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Re: Global Warming as Religion and not Science [larsb]

by gagrice on Fri Sep 05 13:39:12 PDT 2008

You cannot compare surface temperatures in a few locations to the 3000 sensors placed around the globe. They claim No rise since the system was turned up. Brrr! Ocean water temps take a dip REHOBOTH BEACH -- Beachgoers and fishermen alike are noticing the unseasonably cold water temperatures that weather professionals attribute to a phenomena known as upwelling. "Current water temperatures are very close to their July normal values of 73 F. However, a week ago water temperatures were 10 degrees colder," said Meteorologist Gary Szatkowski of the National Weather Service. "South to southwest surface winds during the summer actually push the warm water temperatures at the surface offshore. Colder water from deeper in the ocean comes to the surface, resulting in cold water temperatures in the surf zone," he said. And people are definitely feeling the chill. "We have had a lot of people come up and ask if this is how the temperature normally is, and of course, we tell them no," said Lt. Mark Reynolds of the Rehoboth Beach Patrol. "The water got warmer for a few days -- went up to 71 or 72 F -- but now it's back down." http://www.delmarvanow.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080722/NEWS01/807220336 No sunspots means a mini ice age is coming. Better get out the long johns. The Hummingbird migration is about 2 weeks early this year. I went from a gallon and a half per day last week to just about half a gallon yesterday. They are usually just coming in now. Lots of bees, not sure what that means.

What happens when we cool off?

by gagrice on Mon Sep 01 09:18:43 PDT 2008

Will the hue cry be to burn more coal to warm the earth? Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth. The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted. The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth. In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion. The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial. The paper's lead author, William Livingston, tells DailyTech that, while the refusal may have been justified at the time, recent data fits his theory well. He says he will be "secretly pleased" if his predictions come to pass. But will the rest of us? In the past 1000 years, three previous such events -- the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a "mini ice age". For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases. http://www.dailytech.com/Sun+Makes+History+First+Spotless+Month+in+a+Century/art- icle12823.htm

Before Gary goes and buys 20 tons of coal, some BALANCE

by larsb on Fri Aug 22 07:19:38 PDT 2008

How about a little BALANCE to keep the issue burning like the gas in Gary's Sequoia: GW not proven true or false YET One clue to the sun's variability comes from the Little Ice Age, during the 17th and 18th centuries, when Europe and North America were much colder and snowier than they are today. During that time, astronomers noted a nearly complete absence of sunspots, said atmospheric physicist Peter Pilewskie from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Called the Maunder Minimum, he said, the coincidence of this spotless period on the sun with the notable chill of the ice age suggests a sun-climate connection. Could the sun be getting warmer? If that were so, Pilewskie said it would be unlikely to account for more than a fraction of the observed warming trend. With satellites, scientists have been able to record the total radiation emitted by the sun, and found it has changed very little in the last 30 years. But those records only go back so far. Several years ago, a team from Germany's Max Planck institute published a paper showing that carbon isotopes trapped in tree rings reveal unprecedented solar activity during the 20th century. Carbon 14, a heavy form of carbon, is formed when cosmic rays from outer space impact carbon on the Earth. The greater the solar activity, the more the sun's magnetic field deflects the cosmic rays and the less carbon 14 should be stored in tree rings. According to the Max Planck team, we've been experiencing more solar activity in the last 100 years than we did for the last 8,000 years. Judith Lean, a solar physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory, calls that conclusion erroneous. She said the isotopes also vary much more with changes in the Earth's own magnetic field and processes on the Earth, thus complicating the analysis. She said the consensus among solar physicists now is that the sun is in a relatively warm phase, but nothing unprecedented and not hot enough to have raised the temperature a degree in the last century. But Penn State's Alley said CO2 from volcanoes looks to be the prime suspect for the warm spells of the distant past, and fossil-fuel burning is by far the most likely driver of current trends. "We've looked at the sun. Volcanoes are not doing anything weird. The oceans can dump heat into the atmosphere, but they're getting warmer too," he said. So it's not as cut and dried as anyone might believe. The debate RAGES ON !!!!

Better stock up on firewood,

by gagrice on Fri Aug 22 07:03:32 PDT 2008

Its gonna be cold the next few years. A top observatory that has been measuring sun cycles for over 200 years predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees over the next two decades as solar activity grinds to a halt and the planet drastically cools down, potentially heralding the onset of a new ice age. While the mass media, Al Gore and politicized bodies like the IPCC scaremonger about the perils of global warming and demand the poor and middle class pay CO2 taxes, both hard scientific data and circumstantial evidence points to a clear cooling trend. Following the end of the Sun's most active period in over 11,000 years, the last 10 years have displayed a clear cooling trend as temperatures post-1998 leveled out and are now plummeting. China recently experienced its coldest winter in 100 years while northeast America was hit by record snow levels and Britain suffered its coldest April in decades as late-blooming daffodils were pounded with hail and snow on an almost daily basis. The British summer has also left many yearning for global warming, with temperatures in June and July rarely struggling to get over 16 degrees and on one occasion even dropping as low as 9 degrees in the middle of the afternoon. "Summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century's opening decade," reports the Chicago Tribune. "There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That's by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930." The reason? Sunspot activity has dwindled. There have only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar cycle. "The sun’s surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun’s 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century," reports one science blog. Long-time man-made global warming advocates NASA assure us that significant sunspot activity will return in 2012, but a recent a paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, predicts that sunspots will all but vanish after 2015. Since the sun, and not carbon dioxide, is the principle driver of climate change, a dearth of sunspot activity would herald a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare and contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age during which Europe and North America were hit by bitterly cold winters and the Thames river in London completely froze. Forecasts of a sharp cooling trend are backed by the UK's Armagh Observatory, which has been observing solar activity for over 200 years. The observatory notes that solar cycles 21 and 22, which were characterized by being short and intense in their activity, led to the natural global warming observed in the 80's and 90's. "Cycle 23, which hasn't finished yet, looks like it will be long (at least 12 to 13 years) and cycle 24, which has still to start, looks like it will be exceptionally weak," writes one observatory scientist.

Re: Just goes to prove [timothyamiller]

by vchiu on Sun Jul 27 06:49:27 PDT 2008

>The idea that man is responsible for the change in global temperature is horrible science based on flawed interpretation of climatic data. I won't elaborate any further about the ideas that I already posted in response to Tidester but I will add some comments to some questions I did not address. > We have, over the last 10 to 15 years experienced a period of high sunspot activity - which has ALWAYS resulted in warming on earth. I would welcome a support for both statements. It does not like this looking from this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sunspot-number.png. Whereas the graphs I previously linked to a clear and unprecedented (over a period of 1000 years) temperature increase. I don't see the increase is happening after the the CO2 output increase. >Because as temperature rises the ocean cannot contain as much dissolved Carbon Dioxide and releases it into the atmosphere You have to factor in the phytoplankton which is also absorbing CO2. The ocean is much more complex than a bottle of carbonated water. Do you have link to studies showing a measurable increase in CO2 rejection from the ocean ? >an increase in atmospheric CO2 would be a good thing . . . it would lead to more fruit and vegetables . . . plants love more CO2. Provided that we stop deforestation. CO2 is a result of a scissors crisis. Man made CO2 output increasing in volumes and CO2 traps such as trees are decreasing in number. The result is pretty obvious Here is a piece of what it could cost. Can't be right, can it ? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080723134445.htm >but please get the story straight first. I am working hard on it.

Re: Just goes to prove [vchiu]

by tidester on Fri Jul 25 22:01:11 PDT 2008

That is the key question. Incidentally I did not find any study showing that air vapor increased globally. You probably won't find such a study because you and Kernick are asking the wrong question. It's not the amount of water vapor that matters. You should be focusing on cloud formation. There are (obviously) several factor that affect cloud formation including the usual meteorological suspects but cosmic rays apparently also affect both the formation of clouds and where (elevation) they are formed. That's the link to the Sun. The basic idea is that when the Sun is active (i.e. lots of sunspots) the magnetic field that it projects out into the Solar System is at its strongest. During those periods, the Earth has added protection or shielding from cosmic rays (highly energetic charged particles). When the Sun is "quiet" its magnetic field is weakest and we have less protection. Cosmic rays can trigger condensation in the atmosphere leading to cloud formation (think of those cloud chambers you may have heard about in Phys 101). For most (but not all!) of the 20th century, the Sun has been fairly active implying reduced cosmic ray flux into the atmosphere. Some think this resulted in reduced cloud formation and is what led to the unusual warming over that period. Currently (over the last ten years give or take), the Sun seems to be entering a quiet phase suggesting increased cosmic ray flux and, therefore, more cloud cover. And, perhaps not so coincidentally, the warming trend seems to have been halted over the past decade.