shown the data, but crackpots do not listen to evidence; that's why they are crackpots in the first place. The fact that you either haven't sought out or accepted the available proof shows that you're not really much interested in the truth yourself. This is not the fault of scientists; they've upheld their half of the bargain. You have to be open to the evidence.
Be careful to not confuse computer model output with data. The two are not the same thing. Also don't forget about a fundamental pillar of the scientific method, the null hypothesis.
The last paper I read on the subject couldn't disprove it. This was done in the lab because doing real experiments in the real atmosphere with real cosmic rays is very hard. The best they can do is measure cloud formation in relation to solar wind levels. It will take a full normal solar cycle to do this.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
He didn't assume "that the irradiance is absorbed linearly as a black body by the earth", you did. He pointed out very clearly that variations in solar irradiance simply don't vary as much as people seem to believe.
In fact, when you mention "atmospheric composition, oceanic current flow, heat from the core, drag from the moon and sun" all you manage is to explicitly mention other factors that have greater variation than solar irradiance does.
And yet you were modded informative? GP was insightful in pointing out people don't understand the variability in the sun's output is negligible compared to other factors, demonstrates that the temperature changes experienced *must* be caused by other variable factors butt is modded 'interesting'. Sheesh.
What I'm really griping about is you added nothing to the discussion. You say "People are also bad at understanding complex effects, as your post shows" but all you really demonstrate is that your reading comprehension is fairly limited. And then get modded informative. Sheesh