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.
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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.
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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.”
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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
Kath (21:36:52) :
“I bet I could write some Fortran code that proves that worms are responsible for rain. Every time it rains I see earthworms on the ground. Ergo, earthworms cause rain. QED”
It’s like the wind, it must be caused by the trees waving around. Never is any wind when the trees are still.
Tim, Scarsdale, Aust.
After all, CO2 doesn’t just capture energy, it generates energy!!
“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.”
OK let’s take 50%, that means that 1x + .5x = 380, or 1.5x=380. So according to him normal is around 250PPM. Is’nt that getting dangerously close to the point where plants start shutting down?
UK Sceptic:-)
The question should be “how smart was the scientist before he got his grant by selling his scientific principles to the highest bidder?”
No body has ever been able to explain how the sun/earth interaction works to any great detail as I have pointed out before, without plenty of caveats being tacked on here & there as one would expect. That is because although many say we know a lot, whilst that may be true, there may well still be a heck of a lot more we don’t know! Therefore, how can anyone say that A cannot cause the observed affect on B, but it is C causing the effect for sure, when one doesn’t know what affect A can have on B, & or on C, or in fact on D-Z as well?
Oh & I always thought a “cold snap” was something that happened for a few days only, not 20 years or more!
Is the Martian icecap still receding (or was this something that slipped into the “false” net) as I (imho) would expect for some time to come due to its greater orbital variations, before accumuating more ice again? If so, when would it potentially start to show an increase?
“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).”
Yeah…Right…Apart from the cooling over the past 6 to 10 years, the CO2 is doing a fine job of overwhelming the solar minimum…
What fits better?
The CO2 curve…
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/UAH_LowerTrop_12_78to11_08_CO2.jpg
Or the Schwabe Cycle Length curve…
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/UAH_LowerTrop_12_78to11_08_SSC_Leng.jpg
The concept of “normal” with respect to CO2 has been visualising the graph of CO2 over geological time, so in that context the above quote is a load of utter tosh (but of course, this goes without saying).
Claude Harvey 22:49 “You could be up to your behind in icicles and dodging glaciers, yet those folks would not acknowledge anything other than CO2 induced global warming. They don’t “leap forward” the way skeptics do, They hang right in there, no matter what the evidence might reveal. That’s just the way religion works.”
This campaign — CO2 50-60% higher than normal — is not simply a religion, but a stone-cold plan to strike terror in people’s hearts with two purposes: 1) to end the industrial advantages of the West (smarts and drive along with the cheap energy of fossil fuels); and 2) to establish permanent lush living/ jet-setting from taxes, fees, and rents of the cap-and-trade priesthood.
Anthony began the task of “re-educating” by showing that the government’s temperature measurements from which they claimed run-away global warming are largely a deception, whether from incompetence or intention. The core issue is the truth of the science, not global warming or cooling. The truth will enable us to understand and adapt to warming and cooling.
CO2 has been named as the dragon to slay re runaway global warming. Paid lobbyists for the cap-and-trade priesthood like Lockwood tout those astonishing statistics (50 to 60% higher than normal) and people’s brains see images of smokestacks spewing earth-destroying CO2 everywhere. A (temporarily) cooling earth will not save us and the earth from armageddon.
I like the idea of Lockwood’s nonsense as the quote of the week in order to show that there is no “normal” CO2 level according to geological history, that CO2 is a minor atmospheric gas, and that the physics of CO2 radiation (feedback leading to global warming) is limited. These are the issues and not the cooling globe. People must begin to trust CO2 again as an essential element for life and not the major pollutant to capture during industrialization processes. (If I am remembering correctly, I am grateful to Stephen Goddard for addressing the physics of CO2 warming. I was too ready to sneer at its having any potency of that sort.)
I have a sense that many contributers here are becoming smug about the coming cold — and the world is due a 1500-year bond event (chiefio.com)just like California is due its 150-year major earthquake. These will happen, eventually. However, to get the public to begin sensible adaptations to colder conditions, they must be disabused of their focus on CO2 and all its variations. The solar terrestrial physicist Lockwood may sound ludicrous to WUWT’s readers, but his figures keep people’s minds locked on CO2 as an object of terror.
“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.”
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Choose one ()
60.00% of my wealth ____ 0.01% Bill Gates Wealth
Quoting:
“[Global warming] skeptics tend to leap forward,”
Commenting:
Skeptics tend to be cautious and methodical. Leaping forward would be like , say…predicting temperatures 100 years in the future.
The alarmist got a big leg up in this argument when they got to define “normal” CO2 as that of the Little Ice Age.
“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.”
Yes, AGW experts and Solar Change Minimizers are with a change in hat the same prevaricator.
Lockwood is becoming the CAGW, C stands for Catastrophic, solar expert spokesman and as such will become the premier source for comments on the solar inactivity and its supposedly insignificant effect on terrestrial climate.
I believe we will see more of him in the coming months in the mass media leading up to the Copenhagen meeting, in an effort to try dismiss any effect from the Sun on the climate in the minds of the public and by the misinformed politicians.
In an effort to discredit Henrik Svensmark’s work, two studies have been made during recent years by physicists.
The first study is ”Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcing and the global mean surface air temperature” which was made by him and Frölich. There they took the data from IPCC and added future projective trends to show that while the Sun’s trends have been dropping there has been no drop in the warming trend, while ignoring readily available data that the warming hadn’t been raising at that time for at least 5-6 years. Frölich is an expert in the study of TSI.
The claim Lockwood made that the solar output had peaked around 1985 is contradicted by data in his own earlier papers. If you for example take solar eruptional output and look at the depths of the solar minima’s between in the solar cycles in his papers they give a good correlation, if you use a time lag of 5-8 years, to global average temperature trends.
This study was then recycled as a proof that there were no correlation between current solar variability in the mass media.
Next the CAGW promoters looked for support from physicists that could take on Svenmark’s theory whose works were in the field of particle physics.
So, one year later came “Cosmic Rays and Global Warming”, by Sloan and Wolfendale.
The same thing happened and this article was then recycled in the MSM and was shown as a proof for the dismissal of Svensmark.
I do think both these studies were made for the same reason and ultimately sponsored by the same source.
I’m far outside of this, but I find it reasonable to think that the source and sponsor for these studies where the Royal Society. Both Lockwood and Wolfendale are members of the Society.
There is a huge industry out there promoting the CAGW scam and large sums of money are used for AGW research. This is war and they will not sit idle.
When the cooling sets in and food productions drop in temperate regions of the world because of shorter and rainier summers and food productions drop in the subtropic regions of the worlds because of drought as it always does during prolonged solar inactivity. And when the world is unprepared for this, betting on food to ethanol production for fuel, then likely extra hundreds of millions of people in the third world will go hungry because of the CAGW hysteria.
But that is of no consequence for these people.
I have a goofy question. If most of the global warming has occured in the northern hemisphere, while the southern hemisphere temps remained fairly flat, when or if a mini ice age hits, even if it only hits the Northern hemisphere wouldnt that negate the ‘global’ warming? And when it starts to warm up again.. are we going to have to hear about all this crap again??
Gary Plyler (23:22:58) :
Well, try this one. The sun has finally started to turndown after the Grand Maximum of the later 20th Century.
There are good reasons [as I have mentioned before] to believe that solar activity in the middle of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries were comparable. That is the perspective we need to keep.
“What will explain the not-so-incredibly-hot temps in 10 years? WHAT?!?”
Robert, I believe they will keep saying that it is in the pipeline.
Obviously, cap-and-trade and CO2 sequestration have Wall Street and the large, international corporations slavering.
But IF global cooling does occur, the consequences will be far, far greater to mankind.
In short, global cooling will mean less food.
Science or no science, religion or no religion, it could all go out the window. Food riots will be a fearsome force to contend with …
“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.”
What’s scaring me is that the man who said this is a physicist. I was an art major, for crissakes. I haven’t studied any math since high school — but I can see the howlers in his math. Why can’t he? What has happened to our scientists??
“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.”
Questions:
1). What is normal for CO2 – now, middle warm period, some other period?
2). What is % of athmosphere change of CO2 which you need to be able to compare to solor output changes?
3). Do you account for other changes in solar that also affect us?
There is a host of information about measured CO2 levels over recent and longer term history here:
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2_supp.htm
For a quick overview scroll down to the graphs.
A number of things appear clear:
1) The current level of CO2 has been exceded a couple of times during the last two centuries – and don’t forget these are direct measurements, not derived values – without triggering temperature runaway, and also ,of course, without the help of 21st century levels of emissions
2) The variations in levels over quite short periods of time show the concept of “normal” a bit difficult to grasp, and of course, comparison with a mean is not particularly helpful since choice of start and end times can be used to give you alsmost any answer you want.
3) The comparison between CO2 levels and temperatures shows yet again that CO2 levels lag temperature by 5 or 6 years:
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/graphs.htm#proj
Since it didn’t take a lot of work to find this information, I wonder why those much cleverer than me didn’t find it – or have I missed the wamists rebuttal!
Cassandra King, Gary Plyler & MattA
WOW!
I’ve been reading these columns for quite a while now but this thread had three major peaks in it (maybe some more including the humour of Greame Rodaughan) that had your good names attached.
How succinct the lot of you?
Cassandra (23.01.15) quoted among many delightful comments the most succinct word to describe this whole debarcle, “useless.”
Those who perpetuate it. Yes. I was very tempted to include those sucked in by it, but I didn’t ! “How magnanimous of me, ” the Global Cooling Deniers would say. Nothing generous, just human.
Gary (23.22.58), I’ll be quoting you on your whole last paragraph mate. As a semi-professional astronomer (now there’s an admission, I have received some money from astronomy, but astronomy is not only in the dark technically, it’s in the black personally). I really appreciate the analogy.
MattA(03.03.17)
In answer to your last question,
“You betcha.”
Cheers to one and all,
Coops,
Lower North Island
New Zealand
Jesu H. Christo. “Preemptive denial”. In my lifetime I’ve never seen such a large swath of the scientific establishment bound and determined to not only discredit themselves, but the very idea of “science”. A real scientist would look at this situation and positively gush about what a great opportunity this is to test for real some of the minority scientific theories on sun activity impact on climate. You know, that whole gaining new knowledge and testing theories against reality thing that scientists are supposed to be all about. . .
“I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 forms less than 0.04% of the earths atmosphere, whereas the sun is what drives all the earth’s weather and climate. I think that helps keep it in perspective.”
When I read this article I was struck by the similarity between scientists who will not budge on global warming, whether the facts support it or not and scientists who will not budge on evolution whether the facts support it or not. All scientists have a worldview and we filter everything we see and think through that worldview. Scientists who believe man is like a god and can control all of the earth’s climate can’t even comprehend how truly small we are. These same types of scientists, believing that man is a god, can’t allow in their thinking that there is a real God who is the Creator and continues to work in the lives of His people and continues to control all of the universe, including the sun and the CO2 and the water and ice bergs…
AGW scientists have made saving the planet their religion and will not be moved until they have a change of heart. Same for evolutionary scientists. I guess as a believer, I am not surprised that the researchers will ‘engage in preemptive denial’. We see it happen in other areas of science everyday.
Peter Plail:
You can judge the accuracy of those particular links by the response. Warmists go absolutely ballistic whenever Dr. Beck’s work is mentioned. That’s because it’s pretty hard for them to refute over 90,000 CO2 measurements, made by esteemed scientists like J.S. Haldane and others — who were not paid for their work, but did it out of genuine scientific curiosity.
Even if 80,000 of those CO2 measurements were discarded, and only the ones done on ocean crossings and in truly remote locations were used, we’re still left with strong evidence that CO2 levels as recently as the early 1940’s were much higher than today’s levels. And CO2 measurements in the early 1800’s, well before the industrial revolution, also show that CO2 levels were much higher than today’s levels.
[That’s a great website you linked to. Clicking on the pictures and numbers gives an interactive tour.]
He and other researchers are therefore engaged in what they call “preemptive denial” of a solar minimum leading to global cooling.
So the AGW crowd are now the “denialists”!
It seems to read “tongue-in-cheek” on the part of the author? Is it possible that NatGeo author had a hidden agenda with some satire couched in what superficially appears to be a pro-AGW article?