enjoy!

ENSO conditions: it may influence the concentration of OH in mesopause?
http://www.terrapub.co.jp/journals/EPS/pdf/5204/52040261.pdf

However – is anyone considering the combined effect of lower solar magnetic flux plus steadily-falling geomagnetic field? More clouds? We’ve hardly seen the Sun all August in the UK.

At sunset two nights ago, here in New Hampshire, I noted that, very subtle in a deep blue and cloudless twilight sky, were faint wave-clouds of the dimmest grey. At the time I wondered if ash from the Alaskan eruption in early August was passing over.

Those renamed, newly-moustachioed, NASA types will be railing against the Hydrogen economy as it generates water vapour, and demanding the use of Carbon. Hehehe :-)

BTW I saw a TV ad recently for a Toyota, I think, hydrogen powered car. Environmentally friendly as it produces only H2O, not CO2.

Hmm, I thought, water vapour is the worst greenhouse gas, isn’t it.

Well, so? Waves are an indication of ocean surface change. Earthquakes are an indication of land surface change.

I just somehow think that those last few slides were thrown in to get the further funding. Pity; spoiled an otherwise informative presentation.

Hmmm. Could it be that mankind is somehow special? Could it be that you know Who keeps our climate stable? Or did our campfires produce enough CO2 to ward off global cooling? I doubt the latter.

Its all connected.

Life is so interesting now. Dang that Chinese curse.

This article offers an alternate explanation to Fred Hoyle’s meteor on demand theory, although I wouldn’t count that out as a possibility; for the last 400K years or so.

I keep coming back to this article because it provides an effective explanation for both warming and cooling. Here are two links to the author William Ruddiman and the article I refer to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ruddiman
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-did-humans-first-alte

I don’t think I can reproduce the article here as Scientific American still wants payment for it but it is more than worth the read. I offer this excerpt from his conclusions which I believe is ok to reproduce (up to you Anthony).

Implications for the Future

The conclusion that humans prevented a cooling and arguably stopped the initial stage of a glacial cycle bears directly on a long-running dispute over what global climate has in store for us in the near future. Part of the reason that policymakers had trouble embracing the initial predictions of global warming in the 1980s was that a number of scientists had spent the previous decade telling everyone almost exactly the opposite—that an ice age was on its way. Based on the new confirmation that orbital variations control the growth and decay of ice sheets, some scientists studying these longer-scale changes had reasonably concluded that the next ice age might be only a few hundred or at most a few thousand years away.

In subsequent years, however, investigators found that greenhouse gas concentrations were rising rapidly and that the earth’s climate was warming, at least in part because of the gas increases. This evidence convinced most scientists that the relatively near-term future (the next century or two) would be dominated by global warming rather than by global cooling. This revised prediction, based on an improved understanding of the climate system, led some policymakers to discount all forecasts—whether of global warming or an impending ice age—as untrustworthy.

My findings add a new wrinkle to each scenario. If anything, such forecasts of an “impending” ice age were actually understated: new ice sheets should have begun to grow several millennia ago. The ice failed to grow because human-induced global warming actually began far earlier than previously thought—well before the industrial era.

In these kinds of hotly contested topics that touch on public policy, scientific results are often used for opposing ends. Global-warming skeptics could cite my work as evidence that human-generated greenhouse gases played a beneficial role for several thousand years by keeping the earth’s climate more hospitable than it would otherwise have been. Others might counter that if so few humans with relatively primitive technologies were able to alter the course of climate so significantly, then we have reason to be concerned about the current rise of greenhouse gases to unparalleled concentrations at unprecedented rates.

The rapid warming of the past century is probably destined to persist for at least 200 years, until the economically accessible fossil fuels become scarce. Once that happens, the earth’s climate should begin to cool gradually as the deep ocean slowly absorbs the pulse of excess CO2 from human activities. Whether global climate will cool enough to produce the long-overdue glaciations or remain warm enough to avoid that fate is impossible to predict.

The numbers of LOTTO, please

quote But then you could argue that there’s been some creative Science Fiction generated with an AGW theme in the last decade or two :-) unquote

I ought to be grateful to AGW in a way — I wrote a short story about global cooling and sold it to Analog. A writer may gain respect from any of the big three, but only Analog brings self-respect… Thank you, Dr Hansen.

JF

From the stark black of space
through wrenching shades of blue
and onto the ground
through sad shades of brown.