Solar Lull Could Cause Colder Winters In Europe

Taco Cowboy writes "Since September of last year scientists have been wondering what's happening to the Sun. It's supposed to have reached the peak of its 11-year cycle, but sunspot and flare activity remains much quieter than expected. Experts now think the recent cold snap that hit North America and the wet weather that hit part of Europe might be linked to the eerie quietness of the Sun. According to the BBC, solar activity hasn't been this low in 100 years, and if activity keeps dropping, it may reach levels seen during the 'Maunder Minimum,' an 'era of solar inactivity in the 17th Century [which] coincided with a period of bitterly cold winters in Europe.' It wouldn't have a big effect on global temperatures, just regional ones. Why? The sun's UV output drops during these lulls, and the decreased amount of UV light hitting the stratosphere would cause the jet stream to change course. Prof. Mike Lockwood says, 'These are large meanders in the jet stream, and they're called blocking events because they block off the normal moist, mild winds we get from the Atlantic, and instead we get cold air being dragged down from the Arctic and from Russia. These are what we call a cold snap... a series of three or four cold snaps in a row adds up to a cold winter. And that's quite likely what we'll see as solar activity declines.'"

Comments

Not the sun

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sun does not effect climate. Only carbon.

Only carbon.

Re:Not the sun

[rossdee]

The Sun is still working on turning Hydrogen into Helium
But it will get round to Carbon eventuallu

Re:Not the sun

[hey!]

Seriously, you have captured the essential mindset of the denialists: there can only be one cause for anything. That assumption underlies most of the denialist arguments.

One of the common one is, "Wasn't the Earth warmer in the past? Without industrial carbon emissions?" I've seen that trotted out by politicians against climate researchers, as if (a) that were news to them and (b) it had never occurred to them that something other than CO2 could drive climate change. The other favorite on the denialist hit parade is "carbon lagged warming in past warming periods." Again, they say this as if the climate scientists had never considered this, when the very information they're quoting *comes* from climate science.

Or how about this one: "Mars is warming too, and there's no carbon emissions on Mars."

These arguments are mind-boggling simple-minded, and they're all rooted in a simple, implicit proposition: CO2 either explains all warming episodes everywhere over all time, or it explains *none* of them.

Re:Not the sun

[sideslash]

Seriously, you have captured the essential mindset of the denialists: there can only be one cause for anything. That assumption underlies most of the denialist arguments.

Maybe it makes you feel good to think that, but the AGW skeptical material I've read certainly doesn't match that characterization. Maybe the fluff posted in the comments section on YouTube or Fox News or MSNBC etc.

Am I wrong? Why don't you link to a post in one of the major climate skeptic websites that shows this "can be only one cause for anything" attitude you describe. Or maybe you're just making stuff up in an attempt to portray your opponents in debate as fools.

Re:Not the sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not the "denialists" saying that CO2 is the only cause of climate change, idiot

Re:Not the sun

[Coolhand2120]

On the other hand the "alarmist" logic is: "we already know the cause of the warming, it is humans saturating the atmosphere with too much CO2, we just need to gather and/or create the evidence to support this theory". That's called inductive logic, and is just as unscientific as what you describe coming from the "denialists".

"Real" science comes from gathering evidence and basing your theories on the evidence gathered. You then determine what it might take to falsify your theory and try as hard as possible to falsify it.

All I see from the "alarmist" camp is people trying to support their theories at all costs, calling things causation where there is barely correlation, and making very little if any effort to falsify their theories. This behavior is more akin to religion than any sort of science.

Re:Not the sun

[garyoa1]

It can only get into carbon if it doesn't make too much helium. If it makes too much... it will float away! :::gasp:::

Re:Not the sun

[sideslash]

People in general are good at making fools out of themselves. That is why Doing Science Right (tm) involves disclosing your source data, frequently blurting out to the world everything that may possibly be wrong with your approach, and placing trust in an experiment or model's results only as far as commensurate with the demonstrated reliability of those results.

For anyone keeping score, several of the alarmists have made fools of themselves as well. James Hansen comes to mind as an example of a cargo cult scientist.

Re:Not the sun

[bunratty]

How is that unscientific? Warming caused by excess CO2 in the atmosphere was predicted long before it was ever observed. Isn't that the scientific method, coming up with a hypothesis that makes predictions, then testing the predictions against observations? If we had not observed the warming, you'd have a point, but we've seen not only warming, but also melting ice and sea level rise.

Re:Not the sun

[TubeSteak]

On the other hand the "alarmist" logic is: "we already know the cause of the warming, it is humans saturating the atmosphere with too much CO2, we just need to gather and/or create the evidence to support this theory". That's called inductive logic, and is just as unscientific as what you describe coming from the "denialists".

You seem to be creating a strawman for the express purpose of knocking it down.

These "alarmist" scientists are the same type who told us that CFCs were creating a hole in the ozone layer.
We went to great lengths to eliminate CFCs, then lo and behold, the ozone layer fixed itself.

"Real" science comes from gathering evidence and basing your theories on the evidence gathered. You then determine what it might take to falsify your theory and try as hard as possible to falsify it.

Holy shit! Just like what happened with the ozone layer!
The Ozone Hole Alarmists were right!

All I see from the "alarmist" camp is people trying to support their theories at all costs, calling things causation where there is barely correlation, and making very little if any effort to falsify their theories. This behavior is more akin to religion than any sort of science.

Then you haven't looked very hard.
The weight of "Real" science is behind the "alarmists" and not at all behind the "denialists".

Re:Not the sun

[Orp]

On the other hand the "alarmist" logic is: "we already know the cause of the warming, it is humans saturating the atmosphere with too much CO2, we just need to gather and/or create the evidence to support this theory". That's called inductive logic, and is just as unscientific as what you describe coming from the "denialists".

"Real" science comes from gathering evidence and basing your theories on the evidence gathered. You then determine what it might take to falsify your theory and try as hard as possible to falsify it.

All I see from the "alarmist" camp is people trying to support their theories at all costs, calling things causation where there is barely correlation, and making very little if any effort to falsify their theories. This behavior is more akin to religion than any sort of science.

False equivalency is false.

Guess what? A lot of the "alarmist" are the same scientists doing the research. Sure, people get attached to theories, but do you realize that the best possible thing to happen to a scientist is for him/her to make a discovery that tosses the widely accepted hypotheses on their head? In other words, if a scientist did a rigorously peer reviewed study which indicated that, say, it's a reduction in neutrinos from the sun somehow, oh, say tweaking aerosol concentrations, leading to a strong causal relationship between this phenomenon and observed global warming - while also showing that the greenhouse effect of CO2 was much less of a factor than previously thought - that person would be fricking king of the scientific world.

The tired repeated bleatings of non-scientists who have not spent their careers repeatedly getting their work shredded by reviewers [this being the norm, not the exception] on the path to eventual publication do absolutely zilch to move things forward regarding understand what's really going on. The simple-minded idea that climate science is some sort of "alarmists versus skeptics" battle is laughable; this false equivalency between two imagined camps, each claiming to know the truth, is entirely imagined by ignorant people. Unless you've actually done science and gotten your work published in decent journals, these opinions mean absolute diddlyshit; nothing more than mental masturbation splooging text on the screen, masquerading as informed debate.

Re:Not the sun

[hey!]

Just to make it clear to folks who haven't followed this, the "ozone hole" is not a fixed feature of the Antarctic; it's like weather, it grows and shrinks in different years based on local atmospheric conditions, causing many to have declared premature victory. However the ozone levels in the Antarctic have stabilized and are expected to recover to pre-industrial levels over the coming decades.

This is not a case of the problem "fixing itself", it's a case of people deciding to take effective action by banning ozone depleting chemicals (thank you President Reagan).

Re:Not the sun

[amiga3D]

No no no. Only denialists are fools. Global warming proponents are superior intelligent beings who are never wrong and always have the answers if only all the illiterate peons would listen to them everything would be okay.

Re:Not the sun

[hey!]

I haven't been around that long. But from what I remember the weather is, once again, as cold and wet as it was when I was a kid.

This brings up a very important point. "Global warming" is a phenomenon where the atmosphere -- particularly the troposphere -- has more energy. That doesn't mean that that the climate in your neck of the woods is necessarily going to be warmer and drier.

We're talking about a 0.6 degree C average temperature increase or thereabouts in the last 50 years. If the climate in your home town was 0.6 C warmer, *you wouldn't even notice*. From the point of view of whether you need to point on a sweater when you go outside it is meaningless.

But if you consider there's something like 10^21 cubic meters of troposphere that's a lot of energy

Consider the Coriolis force; you can't *feel* it. It makes no difference whether you walk east or north, the effect is too small to measure. But it has an enormous effect on the atmosphere, because the atmosphere is huge. The same can be said for a 1 C increase in temperature; it's not much hotter, but it's a vast amount of energy that affects the movement of huge air masses. Those changes could well make your neck of the woods colder, because air (e.g. the polar vortex) is moving more often in ways it only did rarely years ago. On the other hand other places (e.g. Greenland and Alaska) may be experiencing unusual warm patterns. Average those anomalies out over the entire globe, and you get very slight global temperature increases out of a patchwork of extremes.

So the kind of mental test you are proposing ("is it warmer outside my house than it would have been thirty years ago?") has very little bearing on "global warming". A), it's not *global*. B) globally averaged, temperatures aren't very much warmer under "global warming".

Re:Not the sun

[TapeCutter]

Reagan also pushed for and won an international "cap and trade" treaty for sulphur emissions which has dramatically reduced "acid rain" around the globe during the past couple of decades. Thatcher was his BFF at the time and I think it's no accident she had the same ideas, she was after all an Oxford trained chemist and was the first world leader to speak out about AGW. By today's standards Regan (and Thatcher) would be considered "too soft on greenies" to lead the republican party, kind of amazing what corporate FUD can do to peoples attitudes in such a short time.

Re:Not the sun

[TapeCutter]

Or there could be something else causing global warming

Thanks captain obvious, here's the IPCC attribution graph. Aside from the predicted warming, numerous other phenomena have been predicted by climate models and then observed in nature, eg: "stratospheric cooling" and "polar amplification".

The last nail in the "something else" coffin was during the 50's when spectrometers became sensitive enough to see that the CO2 absorption spectra was interleaved with the H2O spectra rather that blocked by it. Back then AGW was detectable but the only reason they were looking at all was due to their inability to explain the magnitude of the ice age climate changes from orbital wobbles alone. The original warming prediction was made ~1900, both the 1900 and 1950's predictions did not take into account the growth rate of the FF burning industry, the original predicted a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 concentrations in about 3kyrs not 300yrs.

Re:Not the sun

[KeensMustard]

Maybe it makes you feel good to think that, but the AGW skeptical material I've read certainly doesn't match that characterization. Maybe the fluff posted in the comments section on YouTube or Fox News or MSNBC etc.

And of course, on Slashdot, where this argument and it's derivatives (e.g. referencing the medieval warm period or little ice age as evidence against CO2 induced warming) , is made multiple times in any discussion about climate here. Funny thing is, these remarks are never corrected by the more enlightened denialists. Why is it that you, recognising this fallacy for what it is (and more power to you for seeing that), don't step in and correct these erroneous arguments when they occur? Don't you see the damage this does to the credibility of the argument you think is true? Or do you think that fallacy can coexist comfortably with fact and help promote fact?

And also: If these arguments are not the true doctrine of denialism, what are the demonstrable facts that underpin your argument?

Am I wrong? Why don't you link to a post in one of the major climate skeptic websites that shows this "can be only one cause for anything" attitude you describe.

You ought to be aware that people in general are not going to know who or where these websites are, since it is not a matter of who but what -

(a) What (according to denialists) is the cause of the recent warming

(b) What are the independently verifiable observations that underpin this hypothesis?

Nevertheless: Here are 3 articles by denialist supremo Anthony Watts, who claims his site www.wattsupwithat.com is "the world's most read site on climate".

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/08/the-truth-about-we-have-to-get-rid-of-the-medieval-warm-period/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/31/new-paper-shows-medieval-warm-period-was-global-in-scope/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/18/remarkable-correlation-of-arctic-sea-ice-to-solar-cycle-length/

All 3 articles rely on the fallacy you say is not mainstream denialism.

Or maybe you're just making stuff up in an attempt to portray your opponents in debate as fools.

Is there actually debate?

Re:Not the sun

[bunratty]

I clearly heard the congressman say "When you see warming, why do you automatically assume it's manmade?" and "If it was warmer during the Medieval period, how could we blame it on CO2 emissions?" He's asking questions, but they're loaded questions. They make a presumption that scientists automatically assume warming is manmade and all due to CO2 emissions. He not saying AGW is not happening, but he's implying that arguments that suggest CO2 emissions are causing warming are dumb by the way he's asking those questions. He doesn't sound like he's honestly trying to learn the science, but rather he seems to have a chip on his shoulder.

Re:Not the sun

[bunratty]

You're referring to the temperature escalator. That argument uses cherry picking to throw away most of the temperature data to arrive at that conclusion. It's one of the tactics of denialism.

Re:Not the sun

[sideslash]

No, he's just raising questions also raised by scientists skeptical of AGW alarmism. They are good questions. Also, it is possible to believe that CO2 has a greenhouse gas warming effect on earth without subscribing to climate alarmism -- the positive feedback loop aspect of the alarmist models has been by no means validated. In fact, various models have arguably been discredited by the last few decades' measurements. Anyway.

Re:Not the sun

[KeensMustard]

Just wanted to mention Alfred Wegener, [berkeley.edu] the man who proposed continental drift, only to be dismissed for nearly 50 years before being accepted.

Yes, excellent contrast - Wegener proposed continental drift to explain some observations that could not otherwise be explained. His theory was eventually accepted. Just like the theory of greenhouse gases, which Tyndall/Fourier proposed to explain observations that were otherwise unexplained - a theory that was at first controversial, but later accepted. In contrast, the standard denialist diatribe does not (a) explain any observations, but is actually contradicted by observation (b) does not provide a better explanation to observed phenomena compared to the default (null) hypothesis.

Or, you can read about Barry Marshal [discovermagazine.com] who discovered that the bacterium H. pylori caused peptic ulcer disease, leading him to win a Nobel Prize in 2005. he published it in the 80's and if wasn't widely accepted until some 10 years later.

Yes, excellent contrast. Marshal performed various experiments and published his data which was independently verifiable and therefore his theory, which subsumed various other proposals as to the causes of stomach ulcers, was eventually accepted - following a fairly standard scientific methodology. In contrast, climate denialists refuse to show any data, or even, fully elaborate on an alternative theory as to the causes of the current warming, have no data or methodology that can be independently verified. There is no obvious reason to take them seriously.

Re:Not the sun

[KeensMustard]

Asking why they think that, is actually OK, even if you don't prefer the way the question was worded.

Sure - in some circumstances, being merely ignorant on a subject (in this case AGW) is a fairly neutral stance. if you are a 5 year old, or illiterate, then being ignorant is probably understandable. Ignorance is not really what we are looking for from policy makers, when it concerns subjects we need them to make policy on.

But don't you think it is odd, if he is genuinely interested in a subject that he did not read up on the basics before discussing it at the policy level? This just seems a bit irresponsible, to be wasting the scientists, not to mention the committees, time asking for a introductory run through on climate science.

Re:Not the sun

[riverat1]

Too many people on both sides pay way too much attention to weather events such as you outline. No individual weather event can ever be absolutely attributed to climate change. Climate is the carrier wave that the signal/noise of weather rides on. When climate changes it changes the odds on particular weather events happening. But only by looking at the events over long periods of time can you observe the change in odds. Each individual weather event is only another datum for the climate scientists.

OB: Global warming

[rueger]

Aha! Weather in some places that's colder or warmer than others! With stuff happening on the Sun.

Obviously Global Warming is a fiction created by neo-Luddite Green party members.

And communists. Yeah. Communists.

Re:OB: Global warming

[bill_mcgonigle]

Weather in some places that's colder or warmer than others!

Truly unprecedented in history.

Regardless of the predictive value of our models, let's raise some taxes.

Re:OB: Global warming

[Ichijo]

Carter and Clinton both reduced the public debt.

If, for some reason, you think that those you've personally chosen to lead the country won't do as you've requested by using your tax money to reduce the public debt, then you might favor a revenue-neutral carbon tax. If the tax is $1 per gallon of gas, and if the average person uses 500 gallons per year, then the everyone would receive a $500 check from the government every year, no matter how much gas they've used. Again, it would encourage people to emit less carbon while creating no hardship for the average person, so it would reduce carbon emissions without costing the average person anything, Who doesn't like a deal that benefits everybody while costing nobody anything?

For the investment minded

[xtal]

Good chance to make some money on rising energy costs. ...cause nobody wants to build nuclear plants, but nobody likes being cold, either.

Re:global cooling

[Immerman]

So would a second "Maunder Minimum" now be a good thing because it buys us a little more time to get our act together? Or a bad thing because it lets us keep our heads in the sand even longer so that we get hit all the harder and faster when the sun returns to its normal behavior?

Not that we have solar observations going back long enough to detect long-term cycles, but another 50+ year minimum starting up now when it could make it much easier to avoid the worst permanent climate changes would be almost enough to get me believing in intelligent intervention.

Re:global cooling

[ColdWetDog]

Your argument presupposes that we can manipulate our behavior and environment cohesively and quickly enough to effect a useful change that would - well, what would it do? Allow increased population growth? Allow for better standards of living for humans? The rest of the biosphere?

Given the inertia of 7 billion humans and our imperfect knowledge of some very, very complex systems, I'm not at all sure that anything we can do will actually help.

We could ...

[PPH]

... offset these cold snaps by generating additional greenhouse gasses and injecting them into the atmosphere.

I, for one, am willing to do my part.

Told you so.

[Heraklit]

Winter *is* coming.

Maunder Minimum

[Taco Cowboy]

Just a link to add for the " Mauder Minimum " that was mentioned in TFA -

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml

Hope this helps !

Re:Maunder Minimum

[Taco Cowboy]

The Maunder Minimum is the degree of deviation from the white line allowed before the trooper cites you for being drunk.

I understand you are trying to make light of the subject at hand, but anyway, please refer to the below graph for the real Maunder Minimum as refer to the extraordinarily quietness of the Sun, as had happened back in the 17th century -

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_yearly.jpg

Re:Maunder Minimum

[fyngyrz]

Thanks, c/Taco. I know what it is. I was just possessed of an urge to start typing when I shouldn't have.

I'm a big fan of solar weather, and to the extent we can suss it out, solar history. Also, ham radio operator, and the state of the sun is the first thing I check in the morning.

And here I thought...

[Em Adespoton]

... that the Solarian civil war had finally ended and the sun was at peace once more.

Before this turns into a derpfest...

[Orp]

The NCAR link is probably the best for relating this to climate change:

So could a lengthy drop in solar output be enough to counteract human-caused climate change? Recent studies at NCAR and elsewhere have estimated that the total global cooling effect to be expected from reduced TSI during a grand minimum such as Maunder might be in the range of 0.1 to 0.3 Celsius (0.18 to 0.54 Fahrenheit). A 2013 study confirms the findings. This compares to an expected warming effect of 3.0C (5.4F) or more by 2100 due to greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, even a grand solar minimum might only be enough to offset one decade of global warming. Moreover, since greenhouse gases linger in the atmosphere, the impacts of those added gases would continue after the end of any grand minimum.

So perhaps a serious lull in solar activity could put some feeble brakes on global warming, slowing it down... temporarily, only to charge back when the sun gets over its issues.

I'm a meteorologist, not a climate guy, but I find the hypothesis that the current solar lull is responsible for the recent cold snaps in the northern hemisphere to be extremely dubious. Much more tenuous than the hypothesis that the meandering jet stream is happening due to the reduction in the north/south temperature gradient due from a reduction of Arctic ice cover, which itself is physically feasible but still not shown very conclusively.

The best way to get a grip on these issues would be to run many, many ensembles of weather models and coaxing out statistical links. And this is where weather/climate modeling is going, for good reasons... but as all the armchair slashdot climatologists will (perhaps rightly) point out, models have issues... but they are getting much better and ensembles help a lot to provide a handle on the probability that forcing A is causing response B.

Maunder Minimum

[fyngyrz]

The Maunder Minimum is the degree of deviation from the white line allowed before the trooper cites you for being drunk. Even without exceeding the Maunder Minimum, poor performance here combined with "blowing an .08", a (very low) standard for fellatio (the theory being that you'd have to be *really* drunk to perform that poorly*), can combine to annoy the trooper into issuing a ticket. Tomorrow, we're going to re-discover "Boyle's Laws of Gasses", which dictates performance of glassware with insufficient bong fluid. Now put away your books; time for a pop quiz: Coke, or Pepsi?

* Scale normalized 0.0~~1.0 as per International Standards Req. 4:20, para 69, lines for two.

Re:global cooling

[bunratty]

Ah, finally the real objection to believing in AGW comes to light... you're afraid of your political opponents gaining power. But just for a moment consider that we may need to actually reduce carbon dioxide emissions for legitimate reasons. Can you think of a way that we could do that without the commie pinkos taking over? Let's get creative.

Re:global cooling

[Immerman]

Greenhouse gas heat capture is reasonably well understood, even if many of the secondary effects are still being discovered. While completely unrealistic, eliminating carbon emissions tomorrow would do quite a bit to stabilize the climate, if we were very, very lucky the global climate wouldn't change much by the end of the century and after that the crisis situation would largely be over and global climates would likely remain reasonably stable thereafter. We're probably past the point of getting the climate back to the state it was in a century ago without massive geoengineering, but we can still work towards mitigating the changes.

As for the benefits - a big one would be a biosphere not confronted by a second major extinction event to exacerbate the one were already in the midst of (human hunting, fishing, farming, and (more recently), toxic pollution has devastated the biosphere over the last few millenia). We're going to be hard-pressed to sustain the ~10 billion people the global population is expected to stabilize at by mid-century without any climate troubles. If our farmland is being rendered non-viable by climate shifts that problem will be much, much worse. For example it's looking likely that without serious changes in climate policy in the near term, within a century or two corn mostly won't be a viable US crop except in the northernmost states. Canada will have become much more suitable, but that will mean devastating ecologically important wilderness areas, and while farms are fairly easy to move, you can't just up and move all the processing plants and other infrastructure, and refitting a century worth of infrastructure to process whatever crops, if any, are suited to the new climate is liable to be very expensive if even possible. Now imagine that happening to every crop, everywhere on the planet, simultaneously. Extremely expensive. Not to mention that during the transition period you're going to have vast regions of agricultural land that has become non-viable for one crop but not yet viable for another. And we'll also have all those more extreme weather patterns to contend with as the forcing factors from polar temperature differences weaken and stop forcing the weather to follow predictable patterns from year to year. We're already seeing the polar wind belts becoming weaker and more meandering, which allows weather patterns that would once have swept across the country to get trapped in the eddy currents to cause severe protracted storms in some places and droughts in others.

Global famine is looking like a very real possibility, and that would likely destabilize world peace more thoroughly than anything we've seen in centuries. Peace is one of those luxuries you strive for once not starving to death has been taken care of.

So basically yes to all of your possibilities. But we're not talking about an increase from today, we're talking about avoiding, as much as possible, a massive decrease in all of them. It's looking like some decrease is inevitable - estimates are that we're already harvesting the global ecosystem (farming, fishing, logging, etc) at a rate ~40% higher than is sustainable (we're "spending the capital" and doing long-term damage to environmental productivity). Getting efficient we could possibly support 10 billion people in comfort sustainably, but that's a tall order, and probably not even remotely possible if climate change are powerfully undermine our productivity. And what exactly do you suppose will happen in the intervening time if the global population is forced to be reduced by 1/2 or 3/4 within a few generations?

The solar minimum versus carbon emissions

[oculusprime]

The original post is about changes in solar emissions, which certainly could have (and has had) an effect on climate. So why is this conversation degenerating into the "controversy" over whether burning fossil fuels could be altering the earth's climate. Look, Carbon Dioxide IS a greenhouse gas. No scientist disputes that if we just keep shoving the stuff in the atmosphere forever, eventually things will warm up. The only question is whether or not we are putting enough up there right now to have this effect. So lets do some simple math: 1 gallon of gasoline requires about 100 tons of biomass. 1 barrel of oil makes 20 gallons of gasoline. The world uses 85,000,000 barrels of oil per day. Doing the simple math, we use the equivalent of 170,000,000,000 tons of biomass per day. The earth's current biomass is estimated at 560,000,000,000 tons. So we burn the equivalent of 1/3 of all the earth's current biomass every single day. I find this pretty compelling. Changes in solar emissions may cover this up or even counteract it for a while, but eventually, if we keep shooting carbon into the atmosphere year after year, we won't be able to count on a solar minimum to compensate for it...

Re:Northern Hemisphere bias

[Vinegar Joe]

Europe hasn't seen any real winter yet either, just lots and lots of storms ... birds think it's spring already.

European swallows think it's Spring? What is the opinion of African swallows?

Re:global cooling

[cheesybagel]

Coal is made up of dead plant matter. So the carbon was available and in the environment at one point. I don't like coal power plants either but not because of CO2. I am more concerned about fly ash, coal mining deaths, carbon monoxide poisoning and things like that. CO2 doesn't even compute. There are alternatives like nuclear. Yes even wind with pumped storage hydro is a partial alternative. However I could care less about the amount of 'fossil fuels' we burn. The end state of the universe if we continue is heat death as entropy increases. The Sun itself will burn out at one point. So talk about 'renewables' is a misnomer. Its a matter of timescales of availability. No resource is infinite since the universe is finite.

climate change scepticism = denial

[matbury]

Just FUD:

Let's face it, how can anyone reasonably claim to be sceptical about man made climate change? The evidence is there for all to see and the energy companies have done their best, with their unlimited resources, to pick it apart. Looks like a pretty strong hypothesis to me. If anything, they're probably being way too conservative about their predictions.

BTW, Prof. Mike Lockwood has explicitly stated that he things man made CO2 emissions are the main driver of climate change. In one statement, he says that solar activity is linked with variability (and it's not even conclusive because apparently sometimes they seem to go in opposite directions), not overall climate change, which is a big difference.

Re:global cooling

[the eric conspiracy]

Another denialist myth, misquoted.

Al Gore bought some waterfront property. In CA. On a hill. It's very unlikely the sea level will rise some 80' during his lifetime considering the expected rate is less than 1" per year.

Re:global cooling

[serviscope_minor]

So talk about 'renewables' is a misnomer. Its a matter of timescales of availability. No resource is infinite since the universe is finite.

The mental hoops you're prepared to jump through to convince yourself that there's nothing wrong are quire remarkable.

Anyway: renewable isn't a misnomer. With coal, once it's dug up it's all gone. The time until it's all gone depeneds only on how much you take. With solar, the same is available whatever you do. that's what is meant by renewable: not that it's infinite.

You really do seem to be the King of Straw. You seem to enjoy creating an army of straw men to slaughter.