Excerpts printed below, see full story here (h/t to David Archibald)
Anne Minard for National Geographic News
May 4, 2009 A prolonged lull in solar activity has astrophysicists glued to their telescopes waiting to see what the sun will do next—and how Earth’s climate might respond.
The sun is the least active it’s been in decades and the dimmest in a hundred years. The lull is causing some scientists to recall the Little Ice Age, an unusual cold spell in Europe and North America, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850.
…
But researchers are on guard against their concerns about a new cold snap being misinterpreted.
“[Global warming] skeptics tend to leap forward,” said Mike Lockwood, a solar terrestrial physicist at the University of Southampton in the U.K.
He and other researchers are therefore engaged in what they call “preemptive denial” of a solar minimum leading to global cooling.
…
Even if the current solar lull is the beginning of a prolonged quiet, the scientists say, the star’s effects on climate will pale in contrast with the influence of human-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2).
“I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 is a good 50 to 60 percent higher than normal, whereas the decline in solar output is a few hundredths of one percent down,” Lockwood said. “I think that helps keep it in perspective.”
…
Changes in the sun’s activity can affect Earth in other ways, too.
For example, ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun is not bottoming out the same way it did during the past few visual minima.
“The visible light doesn’t vary that much, but UV varies 20 percent, [and] x-rays can vary by a factor of ten,” Hall said. “What we don’t understand so well is the impact of that differing spectral irradiance.”
Solar UV light, for example, affects mostly the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere, where the effects are not as noticeable to humans. But some researchers suspect those effects could trickle down into the lower layers, where weather happens
Oh! No sunspots today.
So much for the Watts Effect.
I guess it only works for Gore.
If there was ever a dumb statement by a scientist, it is:
“I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 is a good 50 to 60 percent higher than normal, whereas the decline in solar output is a few hundredths of one percent down,” Lockwood said. “I think that helps keep it in perspective.”
Sorry Lockwood, but it does not. Here Lockwood is basically saying CO2 has as much impact on the earth’s climate as the sun!
That’s absurd. It’s scientific amateurism.
Again the warmists are completely overstating, 100-fold, CO2’s role in climate.
Ozzie,
Also a good point you make.
Graeme Rodaughan (22:17:25) :
Molon: – And if snow wipes out crops and drives up food prices will they attribute those outcomes to cap and trade?
No, the blame will fall on the evil kulak farmers. They will be used as scapegoats to justify government takeover of food production. See this excellent essay for the why and how:
OBAMA AND THE NEO-MARXIST LEFT: The Clever Manipulation of Projection and Paranoia
The earth is warming,
This I know.
Because my models
Tell me so.
Preemptive denialism’s predictive models trump real world data.
“I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 is a good 50 to 60 percent higher than normal, whereas the decline in solar output is a few hundredths of one percent down,” Lockwood said. “I think that helps keep it in perspective.”
It certainly does put things in perspective.
For instance, a ‘50% increase in CO2’ has managed to give us a supposed 0.6°C of warming but the ‘few hundredths of one percent’ decrease in solar output gave forth a nearly 1.0°C drop in temperature from the MWP to the LIA.
“…the Little Ice Age, an unusual cold spell in Europe and North America, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850.”
This statement is also misleading, as it implies it was evely cold during this period, and then started warming in 1850. WRONG!
The low point of the LIA was, correct me if I am wrong, around 1750, and then it started getting warm. Yes, it’s been getting warm for almost 250 years now – long before the Industrial Rev started!
For Nat Geo global temperature follows an on-off square tooth wave. Utterly clueless.
Rebar 21:05:51
You got my vote!
Molon Labe,
No it won’t.
You got China and India spewing out more and more every day. It’ll never fly.
Gentry Very true maybe Lief might understand and explain this.
Barry: “At what global average temperature does the AGW argument fail?”
To paraphrase the Monty Python team, AGW is not an argument, it’s contradiction!
To back up my point, George Monbiot’s recent comedy skit (Apri 30) in the Guardian consisted of a list of 38 allegeded “howlers” by John Tomlinson, many of which he proceeded to “debunk” by writing variations on “No it isn’t!” And when he wants really unimpeachable authoritative backup for his stance, he writes “Fact: Gavin Schmidt tells me….”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/apr/30/climate-change-scepticism-climate-change
In the real world, as far as I can judge, the AGW argument has already failed because despite the rise in atmospheric CO2 over the past dozen years, the average global temperature has fallen during that time, or in other words, the earth’s atmosphere and oceans have experienced a net loss of heat which has disappeared through the skylight. It might be argued that the heat has gone into the deep oceans or into melting of polar ice or into warming the subsurface of the solid earth, but there is no strong evidence that this has happened, and a cooling atmosphere on a warming planet is counter-intuative concept to say the least.
Pierre Gosselin (01:20:18) :
If they get cap & trade and global temperatures start dropping, it WILL NOT matter how much CO2 India and China produce. The measured CO2 value at Mauna Loa will be ADJUSTED to show it decreasing.
Environmental research grants make scientists stupid – discuss.
CO2 is a trace gas so 60% increase of nearly nothing is still nearly nothing, while the sun provides almost all our energy. Now that really puts it in perspective. But of course when you say that, some warmer comes along and says something utterly irrelevant like “it only takes a tiny amount of poison to kill you”. These warmers are so chock-full of contradictions in their stories that it’s absolutely clear most of them are just making things up as they go along.
Molon Labe,
No it won’t.
You got China and India spewing out more and more every day. It’ll never fly.
OH! You’re my new favorite blogger fyi
If Lockwood really wanted to get the AGW message across, he should have acknowledged that the sun might cause some cooling – then when there is no cooling he can point to the increasing effects of CO2.
As far as “painting themselves into a corner” (Robert Rust (20:52:27) : ) – what about the proponents of ‘solar cooling’, what will their position be when there is no downturn in temperatures.
S Goddard might want to check this 2 weeks ago this was 1.4 million k above?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/iphone/iphone.currentarea.global.html
and it hasn’t changed much since then as far as I can see…..
A ‘quiet’ Sun certainly correlates with the little ice age minimum temperature period. But it proves as little as global temperatures increasing with increasing CO2. But we have enough empirical evidence to prove that AGW is an utter scientific blunder without relying on this hypothesis.
Furthermore, Mike Lockwood’s preemptive denial does nothing but destroy his case. But it does show how worried his is.
“I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 is a good 50 to 60 percent higher than normal, whereas the decline in solar output is a few hundredths of one percent down,” Lockwood said. “I think that helps keep it in perspective.”
As stated earlier there are some significant problems with the choice of scale described here. Some thoughts follow on the choices of the scales.
The 50-60% increase represents an increase in CO2 (this is significantly lower than some earlier periods of geological history). However as a percentage increase of CO2 in the atmosphere this ammount is insignificant and surely the percentage of the atmosphere would be the more useful scale for determining the the effects of CO2. So why did Lockwood quote the former?
Secondly the author notes that the changes to the suns TSI are of the order of a few 100’s of a percent (this estimate seems deliberately low). However, lets compare these 2 values to the warming which has taken place.
The warming over the last century is approximately 0.4 degrees on a scale whose average is 390 degrees. This is similar to the changes occuring to the TSI in the sun, a few hundreths (as quted by the author) of a percent.
Now directly correlating these values is of course fraut with danger as we should be considering the energy required for the different gasses to change temperature in terms of their specific heat index of each gas. Even so the net energy change is a few hundreths of a percent.
Now when I am examinig causal links and I see the suns TSI percentile changes more closely matching the tiny changes in the earths temperatures it causes me to pause and think.
Does it make you stop and think too?
We’re all going to die. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Actually, sooner or later, we all will. Solar weather happens. I am glad for this site because an intelligent non-scientist like me can read it and learn. Thank you, all of you.
With a hack reporting what was said and the solar terrestrial physicist considering carefully what is said, I’m confused by the double talk.
Molon Labe
“The measured CO2 value at Mauna Loa will be ADJUSTED to show it decreasing.”
They may try, but they are a little late. Temperatures have been dropping 10 years now – and so it will backfire and only prove that CO2 follows temps, and not vice versa. Unless of course they go back a revise the CO2 levels from 15 years ago and show it started dropping in 1995 or so.
Such brazen revisionism would require a Stalinist state.
My guess is that they’ll pull out the “aerosols are causing cooling” or “CO2 is leading to catstrophic ocean acidification” fear-mongering.
QUESTION:
Why has South America been continuously projected to have cooler than normal temps, and has so for the last several months?
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp8.html
Is it that the Pacific and Atlantic are keeping it cool?
Here is a thought … recognition is finally given to Sol for this relapse of “real” AGW heating but then the models are recalibrated to actually demonstrate that the cooling has been less than a true Sol minimum event due to the effect of AGW and predictions begin for a dire catastrophic temperature rise in cycle 24.
Oh and all that extra UV … my “model” predicts new headlines: “Catlin expedition retasked to apply sunscreen to Polar Bears”
I think we are reading him wrong. “Preemptive denial” refers to what he is doing in the face of contradictory evidence for the sake of Grant Money and not the Climate Science itself. Read that way it makes perfect sense.