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
I officially deny both sides of the debate. Both sides are debating the size of a knat’s ass. The most either can do (CO2 or Sun) is ever so slightly exaggerate the swings of natural oscillations. If we want to win this debate, we must continue to talk about the Earth’s oceans, trade winds, and the Coriolis. The rest just doesn’t factor into weather pattern variation to the extent that it should drive anything other than a silly argument over the size of a knat’s ass.
Here is just one official discussion of oceanic oscillations. These are the articles that deserve reprint.
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/faq/amo_faq.php
“G”nat. My bad.
With Mexico having been all but shut down for several days, it might be interesting to see what the local CO2 levels have been surrounding the largest cities and what temps have been there. Of course, temps couldn’t be directly attributed to GHG changes since activity in general has been curatailed. Maybe rural stations would be worth looking at. Just a thought.
Alan the Brit (22:49:37) :
I was very impressed by the vidoe clip showing the geology conference round from Oslo on Climaterealist.com. It was wonderful to see several real geologists very sceptical of the AGW argument, even one or two honourable pro AGW statements by others, 66minutes of it, but who was that last guy with his sycophantic grovelling with his head so far up the Norwegian Environemnt Minister’s errr………….
Do you have a direct link? I cannot find it on Climaterealist.com (I may be blind…).
Uh oh. That ice just made a little uptick.
Duplicate post…Dave Middleton (06:23:07)…Due to Operator Error.
First post has the link; the second one doesn’t. Otherwise they are duplicates. Sorry about that. I thought the spam filter had blocked the Science Mag link.
I posted earlier in another thread that weather pattern variation may be better discussed as a % risk occurrence within a certain time table in a way similar to current earthquake risk projections. So here is one such paper that does or proposes to do just that. We should be examining these papers and giving them top billing here.
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/docs/Enfield_Cid-Serrano_2006.pdf
Preemptive denial is nothing new. My 7 year old son uses that approach regularly — it’s my cue to start looking for what he’s done wrong.
Ian Cooper,
Many thanks for the high praise, your kind words are indeed welcome, more so coming from one with such obvious wit and intelligence(typical in Kiwis).
Best wishes to all sceptics in Gods own country.
Cassie K.
“I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 is a good 50 to 60 percent higher than normal”
It’s interesting that science has become PC enough to encourage the mentally-challenged to become ‘scientists.’
What’s worse is the insidious nature of indoctrination taking place. Channels many proles would consider ‘respectable’ (i.e. NatGeo, History) have woven warming references into shows unrelated to climate. Thinking people are now trapped between gummint and scientific opportunists, and the proles that believe them.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…
OT: Catliners re-supplied. Aircraft was able to land safely:
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/
Interesting item from the evil money grubbing Wall Street Journal-April 30th, 2009. It appears new significant natural gas fields have been discovered (not In Washington D.C.) but in northern LA and in the northern Appalachian region. Looks like the sun is telling us, we may need it.
Hansen ridiculed this solar idea as recently as this year. In a talk in Houston to a Geology professional society, he dismissed this and other problems.
There was, at one point, a .pdf of the slides he used available on the internet.
The site is no longer valid, oddly enough.
Frank Lanser: Your graph included the Hoyt & Schatten TSI reconstruction. It’s obsolete, as noted in this post here at WUWT.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/05/ipcc-20th-century-simulations-get-a-boost-from-outdated-solar-forcings/
Regards.
“Mark Bowlin (07:22:45) :
Preemptive denial is nothing new. My 7 year old son uses that approach regularly — it’s my cue to start looking for what he’s done wrong.”
Nice point.
“Mark Bowlin (07:22:45) :”
He shoots, he scores!
Frank Lansner (06:32:52) :
Ya know, buddy, our sun is saving for its retirement, it uses to do it at Sea´s Bank, not in the Air´s Mall where it “dissipates” rapidly… (more rapidly than your wife does it)
“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.”
So I guess Lockwood is not going to start worrying until the solar output gets to 50% lower than normal?
Sven (07:04:18) :
Sorry, one last time on this other topic. Dr. Spencer has his own explanation for the discrepancy between RSS and UAH here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
But I think that this still does not explain the discrepancy with AMSU-A daily data
You’re right. The RSS v UAH explanation is fine, but the low anomaly should be reflected in the AMSU raw temperatures.
Since when did a scientist whose job is to measure the sun become an expert on the CO2 AGW situation?
But since these solar guys are the same ones who dissmissed the early reports that this solar cycle was not going to be as the *consensus* predicted. Maybe the wise scientist would limit their comments to acknowledging that the *consensus* was wrong and that we have a lot more to learn?
I have just sent an email to mike Lockwood asking him to post a reply on this blog or contact Anthony Watts with regard to making a guest post where he could expand on his obviously very confusing reported comments, may I suggest that others may like to invite Mike Lockwood to clarify his position on this site using the most diplomatic language possible of course!
His email address is m.lockwood [ -at – ] rl.ac.uk perhaps if he is invited to respond by enough individuals made in the most respectful manner he might actually take the time to post here?
And the Gov-ment still don’t beleave? But first you got to get them people to shut up and learn to listen, and maybe read.
Perhaps my skeptic questions have been raised by others but I’ll take Lockwood’s “I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 is a good 50 to 60 percent higher than normal . . . ” as an invitation to raise them anew.
First, what period of time corresponds to the “normal” level of CO2? That would be a hundred or so years ago?
Then I have to wonder . . . what would the conditions have been BEFORE fossil fuels were formed?
Today’s coal fields were laid down over several geologic periods, right? And that carbon came from atmospheric CO2, right?
(You could say that coal was Gaia’s carbon sequestration scheme? 😉 )
So my questions are, just considering coal (’cause I’m still wondering about the possible abiotic origin of petroleum):
1) How much CO2 would have been in the atmosphere at, say, the beginning of the most productive coal forming period (I think that’s like 100 to 200 million years ago)?
2) Using the current climate models, what would have been the corresponding surface temperatures and how does that predicted value correspond to what, clearly, were temperatures quite suitable for plant growth?
3) Given the prediction/concerns that high atmospheric CO2 will lead to oceans too acidic for today’s marine flora and fauna, given the estimates levels of atmospheric CO2, how acidic would the oceans have been at that time?
4) To the extent that there is material overlap between the supposed period of highly acidic oceans and acid intolerant marine species, how to AGW proponents reconcile the apparent conflict?
Just wondering . . . .
Why have we come to this: “preemptive denial”?
Applied material science has brought Man wonderous inventions — this is due to the harsh and demanding law of the laboratory: Observation & measurement talks — unsupported hypothesis walks.
But in “sciences” where the “law of the laboratory” has been pushed aside for fashionable theories that can’t be tested in a laboratory, all kinds of speculation has crept into the disciplines, covered with a fig leaf of mathematical gloss.
Climate Science and astronomy both have limited utility of the laboratory and rely heavily on abstract mathematical theory fed into computers.
Math is a language — it can be used for fanciful fiction just as easy as rigorous logic. And what is worse is that the “authors” claim they are “writing” non-fiction when in reality they are “writing” fiction of the most fanciful sort.
“preemptive denial” — have they gone bonkers?
Yup.
J. Peden (07:56:43) :
“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.”
So I guess Lockwood is not going to start worrying until the solar output gets to 50% lower than normal?
—
Great point. The issue that disturbs me is that, as presented like this in a mainstream publication, an astoundingly inept statement like Lockwood’s probably sounds reasonable to the average person, not realizing that he’s comparing apples with oranges…