Holy Cow! Charles Osgood, a skeptic?
A QUIET SUN DOESN’T HAPPEN OVERNIGHT.
excerpts:
I know you’ve already got a lot to worry about as it is, but something rather odd is going on — on the Sun.
The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity — and last year, it was supposed to have heated up — and, at its peak, would have a tumultuous boiling atmosphere, spitting out flares and huge chunks of super-hot gas.
Instead, it hit a 50-year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity. Right now, the sun is the dimmest it’s been in nearly a century.
Did you know that? It’s true. Astronomers are baffled by it, but has the press covered the story? Hardly at all. Is the government doing anything about it? No, it’s not even in the Obama budget or any Congressional earmarks.
Right now, global warming is a given to so many, it raises the question: Could another minimum activity period on the Sun counteract, in any way, the effects of global warming?
read the entire article at the link below:
Transcripts, podcasts, and Mp3’s of all this program can be found at theosgoodfile.com.
Anyone who has followed any popular science magazine, in print or on the web, over the last ten years has been witness to slow and then accelerating dissection of the body of science. It started with a silly hypothesis here and a study there, and soon large pieces were being removed willy nilly. These scientists, who are on an important mission, reached into the body of science and began removing the inner organs one by one. They remade them. Recently they took out the still beating heart and twisted it to their purpose. The final stitches have been placed, sealing the new organs within the rotting corpse. As the lifeless body is elevated to the highest position and the awful stinking offal of the true core of science lies on the laboratory floor, the lightning of political will cracks and booms around the now twitching monster as his makers scream in glee, “It’s alive! it’s ALIVE!!!!”
As the newly formed body of science is brought back to the floor of the laboratory, the world waits for the to hear the pronouncement that will issue from this construct of the New Science. As the microphones are placed close to record this wisdom, we hear, “Fire… hot… baddd!!”
Thank you New Scientists…
Can this patient be saved?
“REPLY: Leif, Don’t take it personally, he was probably thinking of Hathaway. 😉 Anthony”
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Good one Anthony!
Heck Leif, between you and Hathaway, NASA had all the bases covered!
Kind of like if Al Gore and I joined forces (highly unlikely) to form “OFNA” and we predicted both global warming AND cooling – one of us is bound to be right.
Just giving you a hard time Leif – live by the sword, and all that…
How much longer before you accept that solar variability, directly or more likely indirectly, is a significant driver of Earth’s climate?
Best, Allan 8^)
“Richard Briscoe (02:48:02) :
Richard Hill’s link to the Irkutsk data is certainly interesting. It should be noted though, that although the city is far from the sea it is close to Lake Baikal. This is no ordinary lake. It is large and extremely deep, containing about 20% of all the world’s fresh water – more than all the North American Great Lakes combined. This is bound to have some effect on the local climate.”
“From Wiki:
“Lake Baikal is in a rift valley, created by the Baikal Rift Zone, where the crust of the earth is pulling apart… In geological terms, the rift is young and active—it widens about two centimeters per year. The fault zone is also seismically active; there are hot springs in the area and notable earthquakes every few years.”
RW 00:58:50
How does your correlation between CO2 and temperature rise work for periods other than the last quarter of the last century? Answer: the correlation is poor. So extending your ‘simple analysis’ to periods outside your cherry picked moments shows that CO2 is not driving temperature.
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Jeremy;-)
Prof Mike Lockwood is an esteemed astrophysicist & has appeared on The Sky at Night with Sir Patrick Moore! However, as I posted a comment on a previous topic the other day, he used to be a firm believer that the Sun was the driver of global temps, not CO2. However, he has since converted to the new faith wholeheartedly for whatever reason. He wrote a paper with Carl Frolich in 05 showing TSI varied only by 0.2% during solar max to solar min, & that TSI had been declining over the last few years, this was demolished by Christopher Monckton at SPPI (well worth a visit sometime). I also noted that Lord Monckton pointed out that Svenmark researched a large chunk of the same data & came to the opposite conclusion to Lockwood!
I suspect, like many others have been, & others who read this site also suspect of those, that he has been got at. Probably through the old fashioned Yes Minister (old political satire prog in UK), of offering greater status, salary, general standing, possibly a top university position added in, greater research grants, cash is always a good inducer, but of course “we need the right man for the job, someone who is sympathetic to government policy on certain matters,” etc! If it happens here it happens elsewhere folks!
Generally, I am staggered that, considereing the global cooling measured by all four major temperature metrics for the last 7 years, (take note Prof Lockwood), the Sun is all quiet, with most predictions of its furious activity to come not happening, that someone is not asking the question, “just a minute chaps, the Sun’s all quiet, temperatures are going down, have we gone down the wrong path on this global warming stuff?”
nvw 04:34:47
I could well be wrong, here, but I think you’ve got the wrong take on Sarkozy, despite the skepticism of Allegre. When I first read Sarkozy’s comment I thought the context was that he thought Obama wasn’t serious enough about encumbering carbon. The European leaders are still much enchanted by the idea that CO2=AGW. I hope I’m wrong, though, and you are right.
I see that others have made the same point about RW’s overly simple analysis at 00:58:50, by which he concludes that CO2 is driving the sun. He’s in good company, though. Hundreds of climate modelers have made the same mistake. That’s why they are all wrong.
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RW (00:58:50) :
Perhaps, but had you looked at the PDO, or more simply, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/25/warming-trend-pdo-and-solar-correlate-better-than-co2/ you would find USHCN data vs CO2, TSI, and PDO(+AMO(+TSI)) over the last century or so.
Vs. CO2, there’s a R^2 of 0.44 (poor-fair correlation according to D’Aleo), vs. TSI gets R^2 of 0.57, and vs PDO+AMO R^2 is 0.83 (fair-good).
-Ric (not RW!) Werme
Alan the Brit understands what is going on.
It’s amazing to me that simply stroking someone’s ego […offering greater status, salary, general standing, possibly a top university position added in, greater research grants, cash is always a good inducer, but of course “we need the right man for the job, someone who is sympathetic to government policy on certain matters,” etc…] causes most people to jettison their ethics, and to sell out for the reasons given by Alan.
One by one, this is how the global CO2=AGW forces corrupt science.
OK, nvw, look at the third to last paragraph in your New York Times link at 04:34:47. I get the impression that Sarkozy was commenting that Obama doesn’t know much about the details of what the Europeans have done to control carbon. I don’t get the impression that Sarkozy was the least bit skeptical about its climate effect. But, more power to Allegre. We can but hope.
The Europeans and the Americans are being played for their guilt about past carbon use by the Russians, the Chinese, and the Indians. Those nations, and others, are perfectly aware that the globe is cooling, and that the role of CO2 has been exaggerated. But if they can get the developed West to hogtie themselves about carbon use, while not doing so themselves, it is all to the good for the developing nations. Watch this play out at Copenhagen and in the run-up to it. We can see the jostling already.
And by all means, read Peter Huber in the City Journal: ‘Bound to Burn’. He explains forcefully and persuasively why neither the developing nations nor the developed ones will wean themselves from hydrocarbon energy soon. Aren’t you glad that fossil fuel use doesn’t impact the climate very much after all?
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Who cares what Charles Osgood thinks? He has no expertise in climatology. He is a human interest, soft news reporter. He is well past his sell by date.
This blog is nothing but cheer leading.
REPLY: Then go read another one if WUWT doesn’t suit your preconceived notions, but please spare us your judgments – Anthony
Do you get it RW? Many here have shown that you’ve cherry-picked. Do you understand that that is an error and can mislead you? C’mon, be honest. It can’t hurt. Nor can it hurt you to be relieved of your carbon use guilt. For dessert, you can concern yourself with real environmental problems. God knows, we’ve got enough of them without wasting our essence on pursuing the chimera of carbon demonization.
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Smokey:-) I thank you Sir!
I have some expereince of how government establishments work as I used to be an employee ( I must confess I was underworked & overpaid back then, as were many others – but of course that is no criticism of current government employees!) I remember a supervisor of mine who was employed on a lower grade & hence salary because although competent he was a bit “too young” for the post that was advertised – why they employed him then I don’t know but that’s not the point, – a few years later he was told he could be promoted up without too much diffuclty but he needed to write a paper or two – particularly one that would endorse the current stance of the establishment at which he was employed, although of course written in an “impartial” way by a professional person! He got it!
It would be the right time to propose something of the kind of the 1957 Geophysical Year, so as to convey all resources to study the sun-earth relation in times of a minimum.
Those studies would, for sure, clarify the GHG issue for good.
SC 1015, spawn of the Watts Effect, appears to be a Tiny Tim and fading fast.
It dawned on me that folks rooting for a return to a “normal” sunspot cycle (amateur radio operators, Gole & Hansen, etc.) are like us mid-market MLB fans; e.g. whenever the woeful Astros score more than one run at a time, or somebody makes a great play, we always assert that it was “the turning point of the season”. Repeated frequently enough (usually about once a game) it becomes the comedy of repetition, and a little bit sad.
Thus is is with The Spots. Since about September, every spot has raised hopes of a Solar Hockey Stick. It’s the turning point of the Cycle!
Unfortunately, SC23 spots keep cropping up, and the SC24 ones are acting like octagenarian silent film stars at a benefit; they peek-out from behind the curtain, wave at the crowd, and are gone.
Dunno about the other science and engineering types out there, but this is starting to look a lot like a heavily damped, decaying function to me.
Anybody see any evidence of underlying “excitation”? I can’t.
The Sun isn’t driving the planet’s temp right now.
Solar activity is too low. CO2 forcing requires substantial input, which is lacking due to higher albedo.
The GCR’s are driving the planet’s temp right now.
That is it’s problem.
Any brave Solar observers out there going to try and project this spot (1015)?
Smokey:
“Of course, RW is wrong. I suspect that he just cherry picked a random number set purporting to show an R^2 correlation of .62.”
I got the data from publicly available sources, and plotted the graphs. Do the same and give us quantitative analysis, instead of being dense and rude.
“That is an extremely high number, and if it were true, the planet’s temperature would be tracking the rise in CO2 very closely.”
It is certainly true. Get the data, do the maths. “Extremely” is too strong a description though.
“But it doesn’t; as CO2 rises, the planet cools: click.”
What you are showing there is that over short timescales, noise dominates.
“As Robinson points out above, the planet is not responding to CO2. As carbon dioxide levels rise, the planet’s temperature continues to fall: click. Note that the R^2 correlation is practically non-existent.”
That graph shows a short period, over which noise dominates. R-squared is not given.
“If CO2 caused global warming, then the planet would be getting much hotter.”
It is.
“Instead, the planet is cooling — thus falsifying the CO2=AGW hypothesis.”
If the error bars are larger than the “trend”, there is no trend.
Ric Werme: you link to a piece in which the data is heavily smoothed, which inflates apparent correlations. It also uses US temperatures instead of global.
kim: “How does your correlation between CO2 and temperature rise work for periods other than the last quarter of the last century?”
You can go back to the beginning of the instrumental record and get a very similar result.
“Answer: the correlation is poor”
Answering a question without doing any working out normally leads to the wrong answer. Try getting the data yourself and plotting T vs. CO2, and then answer the question again.
RW, please add a discussion of oceanic oscillation affects. These can have a significant impact on weather pattern variation over several decades. Certainly this has been the case in the past. What part do you think they are playing now, since no one has managed to turn them off yet to allow something else to affect weather pattern variations. The oceans are not warmer, or for that matter cooler, than would be expected for the various phases they are in regarding their oscillations. So far, the ocean temperatures are not being affected by CO2. They are behaving normally. And just so you know where to look, spend some time at NOAA on SST and try to find an ocean that is warm because of CO2, not because of its normal pattern of oscillation. Finally, it is well understood by meteorologists and climatologists that weather pattern variations are sourced by what ever the oceans are doing.
eric (05:45:08) :
Who cares what Al Gore thinks. He’s just a neurotic politician.
I keep bumping into these ridiculous articles, where Scientists give us some new information about the Climate but are in denial about any possible effects it might have on their belief system.
Some choice quotes:
In stark contrast to the loss of sea ice in the Arctic over the last 30 years, the frozen seas surrounding the South Pole have increased at the rate of 100,000 square kilometres a decade over the last 40 years.
That’s interesting…..
Scientists believe the growth is down to stronger surface winds over Antarctica and more frequent storms in the Southern Ocean – both direct consequences of the ozone hole.
Is it? Cool.
But the team from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Nasa warned the ozone hole was only delaying the impact of greenhouse gases on the climate of the White Continent.
If ozone levels recover as expected over the next 100 years, thanks to the international ban on damaging CFCs, weather patterns will return to normal and Antarctic sea ice will shrink rapidly, they said.
Wait a minute….. has the hole in the Ozone layer grown larger or not?. If it isn’t shrinking, then what good did banning CFC’s do and what benefit 100 years into the future will that give to Antarctica?
I must admit to feeling a little confused.
eric (05:45:08) :
“Who cares what Charles Osgood thinks? He has no expertise in climatology. He is a human interest, soft news reporter. He is well past his sell by date.
This blog is nothing but cheer leading.”
Eric, as a person of a “certain” age myself I take personal offence at your rampant ageism. I thought such muddled thinking was no longer permitted in the “New Dawn of Global Social Awareness” which has appeared in the last few years. Tsk, tsk. Perhaps you have inadvertently forgotten to remove your special fact-filtering sunglasses and, therefore, can no longer clearly see the world around you.
Regards,
John
A Wod (2:54:35)
Some carbon dioxide alarmists try to dismiss the Little Ice Age-Solar connection by blaming the cooling on volcanic aerosols. Note figure 2, page 3, of Jasper Kirkby’s paper on Cosmic Rays and Climate, which shows the rough correlation between solar proxies and temperature proxies. For our complicated climate, this rough correlation is good enough for me.
http://aps.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0804/0804.1938v1.pdf
RW 06:52:38
You are as dense as Tom P. The only time there is a good correlation between CO2 rise and Temperature rise is in the last quarter of the last century. Before and after that, the correlation is poor. However there is a good correlation, for at least a century, between temperature variations, overlaid on the constant rise from the Little Ice Age, and the varying phases of the oceanic oscillations.
You refuse to understand that you’ve cherry-picked data. That is willful.
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eric 05:45:08
Well, the answer to your question is simple. Osgood’s listeners care what he thinks. And many of them are hearing for the first time that the sun is acting just a little unusually compared to its behaviour of the last half century. Now, my question is, why don’t you care? Maybe you oughta.
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eric (05:45:08) :
Who cares what Charles Osgood thinks? He has no expertise in climatology.
eric,
You’re being just a little bit disingenuous. Osgood is not makig up things.
Osgood himself is not the point in all of this. It’s his message. What he is observing and mentioning. At least that is real.
Would you have said, “Who cares what Paul Revere says, he’s just a guy on a horse.”?
And what is this site “cheer leading”?
If you choose to “not care” about the many growing contradictions to AGW that’s your choice.
But in doing so you’re ingoring the continued fabrications which keep the AGW movement alive. Also by your choice.
As I mentioned before the new head of NOAA is a regular fabricator.
You and everyone else should care as she and others are about to impose sweeping policies based upon fabrications and the corrupting of science.
kim (07:51:25) :
eric 05:45:08
Well, the answer to your question is simple. Osgood’s listeners care what he thinks. And many of them are hearing for the first time that the sun is acting just a little unusually compared to its behaviour of the last half century. Now, my question is, why don’t you care? Maybe you oughta.
The sun has always fluctuated. The sun’s irradiation increased over the first half of the 20th century and then became flat for the second half.
The indications are the next cycle looks to be weak. If the sun spots, stop it is believed that this is worth about 0.2C temperature reduction for the global average.
This is a small fraction of the 3C expected to result from a doubling of CO2 by human industry. It seems to me that the quiet sun is not a big deal.