Well, yes, but the point of the previous document is that we aren't even thinking of sending humans into space to actually live, to colonize. At least not yet.
Much as I adore the idea of colonizing the entire Universe, putting humans on each and every planet and surrounding stars with Dyson spheres and filling them and eventually using advanced nuclear technology to transform nearly all of the mass that isn't actually in stars into human flesh in the form of exponentially more babies, it really isn't fair to compare space and the imperial colonial expansion of Europe into the New World in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Look at the differences:
New world habitable (indeed, inhabited). Solar system not habitable. Any of it. People didn't colonize Antarctica back then (and still haven't, not really) in spite of all of that absolutely free land and no doubt all sorts of valuable natural resources, gold and all that. Not to mention Cthulhu's lair, somewhere under the ice. Antarctica is an absolute vacation spot compared to, say, the moon, or Europa, or Venus. Penguins just love it.
New world chock full of instantly exploitable and enormously valuable treasure. Gold. Silver. Tobacco. Lots of natives to enslave. Fruits and vegetables and meats. Lumber. All of which were profitable to ship home, even after paying for a ship, crew, and the not insubstantial risks. Solar system: the Moon could be made of solid platinum and it probably wouldn't be profitable to get there, mine it, and ship it home. And it's not. And there isn't any tobacco, native women to roll cigars on the thighs of, fruit, vegetables, meat, lumber. Hell, there isn't any air or water. The only idea that I've heard that is even in principle viable as an export from the Moon is He3 to use as nuclear fuel -- any decade now, right after somebody figures out how to burn He3 as nuclear fuel in a way that is superior to e.g. readily available and cheap Deuterium (which we can't burn either). The Moon is so close, it's like in orbit. Mars, the Asteroids, etc are simply astronomically expensive, even compared to the moon.
New World produced a harvest of knowledge (indirectly, not the point of any of the voyages to settle or exploit it). The Solar system is also producing knowledge, but the previous post pointed out that it is cheaper and smarter to harvest it with robots and computers than to send meatbags that piss blood and die horribly in a vacuum. Or in 500 degree sulphuric acid at high pressure, or in supercold hydrogen and methane and ammonia at higher pressure or...
The New World was a gangbusters place to send criminals, second through tenth sons, religious wanks who didn't want to be Catholic like everybody else, Catholics who wanted to make all of those cigar rolling island women (and men, and kids) into freshly "converted" Catholic slaves to dig all of that gold for you and work your plantations. It was inexpensive (relative to space!) to get there -- a few tens of families could pool enough money to hire a ship -- and when you got there you could be almost instantly self-sufficient, except when you weren't because of a drought or something and died horribly. Space requires the surplus income of an entire wealthy nation to send a tiny handful of humans into near Earth orbit, and space makes the worst drought ever experienced on Earth seem like a humid wet rainstorm. Nobody wants to or can afford to go live in space -- if they could, it would be chock full of Mormons, the Amish, Texans, and other disaffected groups that don't want to live in modern society where they might have to see gay people holding hands or pay taxes.
Not exactly comparable. Even less comparable to the westward expansion of the 1800s, where a single family could often afford the trip, and could forage or buy food when they got wherever.
Tell you what. You invent a spaceship that costs about as much as a house (that's the limit of sing
Um, I think that they are more interested in software to help predict the weather in Farmville. So you'd better start working on a virtual Earth simulator that can be virtually photographed by a virtual satellite to make virtual predictions about the virtual weather. And don't forget to include the effects of global warming and the inevitable flooding of Farmville. And make sure that you make the virtual sun go nova sometime in 2012 so that the weather report is "Hot, very hot" as Farmville is turned into the wisp of incandescent virtual plasma that it so richly deserves to be...
Ooo, what a good idea! I've quit WoW (many times) because e-crack is bad for children and health and sleep and jobs and significant other relationships, but putting it on a stand in front of a treadmill makes it exercise and virtuous. Better yet make the treadmill drive a generator and make the generator drive the laptop! Now it's even green!
Sure, not so great for fine motor control, moving a mouse and clicking on things in realtime while jogging, but that just increases the challenge...
But enough about WoW. Diablo III is around the corner...
You mean aside from their many-times-a-day global photographs of the weather of the world, available on almost any weather site?
For example: http://classic.wunderground.com/tropical/ and scroll down to the latest atlantic still photograph. If you wait too long, BTW, you'll get infrared by default -- you only get clouds per se during daylight so that you can see them.
Or then, there are the many military satellites that can take amazingly high resolution pictures of the surface almost anywhere, to the point where sunbathing nude in your back yard is a chancy proposition if you really don't want anybody to see your ass...
There are, however, ways for even amateurs to get a camera "into space". The traditional one is to buy a weather balloon and use it to haul your camera to 20+ miles, at which point the earth looks pretty much like "earth from space" -- black sky, curvature, clouds. There are some lovely pictures that have been taken this way if you google for them.
Isn't it easier to just not load Windows, not use Windows, not need AV like Windows, and use an operating system that doesn't have a registry?
Just a thought... although I agree, if you install and then do not use Windows it will remain clean and fresh, well, almost forever.
Oh, you mean you want to USE the operating system? Well, that's not recommended. Of course you'll get infected and sooner or later break things if you actually use it.
rgb
(My own favorite way to keep Windows clean is to run it in a VM, with the image locked. Get a virus, just reboot. Every now and then, unlock it long enough to let a windows update happen and lock it again. But then, Windows is a really excellent application to run under, say, Linux....:-)
...and I, for one, will welcome our bug-eyed monster overlords. After all, this is obviously the light halo of an extraterrestrial FTL spaceship, not a "missile" at all...
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...;-)
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.
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
Clearly you have an idea of what a grand solar minimum is -- the Maunder and Sporer minima being fairly "recent" examples. Grand maxima are less well known because they aren't generally named and because there is only one in the post-Enlightenment sunspot record (just ending). It required proxies and a fair bit of work to connect and compare the grand maximum centered on the 1960s with the other grand maxima evident in e.g. radioactive proxy data. In another comment on this thread I posted a link to a site where you can look at the actual graph and a list of grand maxima and their properties. I'm not at the same machine (where I have it bookmarked) but I'll post it when I get back to that machine, if you like. Or Google is your friend. The point is, as I have now said quite a few times, the entire AGW discussion fails to take into account just how unusual the solar state of the last eighty or so years has been compared to the entire Holocene. It has been so far away from normative behavior that one would expect extremes in things like temperature, with or without CO_2.
Are we (were we) getting heterodyning between CO_2 and solar state? Quite possibly. Or possibly not. We won't know until we move well past the maximum that has lasted throughout the entire period of space-based weather observation. We are quite literally blinded by our lack of reliable data and the general ignorance of the effects of grand solar maxima on the climate, a thing that is so rare that there isn't much data on it even in the paleoclimate record. Minima seem to be a lot more common, although there was something of a local maximum in association with the medieval climate optimum.
I'm not assuming everyone else is lying. I'm stating, on the basis of a fair bit of evidence, that cherrypicking data and selecting data transformations that support the conclusion of AGW is mere business as usual in contemporary climatology. When asked about cherrypicking at a congressional hearing, one prominent researcher replied with the tacit confession that "if you don't pick cherries, you can't make cherry pie". Egregious misuse of data, not only unashamed but actually proud of the misuse of data, in other words. The ends (making the world "safe" for your children) justify any means, including lying if it comes to it. This is a specific, concrete example of what I mean by dishonesty. Others were rather clearly revealed in the Climategate emails. Still others are apparent to a statistician if they look at the MBH controversy and the many ways particular proxies (the ones that show anomalous warming) can be made to outweigh all of the other proxies that show no such thing.
If I were king of the Universe, that person would never work in science again, at least not with grant support. If a medical researcher was caught cherrypicking data the way that is absolutely routine in climatology, they would be fired from the University or pharmaceutical company the worked for and would never work in the industry again. If patients were actually harmed by their lies, they would be liable for both criminal prosecution and civil suit. This actually happens in medicine (and is happening "now" at Duke where a medical researcher falsified and cherrypicked data quite recently) because there are lives at stake and there is substantial federal governance and high standards for accepting results as valid, and even so we are told this year that statins are a miracle drug for fighting heart disease, that year that statins ought to be effective but strangely, large studies fail to find any significant difference in mortality. Pretty theories don't always match reality, but they are open invitations to allow confirmation bias to rear its ugly head unless the researcher involved is particularly selfless and honest and truly wants the right answer, not just to be right.
As for proactive improvements to our energy supply -- absolutely! One of the things I am most irritated at Obama over is his utter failure to recognize that the smartest way out of the economic Black Hole of Bush he inherited that kills many birds with one cost-effective stone is to divert money into solar, wind, and fusion energy development and subsidy at the level of tens of billions per year. That isn't just make work -- that's make investment with a serious long term ROI, and would create a gold rush of private capital leveraged by the federal money (while dropping the cost of e.g. solar technologies by close to an order of magnitude as manufacturing achieves the next level of economy of scale). This would have -- and still would -- not only fix our economy, it would make it boom, and every solar plant we build, every new technology we invent while trying to get a piece of all of that lovely money, reduces our reliance on irreplaceable molecules that we should really be using for other things, not burning for energy, and in even the very intermediate of runs would start to drop the costs of raw energy and stimulate nonlinear gain in the economy and incidentally, cause the economies of various middle eastern states to crash (which might or might be desirable, but there it is).
This would have had the side effect of dropping "carbon consumption" (and still would) but that is a completely separate issue. Do not make the mistake of conflating the science of climatology and the wisdom of investing in energy resources without recurring fuel costs constrained to rise without bound as the fuel becomes more scarce or expensive to extract. Oil companies can be evil, renewable energy can be wise, and AGW can be wrong all at the same time. Using AGW as a scare
This is simply factually incorrect. The last time the sun was at as high a level of activity as it was in solar cycles 19, 21 and 22 was eleven thousand years ago, where it probably played a significant role in finally ending the last ice age and stabilizing warm temperatures. A mere glimpse at any of the many figures of solar activity as determined by e.g. sunspot or radioactive proxies reveals that the last half of the twentieth century including cycles 19, 20, and 23 was by far the most active such stretch over the European sunspot record (the last 400 years, basically). Radioactive and other proxies extend the span over which it is a maximum back to roughly 9000 BCE.
Again, you seem to be implicitly assuming that the Earth's response to variations in solar activity is nearly instantaneous and linear, so that any failures in immediate correlation on the timescale of at most a single solar cycle "proves" that CO_2 is required to make up the difference. Is this (really) a sound belief? There is a considerable amount of evidence in the geological climatological record that it is not. See, for example, the Younger Dryas, a thousand year long bobble in warming at the very beginning of the Holocene. Certainly sounds like long time scales, strange attractors, complicated feedback loops to me, with (in all probability) multiple locally stable states at ANY level of solar activity. But what do I know about nonlinear systems and chaos. Aside from the fact that the entire field was discovered while studying the weather.
I see, so it is only since 1960 that CO_2 has been the primary driver (or is that the right conclusion to draw from the figure, (where pre-1960 the correlation between solar activity and temperature is excellent). And naturally, everybody knows that the Earth's response to the Global Warming Grand Solar Maximum of the twentieth century has to be linear and instantaneous. Everybody know there are no delayed-differential loops with decadal timescales and nonlinearities in global climate, after all.
You've convinced me. How could I have been so blind? The most intense solar state in eleven thousand years (most of which were conveniently omitted from the skeptical science figure, as usual clearly has nothing to do with warming temperatures at the end of it compared to man-made carbon dioxide. I feel so ashamed.
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
Sure, and we know that in the past, when the Sun was in a minimum, it cooled a hell of a lot. Funny, that. Doesn't seem to fit with what you "know".
In the business, they call this "we need more data, because our models not only may not be complete -- we know they aren't complete -- they may be be missing major modulators of the energy balance" uncertainty. Because for most of the last eleven thousand years, the Sun's activity has been much lower than it was for the last century, and it has been quite a bit cooler whenever it was inactive, and quite a bit warmer when it was active.
But hey, you've got a good model! What do you need the actual data for?
Absolutely. In fact, I got a whole tank of gas for my Excursion for free just for posting. And to pre-empt further objections, no, I don't teach calculus, am utterly ignorant of statistics, have never taught astronomy or general physics or quantum mechanics or electrodynamics. In fact, I'm really pretty stupid, not to just trust "real scientists" not to cherrypick data or otherwise engage in confirmation bias activity. Everybody knows that the only place that happens is in the drug industry and medical research, not in climate science.
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).
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!
Right, and of course they have a lot of data to base this conclusion on, all of it obtained with modern instrumentation at a time when we were not in the middle of a grand climate maximum in solar activity -- one which everybody has already concluded has nothing to do with a correlated maximum in global temperatures, in spite of the fact that the last grand minimum was very correlated indeed with low temperatures.
I have a really novel idea -- why don't we wait and see what the variation in the sun's activity does, not on a timescale of years but over decades, since if one were perfectly honest -- granted, honesty being a rarity in this game -- we don't actually have any decent data or reliable predictive models based on decent data that cover the kind of extremes that a Maunder minimum would represent. That doesn't mean that one can't lay down your money and place your bets, but to boldly predict that the earth will completely ignore the reduced insolation and significant alteration of its geomagnetic environment and just percolate right along getting hotter in spite of the temperature data from both the last Maunder Minimum and the last Dalton Minimum (with the "year without a summer" embedded in it, driven in part by coincidence of solar minimum and volcanic aerosols) -- wow, that's just plain ballsy.
Or, the warmers might point out that we finished the quietest sun-spot cycle in well over a century...
Really? Which one was that? Surely none of these: http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrsp-2008-3/ -- which seem to show the earth as just having finished a patch of solar activity unequalled in eleven thousand years, right back to the very beginning of the Holocene circa 9000 BCE. Or we could zoom in on just the last four hundred years -- http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/open?pubNo=lrsp-2010-1&page=articlesu28.html -- hmmm, kinda hard to see us "finishing" the quietest sunspot cycle in well over a century -- the last cycle of the twentieth century is what, the fifth or sixth most active over the last four hundred years (and by extension from the previous figure, part of a patch of the most active cycles over thousands of years).
Oh, do you mean the current solar cycle? The one that isn't yet at its peak? Yes, cycle 24 is well on its way towards being the quietest one in a hundred, or even two hundred, years. The end of cycle 23 was also significantly delayed. And if the article (referenced above) is correct, and we're about to start a Maunder minimum -- well, all one can say is that there is a name for the last Maunder minimum, clearly visible on the figures above. It was called "The Little Ice Age". Or at least, that's what it was called before Mann et. al. managed to "erase" it with some clever fiddling and cherrypicking of their proxy data.
Alas, I'm not even a Republican, and I don't bet, but it would be nice if AGW "enthusiasts" could at least keep their solar cycles straight, since they are so very certain that the fact that the twentieth century hosted one of the most intense grand solar maxima of the Holocene is completely irrelevant to those "high global temperatures" observed at the very end of it, after two of the most intense solar cycles in literally thousands of years.
Agreed (with the suggestion that we wait another decade). The historical data indicates a lag on the scale of decades (or 1-2 solar cycles) between when the sun significantly changes state and when the earth's temperatures shift in the direction of the change. Sometimes there are shorter time scale responses, especially to extreme events like we had in the late 1900s, but the earth is big, the oceans are enormous, and it takes a very long time for circulation patterns and so on to effect a significant average change in temperature.
Look at the beginning of the Holocene, for example -- extreme oscillations in temperature, lots of instability, until a grand solar maximum that lasted almost two centuries with a brief hiatus in the middle warmed things up and stabilized us in the warm mode. Some solar-driven climate changes occur over the time scale of centuries, in other words. Expecting to see an immediate response to changes in solar state is just silly -- expect the climate response (as opposed to ignorable changes in the weather) over decades, not years.
You mean, aside from the fact that the last forty or fifty years we were in a grand maximum of solar activity, the highest seen on earth since the very beginning of the Holocene? And that, given the unknowns and the egregious speculation that has occurred in lieu of actual research concerning the feedback, this is a confounding factor that has been more or less completely ignored by the AGW zealots? Do you mean to ignore (as those zealots wish to) the Maunder minimum and Dalton minimum, the "Year without a summer" in the Dalton minimum, and the other, substantial evidence that global climate is first and foremost driven by solar activity and at most modulated by everything else?
To put it more seriously, think about putting error bars on the parameter that controls the feedback. Be sure to make them as large as the current estimates of the parameter itself, as we have no measurements to support one value over any other, only oversimplified model computations that ignore enormous amounts of the complex dynamics of the climate that are in indifferent agreement with the past and incapable (so far) of predicting the future. If we don't even know the correct sign of that parameter, let alone its magnitude, it is really easy to build a model that explains global warming over the last 160 years -- variations in solar activity that almost precisely parallel the observed increases in temperature, right up to the grand maximum (in both solar activity and global temperature) in the last few cycles of the twentieth century. Don't forget to allow for the 10-20 year lag in solar forcing and response in terms of global temperature change (clearly evident in the data and completely understandable given the vast heat capacity of the ocean and the complex feedback loops associated with the major oscillations in circulation).
As for the "every chemistry or physics student knows" -- well, I teach physics including electrodynamics, and to me it is by no means clear that we have a particularly good idea of the full dynamics of heat trapping by CO_2 in the upper atmosphere, including all feedback loops and the climate sensitivity. It is hard to even build an accurate model, given that the trapping is such a small effect that NASA's satellites cannot directly measure it (and the concentrations we are talking about are very small indeed).
The fundamental problem is that impending doom sells. It sells everything. It sells careers. It sells grants. It sells congress on providing money for those grants. It sells a completely artificial market with numerous opportunities for con men to get rich involving things like "carbon futures" or "carbon credits" (look carefully at just where Al Gore and his cohorts are invested, and I mean financially invested, if you want to see what I mean). It sells newspapers. It sells scientific journals. It sells novels and television shows. Even complete crackpot whacko doom such as Harold Camping's incredible shrinking Rapture sells -- sells to the tune of a hundred million dollars. The end of the world in 2012 sells. The earth being hit by entirely speculative and improbable coronal mass ejections in 2013 -- specifically, in 2013, not 2012 or 2014 -- sells. Asteroids hitting the earth sells. Back in the day, nuclear war and MAD sold. A glance at Hollywood's list of disaster movies, TV ditto, novels ditto, and sure, speculative science publications galore ditto, is enough to prove rather conclusively that impending doom sells!
Science -- and I mean good science, the kind that is cautious and pessimistic and that hesitates to state unproven speculations as if they are definite proven facts -- does not sell, alas. Not in our bored and jaded culture. Do a study of earthworm mating habits that concludes with the observation that earthworms globally are doing rather well and that their critical contributions to our ecology are proceeding in an entirely natural and appropriate w
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Much as I adore the idea of colonizing the entire Universe, putting humans on each and every planet and surrounding stars with Dyson spheres and filling them and eventually using advanced nuclear technology to transform nearly all of the mass that isn't actually in stars into human flesh in the form of exponentially more babies, it really isn't fair to compare space and the imperial colonial expansion of Europe into the New World in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Look at the differences:
Not exactly comparable. Even less comparable to the westward expansion of the 1800s, where a single family could often afford the trip, and could forage or buy food when they got wherever.
Tell you what. You invent a spaceship that costs about as much as a house (that's the limit of sing
Um, I think that they are more interested in software to help predict the weather in Farmville. So you'd better start working on a virtual Earth simulator that can be virtually photographed by a virtual satellite to make virtual predictions about the virtual weather. And don't forget to include the effects of global warming and the inevitable flooding of Farmville. And make sure that you make the virtual sun go nova sometime in 2012 so that the weather report is "Hot, very hot" as Farmville is turned into the wisp of incandescent virtual plasma that it so richly deserves to be...
rgb
Ooo, what a good idea! I've quit WoW (many times) because e-crack is bad for children and health and sleep and jobs and significant other relationships, but putting it on a stand in front of a treadmill makes it exercise and virtuous. Better yet make the treadmill drive a generator and make the generator drive the laptop! Now it's even green!
Sure, not so great for fine motor control, moving a mouse and clicking on things in realtime while jogging, but that just increases the challenge...
But enough about WoW. Diablo III is around the corner...
rgb
You mean aside from their many-times-a-day global photographs of the weather of the world, available on almost any weather site?
For example: http://classic.wunderground.com/tropical/ and scroll down to the latest atlantic still photograph. If you wait too long, BTW, you'll get infrared by default -- you only get clouds per se during daylight so that you can see them.
Or then, there are the many military satellites that can take amazingly high resolution pictures of the surface almost anywhere, to the point where sunbathing nude in your back yard is a chancy proposition if you really don't want anybody to see your ass...
There are, however, ways for even amateurs to get a camera "into space". The traditional one is to buy a weather balloon and use it to haul your camera to 20+ miles, at which point the earth looks pretty much like "earth from space" -- black sky, curvature, clouds. There are some lovely pictures that have been taken this way if you google for them.
rgb
Isn't it easier to just not load Windows, not use Windows, not need AV like Windows, and use an operating system that doesn't have a registry?
Just a thought... although I agree, if you install and then do not use Windows it will remain clean and fresh, well, almost forever.
Oh, you mean you want to USE the operating system? Well, that's not recommended. Of course you'll get infected and sooner or later break things if you actually use it.
rgb
(My own favorite way to keep Windows clean is to run it in a VM, with the image locked. Get a virus, just reboot. Every now and then, unlock it long enough to let a windows update happen and lock it again. But then, Windows is a really excellent application to run under, say, Linux....:-)
...and I, for one, will welcome our bug-eyed monster overlords. After all, this is obviously the light halo of an extraterrestrial FTL spaceship, not a "missile" at all...
rgb
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
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
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
Clearly you have an idea of what a grand solar minimum is -- the Maunder and Sporer minima being fairly "recent" examples. Grand maxima are less well known because they aren't generally named and because there is only one in the post-Enlightenment sunspot record (just ending). It required proxies and a fair bit of work to connect and compare the grand maximum centered on the 1960s with the other grand maxima evident in e.g. radioactive proxy data. In another comment on this thread I posted a link to a site where you can look at the actual graph and a list of grand maxima and their properties. I'm not at the same machine (where I have it bookmarked) but I'll post it when I get back to that machine, if you like. Or Google is your friend. The point is, as I have now said quite a few times, the entire AGW discussion fails to take into account just how unusual the solar state of the last eighty or so years has been compared to the entire Holocene. It has been so far away from normative behavior that one would expect extremes in things like temperature, with or without CO_2.
Are we (were we) getting heterodyning between CO_2 and solar state? Quite possibly. Or possibly not. We won't know until we move well past the maximum that has lasted throughout the entire period of space-based weather observation. We are quite literally blinded by our lack of reliable data and the general ignorance of the effects of grand solar maxima on the climate, a thing that is so rare that there isn't much data on it even in the paleoclimate record. Minima seem to be a lot more common, although there was something of a local maximum in association with the medieval climate optimum.
rgb
I'm not assuming everyone else is lying. I'm stating, on the basis of a fair bit of evidence, that cherrypicking data and selecting data transformations that support the conclusion of AGW is mere business as usual in contemporary climatology. When asked about cherrypicking at a congressional hearing, one prominent researcher replied with the tacit confession that "if you don't pick cherries, you can't make cherry pie". Egregious misuse of data, not only unashamed but actually proud of the misuse of data, in other words. The ends (making the world "safe" for your children) justify any means, including lying if it comes to it. This is a specific, concrete example of what I mean by dishonesty. Others were rather clearly revealed in the Climategate emails. Still others are apparent to a statistician if they look at the MBH controversy and the many ways particular proxies (the ones that show anomalous warming) can be made to outweigh all of the other proxies that show no such thing.
If I were king of the Universe, that person would never work in science again, at least not with grant support. If a medical researcher was caught cherrypicking data the way that is absolutely routine in climatology, they would be fired from the University or pharmaceutical company the worked for and would never work in the industry again. If patients were actually harmed by their lies, they would be liable for both criminal prosecution and civil suit. This actually happens in medicine (and is happening "now" at Duke where a medical researcher falsified and cherrypicked data quite recently) because there are lives at stake and there is substantial federal governance and high standards for accepting results as valid, and even so we are told this year that statins are a miracle drug for fighting heart disease, that year that statins ought to be effective but strangely, large studies fail to find any significant difference in mortality. Pretty theories don't always match reality, but they are open invitations to allow confirmation bias to rear its ugly head unless the researcher involved is particularly selfless and honest and truly wants the right answer, not just to be right.
As for proactive improvements to our energy supply -- absolutely! One of the things I am most irritated at Obama over is his utter failure to recognize that the smartest way out of the economic Black Hole of Bush he inherited that kills many birds with one cost-effective stone is to divert money into solar, wind, and fusion energy development and subsidy at the level of tens of billions per year. That isn't just make work -- that's make investment with a serious long term ROI, and would create a gold rush of private capital leveraged by the federal money (while dropping the cost of e.g. solar technologies by close to an order of magnitude as manufacturing achieves the next level of economy of scale). This would have -- and still would -- not only fix our economy, it would make it boom, and every solar plant we build, every new technology we invent while trying to get a piece of all of that lovely money, reduces our reliance on irreplaceable molecules that we should really be using for other things, not burning for energy, and in even the very intermediate of runs would start to drop the costs of raw energy and stimulate nonlinear gain in the economy and incidentally, cause the economies of various middle eastern states to crash (which might or might be desirable, but there it is).
This would have had the side effect of dropping "carbon consumption" (and still would) but that is a completely separate issue. Do not make the mistake of conflating the science of climatology and the wisdom of investing in energy resources without recurring fuel costs constrained to rise without bound as the fuel becomes more scarce or expensive to extract. Oil companies can be evil, renewable energy can be wise, and AGW can be wrong all at the same time. Using AGW as a scare
This is simply factually incorrect. The last time the sun was at as high a level of activity as it was in solar cycles 19, 21 and 22 was eleven thousand years ago, where it probably played a significant role in finally ending the last ice age and stabilizing warm temperatures. A mere glimpse at any of the many figures of solar activity as determined by e.g. sunspot or radioactive proxies reveals that the last half of the twentieth century including cycles 19, 20, and 23 was by far the most active such stretch over the European sunspot record (the last 400 years, basically). Radioactive and other proxies extend the span over which it is a maximum back to roughly 9000 BCE.
Again, you seem to be implicitly assuming that the Earth's response to variations in solar activity is nearly instantaneous and linear, so that any failures in immediate correlation on the timescale of at most a single solar cycle "proves" that CO_2 is required to make up the difference. Is this (really) a sound belief? There is a considerable amount of evidence in the geological climatological record that it is not. See, for example, the Younger Dryas, a thousand year long bobble in warming at the very beginning of the Holocene. Certainly sounds like long time scales, strange attractors, complicated feedback loops to me, with (in all probability) multiple locally stable states at ANY level of solar activity. But what do I know about nonlinear systems and chaos. Aside from the fact that the entire field was discovered while studying the weather.
rgb
I see, so it is only since 1960 that CO_2 has been the primary driver (or is that the right conclusion to draw from the figure, (where pre-1960 the correlation between solar activity and temperature is excellent). And naturally, everybody knows that the Earth's response to the Global Warming Grand Solar Maximum of the twentieth century has to be linear and instantaneous. Everybody know there are no delayed-differential loops with decadal timescales and nonlinearities in global climate, after all.
You've convinced me. How could I have been so blind? The most intense solar state in eleven thousand years (most of which were conveniently omitted from the skeptical science figure, as usual clearly has nothing to do with warming temperatures at the end of it compared to man-made carbon dioxide. I feel so ashamed.
rgb
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
Sure, and we know that in the past, when the Sun was in a minimum, it cooled a hell of a lot. Funny, that. Doesn't seem to fit with what you "know".
In the business, they call this "we need more data, because our models not only may not be complete -- we know they aren't complete -- they may be be missing major modulators of the energy balance" uncertainty. Because for most of the last eleven thousand years, the Sun's activity has been much lower than it was for the last century, and it has been quite a bit cooler whenever it was inactive, and quite a bit warmer when it was active.
But hey, you've got a good model! What do you need the actual data for?
rgb
Absolutely. In fact, I got a whole tank of gas for my Excursion for free just for posting. And to pre-empt further objections, no, I don't teach calculus, am utterly ignorant of statistics, have never taught astronomy or general physics or quantum mechanics or electrodynamics. In fact, I'm really pretty stupid, not to just trust "real scientists" not to cherrypick data or otherwise engage in confirmation bias activity. Everybody knows that the only place that happens is in the drug industry and medical research, not in climate science.
rgb
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
Well and rationally said. Huzzah!
rgb
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
Mathes? We don't need no stinkin' mathes...
("Blazing" saddles indeed.)
rgb
Right, and of course they have a lot of data to base this conclusion on, all of it obtained with modern instrumentation at a time when we were not in the middle of a grand climate maximum in solar activity -- one which everybody has already concluded has nothing to do with a correlated maximum in global temperatures, in spite of the fact that the last grand minimum was very correlated indeed with low temperatures.
I have a really novel idea -- why don't we wait and see what the variation in the sun's activity does, not on a timescale of years but over decades, since if one were perfectly honest -- granted, honesty being a rarity in this game -- we don't actually have any decent data or reliable predictive models based on decent data that cover the kind of extremes that a Maunder minimum would represent. That doesn't mean that one can't lay down your money and place your bets, but to boldly predict that the earth will completely ignore the reduced insolation and significant alteration of its geomagnetic environment and just percolate right along getting hotter in spite of the temperature data from both the last Maunder Minimum and the last Dalton Minimum (with the "year without a summer" embedded in it, driven in part by coincidence of solar minimum and volcanic aerosols) -- wow, that's just plain ballsy.
rgb
Or, the warmers might point out that we finished the quietest sun-spot cycle in well over a century...
Really? Which one was that? Surely none of these: http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrsp-2008-3/ -- which seem to show the earth as just having finished a patch of solar activity unequalled in eleven thousand years, right back to the very beginning of the Holocene circa 9000 BCE. Or we could zoom in on just the last four hundred years -- http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/open?pubNo=lrsp-2010-1&page=articlesu28.html -- hmmm, kinda hard to see us "finishing" the quietest sunspot cycle in well over a century -- the last cycle of the twentieth century is what, the fifth or sixth most active over the last four hundred years (and by extension from the previous figure, part of a patch of the most active cycles over thousands of years).
Oh, do you mean the current solar cycle? The one that isn't yet at its peak? Yes, cycle 24 is well on its way towards being the quietest one in a hundred, or even two hundred, years. The end of cycle 23 was also significantly delayed. And if the article (referenced above) is correct, and we're about to start a Maunder minimum -- well, all one can say is that there is a name for the last Maunder minimum, clearly visible on the figures above. It was called "The Little Ice Age". Or at least, that's what it was called before Mann et. al. managed to "erase" it with some clever fiddling and cherrypicking of their proxy data.
Alas, I'm not even a Republican, and I don't bet, but it would be nice if AGW "enthusiasts" could at least keep their solar cycles straight, since they are so very certain that the fact that the twentieth century hosted one of the most intense grand solar maxima of the Holocene is completely irrelevant to those "high global temperatures" observed at the very end of it, after two of the most intense solar cycles in literally thousands of years.
rgb
Agreed (with the suggestion that we wait another decade). The historical data indicates a lag on the scale of decades (or 1-2 solar cycles) between when the sun significantly changes state and when the earth's temperatures shift in the direction of the change. Sometimes there are shorter time scale responses, especially to extreme events like we had in the late 1900s, but the earth is big, the oceans are enormous, and it takes a very long time for circulation patterns and so on to effect a significant average change in temperature.
Look at the beginning of the Holocene, for example -- extreme oscillations in temperature, lots of instability, until a grand solar maximum that lasted almost two centuries with a brief hiatus in the middle warmed things up and stabilized us in the warm mode. Some solar-driven climate changes occur over the time scale of centuries, in other words. Expecting to see an immediate response to changes in solar state is just silly -- expect the climate response (as opposed to ignorable changes in the weather) over decades, not years.
rgb
COULD there be another cause?
You mean, aside from the fact that the last forty or fifty years we were in a grand maximum of solar activity, the highest seen on earth since the very beginning of the Holocene? And that, given the unknowns and the egregious speculation that has occurred in lieu of actual research concerning the feedback, this is a confounding factor that has been more or less completely ignored by the AGW zealots? Do you mean to ignore (as those zealots wish to) the Maunder minimum and Dalton minimum, the "Year without a summer" in the Dalton minimum, and the other, substantial evidence that global climate is first and foremost driven by solar activity and at most modulated by everything else?
To put it more seriously, think about putting error bars on the parameter that controls the feedback. Be sure to make them as large as the current estimates of the parameter itself, as we have no measurements to support one value over any other, only oversimplified model computations that ignore enormous amounts of the complex dynamics of the climate that are in indifferent agreement with the past and incapable (so far) of predicting the future. If we don't even know the correct sign of that parameter, let alone its magnitude, it is really easy to build a model that explains global warming over the last 160 years -- variations in solar activity that almost precisely parallel the observed increases in temperature, right up to the grand maximum (in both solar activity and global temperature) in the last few cycles of the twentieth century. Don't forget to allow for the 10-20 year lag in solar forcing and response in terms of global temperature change (clearly evident in the data and completely understandable given the vast heat capacity of the ocean and the complex feedback loops associated with the major oscillations in circulation).
As for the "every chemistry or physics student knows" -- well, I teach physics including electrodynamics, and to me it is by no means clear that we have a particularly good idea of the full dynamics of heat trapping by CO_2 in the upper atmosphere, including all feedback loops and the climate sensitivity. It is hard to even build an accurate model, given that the trapping is such a small effect that NASA's satellites cannot directly measure it (and the concentrations we are talking about are very small indeed).
The fundamental problem is that impending doom sells. It sells everything. It sells careers. It sells grants. It sells congress on providing money for those grants. It sells a completely artificial market with numerous opportunities for con men to get rich involving things like "carbon futures" or "carbon credits" (look carefully at just where Al Gore and his cohorts are invested, and I mean financially invested, if you want to see what I mean). It sells newspapers. It sells scientific journals. It sells novels and television shows. Even complete crackpot whacko doom such as Harold Camping's incredible shrinking Rapture sells -- sells to the tune of a hundred million dollars. The end of the world in 2012 sells. The earth being hit by entirely speculative and improbable coronal mass ejections in 2013 -- specifically, in 2013, not 2012 or 2014 -- sells. Asteroids hitting the earth sells. Back in the day, nuclear war and MAD sold. A glance at Hollywood's list of disaster movies, TV ditto, novels ditto, and sure, speculative science publications galore ditto, is enough to prove rather conclusively that impending doom sells!
Science -- and I mean good science, the kind that is cautious and pessimistic and that hesitates to state unproven speculations as if they are definite proven facts -- does not sell, alas. Not in our bored and jaded culture. Do a study of earthworm mating habits that concludes with the observation that earthworms globally are doing rather well and that their critical contributions to our ecology are proceeding in an entirely natural and appropriate w
Amen, brother!
(I too did some of this, but not for a living, as a sideline. But you are dead on the money.)
rgb