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Sun Not a Significant Driver of Climate Change
damn_registrars writes "Scientists from Edinburgh, Scotland have recently published a study based on 1,000 years of climate data. They have compared the effects of differing factors including volcanic activity, solar activity, and greenhouse gases to find which has the most profound effect on climate. They have concluded that the driving factor since 1900 has been greenhouse gases."
In related news, angered Sun goes supernova, replies "I'm not a significant what!?"
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Yeah, ever since Oracle bought them . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I see you did not actually look at the Nature paper they published. The title is: "Small influence of solar variability on climate over the past millennium". The key word is variability. As in variations in solar activity aren't a major driver in climate change, not the Sun itself.
In other words, you are the loon.
Do you know how derivatives work? Probably not, so I'll remind you. The derivative of a function is its rate of change. The derivative of a constant is always zero, no matter how big that constant is. So if you have a small function that's rapidly fluctuating, it can have a big derivative, whereas a really large signal that's barely changing at all can have a small derivative.
Yes, almost all of the Earth's energy comes from the Sun. But that doesn't matter, because we're talking about climate change. Is the derivative of the Sun's output power big enough to explain the derivative of the Earth's temperature, and are the two at all correlated? Some people who are much, MUCH smarter than you, have looked at the data, and decided that the answer is no.
As an aside, this is why math education is important even for people not interested in STEM fields. You can't think logically when you don't understand such basic concepts.
Exactly.
The pause in temperature rise has been written off as merely the effect of solar minimum. Now they would like to erase any effect of solar input. Have the cake and eat it too! Maybe the cake is a lie after all.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
How did the world warm up and cool down before then? Perhaps that is relevant?
Over geologic times, lots of things have affected Earth's climate. On astronomical time scales the Sun has an impact: as it ages the Sun emits more radiation: it becomes warmer. But not on human timescales, or even moderate geological time scales. 600 million years ago the Sun was about 4% cooler. That means over the last 15 million years the Sun's radiation has probably increased by about 0.1%. Oceanic circulation has a major role: as continents move around they alter how the oceans transport and circulate heat. Volcanism also has a significant impact, but that impact is tricky to work out: increased CO2 adds to the greenhouse effect, but other volcanic emissions like dust and SO2 have a net cooling effect on the surface of the Earth. The Deccan traps, for example, is believed to have caused significant cooling during their formation.
Life, on long time scales, also causes an effect, Much of the petroleum the industrial revolution is burning and adding to current CO2 levels came primarily from the Carboniferous period. During that time Earth had a warm and humid climate promoting the development of huge rainforests worldwide. These plants photosynthesized so much carbon out of the atmosphere that CO2 levels dropped from something like 1400ppm to 400ppm. That caused the climate to cool significantly over a few hundred million years until it became colder and drier. The rainforests died off, and with the rainforests gone atmospheric CO2 began to rise again, increasing temperatures again.
Actually, over Earth's history the largest contributors to climate change have been atmospheric greenhouse gases, oceanic circulation currents, and the configuration of the continents. Two of the three are things human activity is demonstrated to be capable of altering on timescales many times faster than they have changed in Earth's history.
If I'm driving on the freeway, holding the gas pedal steady, and suddenly notice the car is speeding up, I don't think "gee, it must be the small fluctuations in the pressure I'm applying to the pedal, since the engine is the primary source of energy". I start looking at other factors, like a downward slope.
Do you understand? Of course not, because that would mean admitting you were wrong about this issue. If all the scientists in the world can't convince, no logic will ever get through.
I don't need to calculate shit. The scientists did, and they're better at this than I am.
You don't know what you're talking. Seriously, you have NO FUCKING CLUE. Do you tell the contractors what thickness screws to use in your roof? Do you tell your electrician what gauge wire he should run? Do you tell your doctor which drug he should prescribe? So why the fuck do you think you can tell scientists how to better do their job?
This idiot culture, where we glorify "folksy wisdom" and condemn "book-learnin" is going to be the death of us.
Yep. Science is now for true believers. The method has been abandoned. Anyone who disagrees or is skeptical is to be ridiculed and destroyed. Yay fascism, boo debate.
Honest skepticism is important to Science: scientific theories are considered reliable not because of the strong arguments in favor of them, but because they survive scientific challenge.
But its equally important to recognize that just because skepticism is important to Science, doesn't make all skeptical commentary equally valid, and more importantly it doesn't make all sides equally valid. Its important for scientists to continue to question General Relativity. But when the rubber meets the road, I'm trusting Relativity over any other skeptical invention intended to overturn it. Relativity has survived a lot of challenges. Upstart competitors haven't.
Climatology is an imperfect Science, and its being refined all the time. But Relativity didn't overthrow Newton: Newton is so well tested and established nothing is going to overturn Newtonian gravity because it explains too much of the world too accurately. Relativity *refines* Newtonian gravity in extreme situations Newton was never checked against. All competitors to Einstein are also competitors to Newton: we all know Newton was close enough in most cases: its extraordinarily unlikely anyone is going to discover a normal situation where Newton just plain fails. Anyone wanting to replace Einstein has to not only do better than Relativity, but also better than Newton. Similarly, Climatology is being refined, but the odds are not high that its going to simply fall apart one day. Thinking that will happen represents a complete misunderstanding of how Science itself works.
That's exactly what will happen. A while back, a friend of mine described the Five Stages Of Climate Change Denial:
1. It's not happening.
2. If it is happening, humans have nothing to do with it.
3. If it's happening and we're causing it, we can't do anything about it because that would cost too much.
4. It's happening and we're causing it, but that's a good thing.
5. If those damned liberals hadn't interfered with all their regulations, the market would have taken care of this problem!
Mostly we see #1-3 right now, but I've seen #4 too, and I'm sure #5 will be along any time.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Scientists from Edinburgh, Scotland have recently published a study showing that the sun is not a significant driver of recent climate change.
Of course they think that - there is no sun in Edinburgh.
Or you could learn to read what they are actually saying, and stop listening to the made up crap you invent in your head.
Variations in solar output is not the key driver behind climate variation since 1900AD. That's it. Note the decided lack of dismissal of the sun as an energy source, or of the possibility that the sun could have been the primary driver of climate change. People suggested it, so they checked a millennium's worth of proxy data, and they showed a marked disconnect between the trends in solar and climate activity that appears in the last 100 years. This reconfirms similar studies over the last 20 years that have shown the same thing. Science.
The UK getting record snowfall despite AGWers claiming the UK wouldn't see snow after 2008.
It goes back and forth. In 2000, they were saying that AGW would get rid of snow. In 2008, they were saying the snow was a result of AGW.
No doubt you will see a reversal again when there is no snow.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Agree that the Sun is the source of all the energy in the climate. The composition of the earth's Atmosphere, oceans and crust, have been likened to the "thermostat" in that they can absorb or reflect that energy to varying degrees.
CO2 has been a major factor in climate for a looooong time, at least as far back as the Cambrian explosion since CO2 is what melted "snowball" earth prior to the Cambrian explosion. CO2 can be both a "feedback" (melting permafrost) or a "forcing" (volcanos, human emissions). When acting as a feedback it always amplifies the direction of the change. We have known about CO2's major role since the 1950's when improved spectrometers finally pinned down it's role in the ice ages, ( Milankovich cycles alone cannot account for the magnitude of the changes observed in the ice ages).
Our best estimates of an important metric called "climate sensitivity" come from Fourier's formula and paleoclimatology (aka-geology). Fourier's formula alone gives ~1.5C rise for a doubling of CO2 but that assumes Earth is an ideal black body, which it is not. Adding geological evidence to estimate the feedback component brings it up to ~3.0C, the error bars are between 1.5c and 4.5C for a doubling of CO2, with the upper limit being far less certain then the lower. The uncertainty at the upper end is due to the lack of knowledge on things like frozen methane in deep ocean beds. The recent IPCC report downgraded the risk from sudden "tipping points" so the current high end estimate of climate sensitivity (whatever it is exactly) has a smidge more certainty than the previous report.
Disclaimer, IANACS, just a layman with a 30yr interest in the subject, don't rely on what my aging neurons tell you, WP is your friend for climate facts and trivia and I'm more than happy to be (politely) corrected.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It was autumn, and the Indians on the remote reservation asked their new Chief if the winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was an Indian Chief in a modern society, he had never been taught the old secrets, and when he looked at the sky, he couldn't tell what the weather was going to be. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he replied to his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect wood to be prepared. But also being a practical leader, after several days he got an idea. He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked, "Is the coming winter going to be cold?" "It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold indeed," the meteorologist at the weather service responded. So the Chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more wood in order to be prepared. One week later he called the National Weather Service again. "Is it going to be a very cold winter?" "Yes," the man at National Weather Service again replied, "it's going to be a very cold winter." The Chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of wood they could find. Two weeks later he called the National Weather Service again. "Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?" "Absolutely," the man replied. "It's going to be one of the coldest winters ever." "How can you be so sure?" the Chief asked. The weather man replied, "The Indians are collecting wood like crazy."