[BartSimpson]

From http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCommentary.a ... 0218a.html

Calm Sun, Cold Earth

By Alan Caruba
CNSNews.com Commentary from the National Anxiety Center
February 18, 2008

I can understand why people believe that global warming is real and that all the things Greens say are true. One cannot read a newspaper or magazine, turn on the television or radio, without getting the Green message.

Since switching their message in the 1970s that an Ice Age was coming to the complete fiction of a massive, dramatic global warming due to greenhouse gases, the Greens have been able to influence policy at the international and national level. They have been utterly relentless, a modern version of the Mongols on horseback who swept out of the East to conquer everything before them until they reached the gates of Europe. These days the Greens have long since conquered Europe.

One thing alone stands against the Greens. The science does not support them. Their sense of moral superiority, their contempt for all things modern, their resistance to all forms of energy except the weakest -- wind and solar, and at the very heart of the Greens' message is a contempt and hatred for the human race.

Humans have come to dominate life on Earth because we know how to adapt to the planet. We know how to use its minerals, the riches of its plant life, the domestication of its animals, and its reserves of energy in the form of coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear fission, to fuel the creation of great cities, farms and ranches, and everything that passes for modern civilization.

Long ago humans conquered the continents of the Earth and its great oceans to spread everywhere. Humans now fly between continents in hours. Everywhere on the face of the Earth humans now communicate with one another via the Internet.

For billions of years the Earth existed without humans and it will do so again when we cease to inhabit it. As a species, we are newcomers, but like every other species that lived on planet Earth -- 95% of which are extinct -- we are subject to forces far greater than anything we possess.

To suggest that humans actually cause climate change is such idiocy that the Earth itself reminds us daily of our vulnerabilities. The news is full of tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, blizzards, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and wildfires.

On February 7, Investors Business Daily had an editorial titled "The Sun Also Sets" in which it cited the views of Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council. In essence, Tapping wants people to know that solar activity such as sunspots, i.e., magnetic storms, "has been disturbingly quiet."

It's useful to know that global temperatures and events closely reflect solar cycles.

The lack of activity "could signal the beginning of what is known as the Maunder Minimum." While solar cycles tend to last about 11 years, the lack of normal or increased activity can trigger the Maunder Minimum, an event that occurs every few centuries, can last as long as a century, and causes a colder earth.

The most recent such event was the mini-Ice Age that climatologists date from around 1300 to 1850. In the midst of this there was a distinct solar hibernation from around 1650 to 1715.

"Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere."

If these events continue and become a cycle of cooling, it represents a major threat to the Earth's population because it means that food crops will fail and, with them, the means to feed livestock, and the rest of us.

If you have been paying attention to global weather reports, you know that China has had the heaviest snowfall in at least three decades. David Deming, a geophysicist, in a December 19, 2007 article in The Washington Times, noted that, "South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918." This occurred across the entire Southern Hemisphere. "Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever."

It must be said that one big blizzard does not an Ice Age make, but a whole series of events that suggest a cooling cycle may well be the warning that is being ignored in the midst of the vast global warming hoax.

Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, is staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute. He recently published a commentary asserting that a global cold spell could replace global warming. Note that the Earth has been warming -- about one degree Fahrenheit -- since the last mini-Ice Age ended around 1850. "The real reasons for climate change are uneven solar radiation", said Dr. Sorokhtin, while citing others that include the Earth's axis gyration and instability of oceanic currents.

"Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface." Yes, the Sun itself goes through periods of change. Dr. Sorokhtin believes that "Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer."

There is a reason scientists refer to our current era as an "interglacial period", i.e., a time between Ice Ages.

Up to now, the mainstream media has ignored the cold reality of the Earth's known cooling cycles. They have been in complete thrall to the howling of Al Gore with his endless lies about an imminent warming. Given the accolade of a Nobel Prize and even a Hollywood Oscar, why should people unschooled in science believe otherwise?

The United Nations International Panel on Climate Change whose reports have been based, not on hard science such as observations of solar activity, but on flawed, often deliberately false computer models, has been the driving factor behind the global warming hoax. What better way to assert political and economic control over the Earth than to create a global crisis? To their credit, many participants in the IPCC have protested these reports.

Large numbers of scientists have sold their soul to the global warming lies in order to receive millions in research grants, but increasingly other scientists have been coming forth to tell the truth. On March 2-4, several hundred will convene in New York for the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change to offer papers and serve on panels disputing and debunking the global warming hoax.

Beyond the climatic threat of a cooling planet is the one posed by U.S. politicians and their counterparts in Europe who are seeking to impose all manner of regulation and limits on energy use based on the false assertion that greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming.

They want to mandate a "cap-and-trade" scheme that will make some people and industries wealthy selling credits that will permit greenhouse gas emissions. But it is not greenhouse gases we need to fear, it is the action or, in this case, the inaction of the Sun.

At the very moment the Earth is on the cusp of what is likely to be a very long cooling and possibly a full scale repeat of the last Ice Age, all the engines of government, nationally and internationally, are trying to inhibit the discovery, extraction, and use of energy reserves that will be needed to cope with climate changes that will impact millions and, ultimately, billions of people.

All the wind turbines and solar panels in the world will not keep you warm in your home or apartment when a short or long term cooling of the Earth occurs. Ironically, as the Greens rant about so-called endangered polar bears in the Arctic, the bears are far more likely to survive than humans.

What controls the Earth's climate? The Sun!

[BartSimpson]

So if CO2 really can cause the world to keep warm then we need to get out there and start burning some fossil fuels to prevent global cooling!

[BartSimpson]

Bump - here's why it's getting colder.

[Toro]

Here's another article.

Quote:

Global Cooling comes back in a big way

Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago -- and it signaled a solar event known as a "Maunder Minimum," along with the start of what we now call the "Little Ice Age."

Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, says it may be happening again. Overseeing a giant radio telescope he calls a "stethoscope for the sun," Tapping says, if the pattern doesn't change quickly, the earth is in for some very chilly weather.

During the Little Ice Age, global temperatures dropped sharply. New York Harbor froze hard enough to allow people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island, and in Britain, people reported sighting eskimos paddling canoes off the coast. Glaciers in Norway grew up to 100 meters a year, destroying farms and villages.

But will it happen again?

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov predicted the sun would soon peak, triggering a rapid decline in world temperatures. Only last month, the view was echoed by Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. who advised the world to "stock up on fur coats." Sorokhtin, who calls man's contribution to climate change "a drop in the bucket," predicts the solar minimum to occur by the year 2040, with icy weather lasting till 2100 or beyond.

Observational data seems to support the claims -- or doesn't contradict it, at least. According to data from Britain's Met Office, the earth has cooled very slightly since 1998. The Met Office says global warming "will pick up again shortly." Others aren't so sure.

Researcher Dr. Timothy Patterson, director of the Geoscience Center at Carleton University, shares the concern. Patterson is finding "excellent correlations" between solar fluctuations, a relationship that historically, he says doesn't exist between CO2 and past climate changes. According to Patterson. we shouldn't be surprised by a solar link. "The sun [is] the ultimate source of energy on this planet," he says.

Such research dates back to 1991, when the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study showing that world temperatures over the past several centuries correlated very closely with solar cycles. A 2004 study by the Max Planck Institute found a similar correlation, but concluded the timing was only coincidental, as the solar variance seemed too small to explain temperature changes.

However, researchers at DMI continued to work, eventually discovering what they believe to be the link. The key factor isn't changes in solar output, but rather changes in the sun's magnetosphere A stronger field shields the earth more from cosmic rays, which act as "seeds" for cloud formation. The result is less cloud cover, and a warming planet. When the field weakens, clouds increases, reflecting more light back to space, and the earth cools off.

Recently, lead researcher Henrik Svensmark was able to experimentally verify the link between cosmic rays and cloud formation, in a cloud chamber experiment called "SKY" at the Danish National Space Center. CERN plans a similar experiment this year.

Even NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies -- long the nation's most ardent champion of anthropogenic global warming -- is getting in on the act. Drew Shindell, a researcher at GISS, says there are some "interesting relationships we don't fully understand" between solar activity and climate.

http://www.dailytech.com/Solar+Activity ... e10630.htm

[stemmer]

Wow...excellent posts guys... Certainly food for thought... But I thought we jsut entered a new solar cycle, solar cycle 24?

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008 ... ycle24.htm

[Chumley]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080717224333.htm

[Zipperfish]

It's funny that the largest scientific study ever undertaken, which determined that it is very likely that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 were a signficant driver in affecting global climate, fails to resonate with the anti-AGW crowd, and yet one observation about sunspot actvitiy and they're convinced the globe is cooling.

It is, as stemmer said, "food for thought," but it hardly stacks up to the evidence presented supporting AGW.

Given the angry timbre of the piece, I have a feeling that the writer's position is more driven by ideology than fact.

[DrCaleb]

Zipperfish wrote:

It is, as stemmer said, "food for thought," but it hardly stacks up to the evidence presented supporting AGW.

Some more food for thought - Pollution is causing more of the sun's rays to be reflected out of the atmosphere.

CO2 warming is estimated to add 3 Watts/M^2 to the earths' surface, while Global Dimming is causing -1.9 W/M^2 heat loss. The two are holding each other in check.

PBS wrote:

...
NARRATOR: In the polluted air, billions of manmade particles provided 10 times as many sites around which water droplets could form. So, polluted clouds contained many more water droplets, each one far smaller than it would be naturally. Many small droplets reflect more light than fewer big ones, so the polluted clouds were reflecting more light back into space, preventing the heat of the sun from getting through. This was the main cause of global dimming over the Indian Ocean.

VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: Basically, the global dimming we saw in the north Indian Ocean was contributed, on the one hand, by the particles themselves shielding the ocean from the sunlight, on the other hand, making the clouds brighter. So this insidious soup, consisting of soot, sulfates, nitrates, ash and what have you, was having a double whammy on the global dimming.

NARRATOR: And when he looked at satellite images, Ramanathan found the same thing was happening all over the world: over India; over China, and extending into the Pacific; over Western Europe extending into Africa; over the British Isles. But it was when scientists started to investigate the effects of global dimming that they made the most disturbing discovery of all. Those more reflective clouds could alter the pattern of the world's rainfall, with tragic consequences.

...

NARRATOR: In Europe and North America, air pollution is already in decline. Scrubbers in power stations, catalytic converters in cars, and low sulfur fuels, though they do nothing to reduce greenhouse gases, have already led to a marked reduction in visible air pollution.

Coincidence or not, this should be good news for the Sahel, and in recent years the droughts have not been nearly so bad. But in developing countries, like China and India, air quality has been getting worse. The health effects are terrible. It's estimated that respiratory diseases kill a million Indians each year.

As a result, it's likely that India and China will follow the same path as the developed world and strive to bring air pollution under control. But there's a terrible catch. While global dimming is a major threat, it now appears it has been protecting us from an even greater threat: accelerated global warming.

It was David Travis who first caught a glimpse of what the world could be like without global dimming. It happened in those chaotic days following the tragedy of 9/11. For 15 years, Travis had been studying the vapor trails, or contrails, left behind by high-flying aircraft. As a jet passes through the air, the pollution particles it emits can trigger the condensation of water droplets. These manmade clouds seem small, but when they all spread out, they can blanket the sky.

DAVID TRAVIS: Here are some examples of what we call "outbreaks" of contrails. These are large clusters of contrails. And here's a particularly good one from Southern California. Here's the west coast of the United States. And you can see, here, this lacing network of contrails, covering at least 50 percent, if not 75 percent or more of the sky in that area. It doesn't take an expert to realize that if, if you look at the satellite picture and see this kind of contrail coverage that they've got to be having an effect on temperature at the surface.

NARRATOR: But the problem Travis faced was to establish exactly how big an effect the contrails were actually having. The only way to do that was to find a period of time when conditions were right for contrails to form, but there were no flights. And, of course, that never happened—until September, 2001. Then, for three days after the 11th, virtually all commercial aircraft were grounded, so Travis set about gathering temperatures from all over the U.S.A., and comparing them to records from the last 30 years.

DAVID TRAVIS: ...initially, data from over 5,000 weather stations across the 48 United States, the area that was most dominantly affected by the grounding.

NARRATOR: Travis was not looking just at temperature, which varies a lot from day to day. Instead he focused on something that normally changes quite slowly: the temperature range, the difference between the highest temperature during the day and the lowest at night. Had this changed at all during the three days of the grounding?

DAVID TRAVIS: As we began to look at the climate data and the evidence began to grow, I got more and more excited. The actual results were much larger than I expected.

So here we see, for the three-day period preceding September 11th, a slightly negative value of temperature range with lots of contrails, as normal. Then we have this sudden spike right here of the three-day period. This reflects lack of clouds, lack of contrails, warmer days cooler nights, exactly what we expected, but even larger than we expected.

NARRATOR: During the three-day grounding, the nights had gotten colder and the days, warmer. Averaged over the whole continental U.S., the temperature difference between day and night had suddenly increased by over a degree Celsius or two degrees Fahrenheit. Travis had never seen anything like it before.

DAVID TRAVIS: This was the largest temperature swing of this magnitude in the last 30 years.

...

DOCTOR PETER COX (University of Exeter): Climate change, to the current date, appears to have been a tug of war, really, between two manmade pollutants. On the one side, we've got greenhouse gases that are pulling the system towards a warmer state, on the other hand, we've got particles from pollution that are cooling it down. And there's a kind of tug of war going on between the two, in which the middle of the rope, if you like, determines where the climate system is going in terms of warming or cooling.

NARRATOR: So which is stronger in the tug of war? Something powerful enough to push and pull on the global temperature has what scientists call a "climate forcing" effect.

PETER COX: Since we're pumping up greenhouse gases, we actually provide what's called a forcing on the climate system, a warming effect, which you can measure in terms of watts-per-meter-squared, much like you could measure watts from a light bulb. And that forces the climate to a warmer state.

NARRATOR: Because greenhouse gases trap heat, when we add to them we increase the heat energy trapped in the atmosphere. Today, the extra energy trapped by manmade greenhouse gases would be enough to run a 100-watt light bulb, placed every six meters over the entire surface of the globe, an extra 2.6 to three watts of energy for every square meter. It's this extra energy that's driving global temperatures ever higher.

But it's now clear to the world's climate scientists that this greenhouse warming is not the only factor at play. There's also the cooling from global dimming. The question is, "How big an effect is it having?"

In 2002, NASA launched the Aqua satellite. Onboard was a suite of instruments designed to measure the effect of dimming pollutants on the energy budget of the Earth. The observations from Aqua have enabled climate scientists to make a rough estimate of global dimming's total cooling effect on our planet.

JAMES HANSEN: Our estimate for the particle forcing is minus-one-and-a-half-watts- per-meter-squared. So that would imply a cooling of more than one degree Celsius.

NARRATOR: In other words, while the human greenhouse effect has produced 2.6 to three watts of extra energy for every square meter of the Earth, global dimming has subtracted about 1.5 watts, so, more than half the warming effect of our greenhouse emissions has been masked by the cooling effect of particle pollution.

Perhaps this is why, despite a large rise in the concentration of greenhouse gases, until recently, the temperature rise has been hard for most of us to notice.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3310_sun.html

It's a really good episode of Nova, video available online soon.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/

[C.M. Burns]

And yet those idiots and Stanford University tell a different story about solar activity and climate change:

Quote:

Some uncertainty remains about the role of natural variations in causing climate change. Solar variability certainly plays a minor role, but it looks like only a quarter of the recent variations can be attributed to the Sun. At most. During the initial discovery period of global warming, the magnitude of the influence of increased activity on the Sun was not well determined.

Solar irradiance changes have been measured reliably by satellites for only 30 years. These precise observations show changes of a few tenths of a percent that depend on the level of activity in the 11-year solar cycle. Changes over longer periods must be inferred from other sources. Estimates of earlier variations are important for calibrating the climate models. While a component of recent global warming may have been caused by the increased solar activity of the last solar cycle, that component was very small compared to the effects of additional greenhouse gases. According to a NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) press release, "...the solar increases do not have the ability to cause large global temperature increases...greenhouse gases are indeed playing the dominant role..." The Sun is once again less bright as we approach solar minimum, yet global warming continues.

Source: Stanford Solar Center

[BartSimpson]

Quote:

The Sun is once again less bright as we approach solar minimum, yet global warming continues.

Does it? Was it hotter last year or this year than 1998? I don't think so.

[Zipperfish]

BartSimpson wrote:

Quote:

The Sun is once again less bright as we approach solar minimum, yet global warming continues.

Does it? Was it hotter last year or this year than 1998? I don't think so.

Warming continues.

[DrCaleb]

C.M. Burns wrote:

And yet those idiots and Stanford University tell a different story about solar activity and climate change:

Quote:

Solar irradiance changes have been measured reliably by satellites for only 30 years.

The Sun is once again less bright as we approach solar minimum, yet global warming continues.

Comparing Apples to Hydrogen Monty. Light measured from orbit isn't affected by particles in the air.

It's actually worse then. If Global dimming is keeping global warming in check during solar minimum - what happens when Ra gets angry again and solar activity increases! We must create more pollution to offset our CO2 emissions! (or the CO2 traders won't have more worthless gas to sell)

[C.M. Burns]

BartSimpson wrote:

Quote:

The Sun is once again less bright as we approach solar minimum, yet global warming continues.

Does it? Was it hotter last year or this year than 1998? I don't think so.

Once again, you prove that you don't know the difference between 'weather' and 'climate'.

[C.M. Burns]

DrCaleb wrote:

C.M. Burns wrote:

And yet those idiots and Stanford University tell a different story about solar activity and climate change:

Quote:

Solar irradiance changes have been measured reliably by satellites for only 30 years.

The Sun is once again less bright as we approach solar minimum, yet global warming continues.

Comparing Apples to Hydrogen Monty. Light measured from orbit isn't affected by particles in the air.

It's actually worse then. If Global dimming is keeping global warming in check during solar minimum - what happens when Ra gets angry again and solar activity increases! We must create more pollution to offset our CO2 emissions! (or the CO2 traders won't have more worthless gas to sell)

No, Doc, Stanford is not making a false comparison. They are not even making a comparison. Only YOU are making a comparison.

[Gunnair]

Zipperfish wrote:

It's funny that the largest scientific study ever undertaken, which determined that it is very likely that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 were a signficant driver in affecting global climate, fails to resonate with the anti-AGW crowd, and yet one observation about sunspot actvitiy and they're convinced the globe is cooling.

It is, as stemmer said, "food for thought," but it hardly stacks up to the evidence presented supporting AGW.

Given the angry timbre of the piece, I have a feeling that the writer's position is more driven by ideology than fact.

Especially as it comes from the National Anxiety Centre. Certainly a balanced piece.