NASA Goddard study suggests solar variation plays a role in our current climate

dennis ward (22:56:43) :
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For the last 4 billion years the sun has been warming up. Yet temperatures today are much lower than they were in the age of the dinosaur. Explain that, if anybody really believes the sun is the biggest factor?
Also it is far hotter at the centre of the earth than at the surface of the sun. And which is closer to us?

The Earth’ surface has not been steadily cooling down for the last 4 billion years. Over the Phanerozoic Eon (~600 million years or since the Cambrian) the Earth’s average surface temperature has been relatively stable…Generally averaging ~22 C. Four times during the Phanerozoic, the Earth has dropped into “ice ages” in which the average surface temperature dropped. This is known as the “hothouse” or “greenhouse” and “icehouse” cycle. Earth’s icehouses occur about once every 130 million years (Shaviv and Veiser have attributed this cycle to the Cosmic Ray Flux). Three of the four icehouses were very cold (U. Ordovician, Pennsylvanian-L. Permian and Cenozoic) one icehouse was relatively warm (U. Jurassic-L. Cretaceous) …LINK
I don’t know why the first three icehouses came to be; but the current one is fairly well understood. It began in the Oligocene when Antarctica was nearing the end of its plate tectonic journey to its current location. The Antarctic ice sheet began building…And the Earth started to undergo episodes of glacial advances and retreats. The frequency of these glacial cycles increases throughout the Neogene. During the U. Pleistocene the glacial/interglacial frequency has been about 130,000 years; with the glacials lasting considerably longer than the interglacials. This record of Cenozoic glacial cycles is literally “written in stone.” The Milankovitch correlation may not be perfect; but it is very good.
We are living in an icehouse or an Ice Age. We just happen to be enjoying an interglacial.
Regarding the heat of the Earth’s interior…The Earth was once a ball of molten rock (Hadean Time). Over the Earth’s first 3 to 3.8 billion years, the surface cooled and solidified. The interior of the Earth differentiated (Crust, mantle, outer core, inner core). The heat at the “center of the Earth” is mostly the result of radioactive decay (although pressure does play a role). That heat drives very large convection cells in the mantle…The convection cells drive plate tectonics. Some of that heat is “vented” through volcanoes and mantle plumes. The heat of the Earth’s interior plays a very minimal role in heating the atmosphere. However, very large volcanic eruptions do play a role in climate change by putting large volumes of aerosols and dust into the Stratosphere and blocking sunlight. These volcanic winters are the result of the Earth’s interior heat preventing the Sun from warming the Earth.

” This suggests that factors such as Land/Ocean ratio are more dominant.”
How can one factor be ‘more dominant’ than another? That is like saying that one truth is more true than another.
That said, given that dry land warms and cools much more readily than do the oceans, the much larger ratio of land area to ocean in the northern hemisphere does account for the fact that globally, January is colder than July despite the fact that the earth is at perihelion during January.

The sun may not drive the earth’s climate DIRECTLY, but the very fact that we don’t know everything about the climate of Earth or the sun is a good enough reason to devote research and attention to understanding the possible connection between the sun and climate.
The very basic principle that one of the commentators stated with regards to the sun providing warmth during the day is a good starting point, and quite a good indication that there is some sort of potential relationship.
To say that there is absolutely no link or a negligible/insignificant link between the sun and climate and claiming that all whose research indicates that the sun may have a major part in influencing the climate directly OR indirectly are amateurs who have fake, biased, uncorrected data is anti-scientific and dismissive.
I am currently typing in a cold dark room, with no open curtains, in the middle of winter and I can feel the difference when I walk out the front door into the sun’s rays. I can feel the radiation hitting my skin and the warmth it generates. This may sound trivial or irrelevant but surely the laws of common sense dictate that there must be at least an ounce of possibility that the nearest star to us is what drives life and the non-living fundamental processes of the Earth’s surface which life depends on, and that studying its changes may explain some of the phenomena we witness and how they respond to the changes.
Research currently indicates that oceanic currents are the direct drivers of climate; but what is the driver of the oceanic currents?
Think of it as a domino effect.

“They [Milankovitch cycles] are predictable, and I would dare to say unalterable.”
The problem is that they don’t ever repeat in the same way. As the moon moves away from the earth, its effect on the earth’s spin is modified, and so the earth’s wobble changes in an arrow of time sort of way, never going back to what was. Milankovitch cylcles are not the complete answer, but obviously, when summer is longer at the poles, and coincides with the closest approach to the sun at one or the other, this is going to affect climate. To argue otherwise is to really be a “denier”.
Continental drift also operates over Milankovitch time scales, as does variation in cosmic ray flux as we orbit the galaxy. To expect one influence to dictate the climate is folly.

NASA – 1958. A beginning of ‘rocket focus’ with government and research (like Manhattan Project) to propel aeronautics-space flight (significant behind the wings research for military application). President Eisenhower in his farewell address warned of mega industrial complex political connections.
A youthful sci-fi space-dreamer hitting the library scientific pamphlets on the 60’s trip to the moon set the seed of dream shattering. There were engineer skeptics of committing such money and focus (life support systems) on essentially a dead-end rocket program. Once there, no more direction without backtracking. The moon landing is still the banner of man exploration.
NASA became a prostitute to grant-government funding. Let the scientists do the science. NASA should have remained the trucking manager, science to do the scientific payload, etc. Common Sense=? NOAA=?

I’ve kinda lost interest in the solar stuff. Yeah, it is important and can’t be left out, but it is just one more example of a systematic factor to account for.
Until we can deal with spontaneous variations in clouds, everything else is handwaving (look ma, correlations!).

Paul R: Modern science could be evidence of ‘devolution’! Simple logic perhaps.. but indeed simple logic can prove to be very useful and answer many questions however informal or trivial it may appear.
Pamela Gray: The Earth isn’t flat ;)! I see what you mean, but take an egg or a nice steak or some strips of bacon and put them in the pan, what heats the food on the pan and denatures the protein? The burner of course!
Turn up the dial, the oil becomes less viscous, things start to burn; turn the dial down, things cool down abit and take longer to fry.
The real question is how much dial adjustment is sufficient enough to induce a change that the salmonella or other prokaryotes on the food notice and deem as extreme! The scale is all wrong though… the distances, relative sizes, intelligence of bacteria…
I wouldn’t say that removing the pan from the burner is a good representation of the earth rotating to face away from the sun. This pan exercise would represent the entire Earth shifting away from the sun, to recieve no solar radiation, as the pan recieves no radiation whilst it is put aside, but the Earth is being constantly bathed in solar energy on one side.
Apparently if the sun were to “switch off” for 5 seconds the land would freeze over in a matter of hours and become like Pluto, but the oceans would not due to the ability of the water molecule to store heat and release it slowly. (This shows that the atmosphere is not nearly as effective at moderating temperature as the oceans.)
I must say, I don’t really like this example!

Go to realclimate, and it is taken as fact that there is no ten year cooling, and no reduction in ocean heat levels. What charts are you looking at to say that there is a ten year cooling, and why isn’t that good enough for them?

From the article:
“Or, it could be calmer, creating a cooler climate on Earth similar to what happened in the late 17th century. Almost no sunspots were observed on the sun’s surface during the period from 1650 to 1715. This extended absence of solar activity may have been partly responsible for the Little Ice Age in Europe and may reflect cyclic or irregular changes in the sun’s output over hundreds of years. During this period, winters in Europe were longer and colder by about 1 C than they are today.”
Now ok they use the caveats of “may have” and “partly” but can anyone tell us what else might have been responsible for the Little Ice Age apart from the Sun It has long appeared obvious that the Sun is the smallish trigger for what was clearly a 100% natural event and something else (oceans/clouds/albedo/whatever) provide the amplifications, just as the ice ages cycles were also natural events triggered by solar forcing and just as our current solar downturn has coincided with a pretty nippy pair of Winters. All this must surely add up to more than 0.1C if you care to actually notice the lack of any other obvious correlation or mechanism for these events. Clearly CO2 has had nothing to do with any of it. And whatever natural event caused the LIA, the reversal of that natural event must perforce be the cause of much of the 20th century trend. That much is even often admitted by mainstream climateers (though just as quickly denied again when I remind them of their own words). Just how long does it take for a scholarly mind to see the bleeding obvious anyway? When the funding for the science fashion of the day dries up I’d suggest.

Even leaving the sun out of it entirely, if one is stating that the CO2 regime started in earnest in 1980, and again this NASA team restated it as have many other climateers, then the entire 20th century trend upwards is automatically mostly from natural causes. That leaves very little left to be attributed to CO2 and the longer the flat spot continues (thanks to more natural variation) then the less you can blame on CO2. The only argument left then is the “in the pipeline” handwave which presumes that heat can hide from us in the oceans and then suddenly burst free to cause thermageddon. What a laugh!