2006 Hottest Year on Record – So what? Part 2

Previously in Part 1 I’ve talked about the fact that 2006 was the hottest year on record according to the National Weather service. But what does that mean? Does a record year indicate a long term climatic trend?

Which leads me to my next point.

3) Humans tend to extrapolate their experience to their environment. Its only natural to think that when your experience tells you things are different from what you remember “the way it used to be” to go searching for answers. Search hard enough for the answers you seek, and they are often found to fit your criteria. It happens in science too. In the 1970’s, the USA saw several harsh winters and the “big chill” was the focus of science. A new ice age was envisioned in our future. Even Time Magazine got in on the act, not just once or twice but three times with articles expounding on the coming ice age.

From the 1974 Time article: “Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. ”

The point is this: people talk about weather more than anything else. And, if the weather starts seeming “odd” well then there’s lots of reasons to go look for a cause. But climate is a whole different story. Climate is based on trends lasting tens, hundreds, and thousands of years….so one year or even ten of hot or cold weather does not a climate change make.

Now, the pendulum of climate opinion may be about to swing in another direction, according to this National Geographic article, the warming trend we’ve seen could trigger another ice age.

So which way is it? Colder, Hotter? It depends on whom you ask. The big problem is that many meteorologists and climate scientists don’t look at the REALLY big picture that includes our SpaceWeather environment. And some still labor under the notion that the sun is not variable, or that the small chnages in solor luminosity can’t account for the changes we see in earths climate.

But the earth is not just getting energy from the sun in the form of visible light. There’s a whole range of electromagnetic linkage between the earth and sun, and the solar wind.

Yet climate models don’t figure these energy factors into the earths energy balance. How can they? They don’t have a good handle on how the suns magnetic field and and solar wind changes might possiblly affect earth. And, I’ll be the first to admit that they don’t teach you anything in meteorology school other than about how visible solar irradiance is responsible for earth’s energy budget. There’s a built in bias on the part of meteorologists and climatologists to only look at the atmosphere, and how light from the sun affects it. Hence CO2 becomes the focus since it has the abilty to alter how earth’s atmosphere reacts to sunlight. CO2 is the boogeyman of climate change because the vast majority of meteorologists and climatologists don’t look beyond the atmosphere for answers.

But ask a solar scientist about global warming, and you’ll likely get an entirely different answer.

In Part 3, I’ll show you some hardly ever seen before solar studies that come about as close to a “smoking gun” for climate change you’ll ever see and suggest a mechanism for how the missing linkage between the sun and earth is likely responsible for the ‘apparent’ climate shifts we see.