THE DEMISE OF SUNSPOTS—DEEP COOLING AHEAD?
Don J. Easterbrook, Professor of Geology, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA
The three studies released by NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network this week, predicting the virtual vanishing of sunspots for the next several decades and the possibility of a solar minimum similar to the Maunder Minimum, came as stunning news. According to Frank Hill,
“the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation.”
The last time sunspots vanished from the sun for decades was during the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1700 AD was marked by drastic cooling of the climate and the maximum cold of the Little Ice Age.
What happened the last time sunspots disappeared?
Abundant physical evidence from the geologic past provides a record of former periods of global cooling. Geologic records provide clear evidence of past global cooling so we can use them to project global climate into the future—the past is the key to the future. So what can we learn from past sunspot history and climate change?
Galileo’s perfection of the telescope in 1609 allowed scientists to see sunspots for the first time. From 1610 A.D. to 1645 A.D., very few sunspots were seen, despite the fact that many scientists with telescopes were looking for them, and from 1645 to 1700 AD sunspots virtually disappeared from the sun (Fig. 1). During this interval of greatly reduced sunspot activity, known as the Maunder Minimum, global climates turned bitterly cold (the Little Ice Age), demonstrating a clear correspondence between sunspots and cool climate. After 1700 A.D., the number of observed sunspots increased sharply from nearly zero to more than 50 (Fig. 1) and the global climate warmed.
The Maunder Minimum was not the beginning of The Little Ice Age—it actually began about 1300 AD—but it marked perhaps the bitterest part of the cooling. Temperatures dropped ~4º C (~7 º F) in ~20 years in mid-to high latitudes. The colder climate that ensued for several centuries was devastating. The population of Europe had become dependent on cereal grains as their main food supply during the Medieval Warm Period and when the colder climate, early snows, violent storms, and recurrent flooding swept Europe, massive crop failures occurred. Winters in Europe were bitterly cold, and summers were rainy and too cool for growing cereal crops, resulting in widespread famine and disease. About a third of the population of Europe perished.
Glaciers all over the world advanced and pack ice extended southward in the North Atlantic. Glaciers in the Alps advanced and overran farms and buried entire villages. The Thames River and canals and rivers of the Netherlands frequently froze over during the winter. New York Harbor froze in the winter of 1780 and people could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing many harbors. The population of Iceland decreased by half and the Viking colonies in Greenland died out in the 1400s because they could no longer grow enough food there. In parts of China, warm weather crops that had been grown for centuries were abandoned. In North America, early European settlers experienced exceptionally severe winters.
So what can we learn from the Maunder? Perhaps most important is that the Earth’s climate is related to sunspots. The cause of this relationship is not understood, but it definitely exists. The second thing is that cooling of the climate during sunspot minima imposes great suffering on humans—global cooling is much more damaging than global warming.
Global cooling during other sunspot minima
The global cooling that occurred during the Maunder Minimum was neither the first nor the only such event. The Maunder was preceded by the Sporer Minimum (~1410–1540 A.D.) and the Wolf Minimum (~1290–1320 A.D.) and succeeded by the Dalton Minimum (1790–1830), the unnamed 1880–1915 minima, and the unnamed 1945–1977 Minima (Fig. 2). Each of these periods is characterized by low numbers of sunspots, cooler global climates, and changes in the rate of production of 14C and 10Be in the upper atmosphere. As shown in Fig. 2, each minimum was a time of global cooling, recorded in the advance of alpine glaciers.
The same relationship between sunspots and temperature is also seen between sunspot numbers and temperatures in Greenland and Antarctica (Fig. 3). Each of the four minima in sunspot numbers seen in Fig. 3 also occurs in Fig. 2. All of them correspond to advances of alpine glaciers during each of the cool periods.
Figure 4 shows the same pattern between solar variation and temperature. Temperatures were cooler during each solar minima.
What can we learn from this historic data? Clearly, a strong correlation exists between solar variation and temperature. Although this correlation is too robust to be merely coincidental, exactly how solar variation are translated into climatic changes on Earth is not clear. For many years, solar scientists considered variation in solar irradiance to be too small to cause significant climate changes. However, Svensmark (Svensmark and Calder, 2007; Svensmark and Friis-Christensen, 1997; Svensmark et al., 2007) has proposed a new concept of how the sun may impact Earth’s climate. Svensmark recognized the importance of cloud generation as a result of ionization in the atmosphere caused by cosmic rays. Clouds reflect incoming sunlight and tend to cool the Earth. The amount of cosmic radiation is greatly affected by the sun’s magnetic field, so during times of weak solar magnetic field, more cosmic radiation reaches the Earth. Thus, perhaps variation in the intensity of the solar magnetic field may play an important role in climate change.
Are we headed for another Little Ice Age?
In 1999, the year after the high temperatures of the 1998 El Nino, I became convinced that geologic data of recurring climatic cycles (ice core isotopes, glacial advances and retreats, and sun spot minima) showed conclusively that we were headed for several decades of global cooling and presented a paper to that effect (Fig. 5). The evidence for this conclusion was presented in a series of papers from 2000 to 2011 (The data are available in several GSA papers, my website, a 2010 paper, and in a paper scheduled to be published in Sept 2011). The evidence consisted of temperature data from isotope analyses in the Greenland ice cores, the past history of the PDO, alpine glacial fluctuations, and the abrupt Pacific SST flips from cool to warm in 1977 and from warm to cool in 1999. Projection of the PDO to 2040 forms an important part of this cooling prediction.
Figure 5. Projected temperature changes to 2040 AD. Three possible scenarios are shown: (1) cooling similar to the 1945-1977 cooling, cooling similar to the 1880-1915 cooling, and cooling similar to the Dalton Minimum (1790-1820). Cooling similar to the Maunder Minimum would be an extension of the Dalton curve off the graph.
So far, my cooling prediction seems to be coming to pass, with no global warming above the 1998 temperatures and a gradually deepening cooling since then. However, until now, I have suggested that it was too early to tell which of these possible cooling scenarios were most likely. If we are indeed headed toward a disappearance of sunspots similar to the Maunder Minimum during the Little Ice Age then perhaps my most dire prediction may come to pass. As I have said many times over the past 10 years, time will tell whether my prediction is correct or not. The announcement that sun spots may disappear totally for several decades is very disturbing because it could mean that we are headed for another Little Ice Age during a time when world population is predicted to increase by 50% with sharply increasing demands for energy, food production, and other human needs. Hardest hit will be poor countries that already have low food production, but everyone would feel the effect of such cooling. The clock is ticking. Time will tell!
References
D’Aleo, J., Easterbrook, D.J., 2010. Multidecadal tendencies in Enso and global temperatures related to multidecadal oscillations: Energy & Environment, vol. 21 (5), p. 436–460.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2000, Cyclical oscillations of Mt. Baker glaciers in response to climatic changes and their correlation with periodic oceanographic changes in the Northeast Pacific Ocean: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 32, p.17.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2001, The next 25 years; global warming or global cooling? Geologic and oceanographic evidence for cyclical climatic oscillations: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 33, p.253.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2005, Causes and effects of late Pleistocene, abrupt, global, climate changes and global warming: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 37, p.41.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2006, Causes of abrupt global climate changes and global warming; predictions for the coming century: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 38, p. 77.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2006, The cause of global warming and predictions for the coming century: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 38, p.235-236.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2007, Geologic evidence of recurring climate cycles and their implications for the cause of global warming and climate changes in the coming century: Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, vol. 39, p. 507.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2007, Late Pleistocene and Holocene glacial fluctuations; implications for the cause of abrupt global climate changes: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 39, p.594
Easterbrook, D.J., 2007, Younger Dryas to Little Ice Age glacier fluctuations in the Fraser Lowland and on Mt. Baker, Washington: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 39, p.11.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2007, Historic Mt. Baker glacier fluctuations—geologic evidence of the cause of global warming: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 39, p. 13.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2008, Solar influence on recurring global, decadal, climate cycles recorded by glacial fluctuations, ice cores, sea surface temperatures, and historic measurements over the past millennium: Abstracts of American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting, San Francisco.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2008, Implications of glacial fluctuations, PDO, NAO, and sun spot cycles for global climate in the coming decades: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 40, p. 428.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2008, Correlation of climatic and solar variations over the past 500 years and predicting global climate changes from recurring climate cycles: Abstracts of 33rd International Geological Congress, Oslo, Norway.
Easterbrook, D.J., 2009, The role of the oceans and the Sun in late Pleistocene and historic glacial and climatic fluctuations: Geological Society of America, Abstracts with Programs, vol. 41, p. 33.
Eddy, J.A., 1976, The Maunder Minimum: Science, vol. 192, p. 1189–1202.
Hoyt, D.V. and Schatten, K.H., 1997, The Role of the sun in climate change: Oxford University, 279 p.
Svensmark, H. and Calder, N., 2007, The chilling stars: A new theory of climate change: Icon Books, Allen and Unwin Pty Ltd, 246 p.
Svensmark, H. and Friis-Christensen, E., 1997, Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverda missing link in solar–climate relationships: Journal of Atmospheric and SolareTerrestrial Physics, vol. 59, p. 1125–1132.
Svensmark, H., Pedersen, J.O., Marsh, N.D., Enghoff, M.B., and Uggerhøj, U.I., 2007, Experimental evidence for the role of ions in particle nucleation under atmospheric conditions: Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. 463, p. 385–396.
Usoskin, I.G., Mursula, K., Solanki, S.K., Schussler, M., and Alanko, K., 2004, Reconstruction of solar activity for the last millenium using 10Be data: Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. 413, p. 745–751.
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UPDATE: Bob Tisdale has posted a rebuttal. Here is what he has to say via email.
Hi Anthony: The following is a link to my notes on the Easterbrook post:
We should have progressed beyond using outdated TSI datasets, misrepresenting the PDO, and creating bogus global temperature graphs in our arguments against AGW.
I’ve advised Easterbrook, and we’ll see what he has to say – Anthony
Not sure why we even bother to present these facts. Since we can’t control the sun, we can’t control society with it. Our best bet is to convince or otherwise coerce the public into giving up their rights to abundant energy in the name of saving the earth (in reality, giving the elite control over our lives). From my favorite books: “People will believe what they want to be true, or what they are afraid might be true”
John B,
Glad you asked. The chart you posted is simply a copy of Mann’s debunked Hokey Stick chart. When I get back home I’ll show you how it’s been falsified. I’ll also provide some other charts showing that the noaa chart you posted is deliberately – and mendaciously – misleading.
don penman says:
June 17, 2011 at 3:17 pm
agreed – as you say, a solar minimum could and most likely would drop temps by a good amount! I was kinda taking this to be the underlying ‘point’ of Easterbrooks article – which, the way it was presented, shows the possible/likely effect of a quiet sun and the general references to past historical events.
I need to do some more reading on this subject (TSI) but it seems perfectly logical to me (and I believe reasonably widely accepted) that the suns output varies. Even basic physics determines that an object ‘burning up’ and throwing off buckets loads of energy must lose mass and therefore must have to adjust itself accordingly? So, yet again, we are only really concerned with actually ‘How much’ this variation is – and whether it is or is not significantly large enough to affect climate. The sunspot cycle has been well observed (though earlier years may be more qualitative than quantitative due to observational limitations) and this clearly shows that the sun goes through phases of activity. As far as I am aware, there is no argument against the fact that this happens. The warmist (and generally touted AGW point) argument seems to be that the sun does indeed affect climate – but not by much – and this is clearly at odds with the known (as in written!) historical lower temp events of the past! Again, on the logical assumption that 17th century Europeans were not driving SUV’s – it sure as eggs are eggs wasn’t anthropgenic in origin and therefore must have been natural – and on the further assumption that most other earthly things remained the ‘same’ or at least ‘similar’ (i.e. no nukes going off or whatever) – it can only be down to the sun as the external warmer of the planet!?
OK Smokey, but don’t get too obsessed with Mann. His hockey stick may have been the first, but there are lots of them now, all pointing the same way…
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13252/F3.medium.gif
Are they ALL lying?
If we cannot learn from the lessons of past history, what can we learn from?
I name thee “the (climate) Frauder Minimum”
Warmist Persunal Regards,
Tesla
Distinct clones of Yersinia pestis caused the black death. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20949072
There are clearly a number of other studies with similar results. Very likely that some of the plagues were not Yersinia, but the black death one does not appear to be in dispute.
Gates says:
“Except of course for the fact the we have the lowest arctic sea ice extent ever for this date in June.”
But see global sea ice, that is more important as the various oscillations tend to make regional climate move around more year to year.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
This will be interesting over the next few years if the sun does enter a prolonged minimum.
Other people suggest the “Gore Minimum”. I like to agree with them.
Think greenhouses & your own garden would be prudent for many… anyone know how many farmers are hooked up with WEATHERBELL so far?
Food prices to be ‘high and volatile’ until 2020 – FRANCE 24
http://www.france24.com/en/20110617-food-prices-be-high-volatile-until-2020#
…”Weather-related crop yield variations are expected to become an even more critical driver of price volatility in the future,” the report said…
http://news.tradingcharts.com/futures/9/1/160286219.html
…Ministers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations are expected to announce next week plans to create a global database on food production and stocks, to mirror existing schemes in oil markets.
The OECD and the FAO backed the need for improving transparency through better forecasting, but stopped short of arguing that financial investors were responsible for driving up food prices in the long term. “High levels of speculative activity in futures markets may amplify price movements in the short term although there is no conclusive evidence of longer term systemic effects on volatility,” they said…
R. Gates says:
June 17, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Thanks for the link Smokey, really, I find Daly’s thinking very interesting, but it seems the facts would not be falling in line with what he was saying. The Arctic would seem to warmer over the past 5 years than any time in the past 2000:
http://www.adn.com/2011/06/16/1921104/arctic-ice-melting-faster-than.html
Its those sediments again! We all know how variable proxy records can be.
One proxy dataset alone cant really be held up against the instrumental record.
Caleb says:
June 17, 2011 at 11:37 am
Regarding sea ice: Check the “Sea Ice Page.” Go to the comparison between 2007 and 2011. Look at the ice north of Siberia.
To me it seems it was already getting slushy, and was 40% open water, at this time in 2007, while it is more solid this year.
2011 sea ice does look fore solid than 2007 on Cryosphere today – at least it does today. But on other days it looks a lot more patchy and even worse than 2007. There seems to be a lot of day to day variability in the images, too much for it to be showing a real trend. Maybe the higher resolution data this year is more noisy (as it inevitably will be without a geometric increase in the strength of signal).
Smokey says:
June 17, 2011 at 1:33 pm
R Gates says:
“And you can provide solid specific data (rather than conjecture) of when it’s been lower in recorded history? Please show me that data. I’d love to see it.”
Read the first paragraph [in red]: click The whole article is worthwhile.
So the “solid specific data” consists of a statement by the President of the Royal Society which was actually based on a single report by William Scoresby (Jnr). It’s very probable that Scoresby had simply come across one of any number of random straits which opened up during the summer months. There is certainly nothing in Scoresby’s accounts to suggest that ice extent across the arctic was anomalously low.
It is, though, interesting given that the President’s address was given in 1817 – just around the time of the deepest part of the Dalton Minimum and only 12 months after the “year without a summer”. Perhaps this “solar effect” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Bob Tisdale says:
June 17, 2011 at 1:27 pm
Leif: Glad you made an appearance. In my critique of this post at my blog I wrote, Don Easterbrook’s Figure 5 shows global temperatures dropping in the future. Why would they drop? We’re pretty close to solar minimum now.
Close to minimum now? I cant see how that can be. The reported research on the three lines of evidence for the no-show of cycle 25 (zonal flows, flare poleward migration and the L&P magnetic field decline) make it practically certain that there will be no cycle 25. So sunspot levels will bump along at a rate typical of the inter-cycle minimum for the whole of cycle 25. Who knows if cycle 26 will appear or not? We are currently nearing the peak of cycle 24, a weak cycle but still stronger than no cycle. So we are a long way short of any sort of minimum.
The Maunder minimum had two absent cycles (with weak cycles on either side). We are now committed to at least one absent cycle, possibly more.
@John Finn
Here’s some evidence:
Amundsen traversed the Northwest Passage in 1903-1906 (that’s right, it took him 3 years)
[snip – various folk in between, mainly in specialist ice vessels]
In 2009 sea ice conditions were such that at least nine small vessels and two cruise ships completed the transit of the Northwest Passage.
Cruise ships for Pete’s sake!
Wil says:
June 17, 2011 at 12:19 pm
phlogiston
May I say I find your comment very enlightening and satisfying indeed. While we must fight today’s AGW nonsense every step of the way this planet has a story to tell few of us even consider with due diligence. I am far from satisfied with us as a species knowing full well the volatile history of this planet and the fact of how little we understand or even allow into the conversation why and how ice ages and the inner-spaced warm periods triggered.
The planet indeed has a story to tell but many scientists have their agendas, so they like to pick “‘mini-stories” from selected parts of nature that support the agenda that their “research” is serving. An honest look at the palaeo record as a whole is anathema to AGW climate science.
Indeed with the complexity of the recent glacial record, unless a robust “theory of everything” exists explaining and predicting exactly the start and end of each glacial / interglacial (and it doesn’t), then we cant be complacent about when the current interglacial might end. In fact such is the raggedness of the glacial record from the Vostok and other ice cores that the term “interglacial” may even be oversimplistic. There have been warmer intervals of many different durations and “shapes”.
To use an analogy of the human body, climate science thinks it can count the hairs on its head, but in reality does not know its arse from its elbow.
TonyG writes “Jim Cripwell says:
Recent studines indicate that the Black Death was caused by a virus like Ebola.
Jim, I have never heard that before – can you point me to any of those studies?”
The BBC did a very good documentary on this issue, which I saw when I was visiting a couple of years ago. Other than that I cannot help too much.
TonyG. I did a quick search and found
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/02/science/new-theories-link-black-death-to-ebola-like-virus.html
John B says:
“Are they ALL lying?”
Affirmative. They are playing eye games with their chart by using a bogus zero reference line, when there is actually a clear upward trend from the LIA. This chart shows how they fool folks like John B: click The top two charts look alarming, don’t they? But when the natural trend line is used in the bottom chart… not so scary.
Next, let’s look at the divergence between rural and urban temps: click A large part of the temperature reconstructions are due to the localized UHI effect. And they are deliberately eliminating many rural stations: click [Blink gif animation].
Here you can see how Hansen diddled with the past record: click GISS routinely “adjusts” the past temperature record — which always results in a more alarming graph: click NOAA does the same thing. They continually reduce past temperatures, so as to falsely show an alarming recent increase: click [blink gif – loads slowly].
Next, look at what the USHCN does with the “raw” temps of different months: click Bob Tisdale provided this chart: click More of the same “adjustments”, eh?
Another GISS chart: click [another slow loading blink gif]. Notice that earlier temps have been artificially adjusted lower. That’s the same thing they did with the MWP to make it look like current temperatures are higher in John B’s link. Here is a chart based on peer reviewed data: click The MWP was significantly warmer than today’s mild cyclical uptick: click
Next, let’s look at CRUtemp: click Both the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere are lower… but global temps are higher! Explain how that works. Here’s another Bob Tisdale chart: click And another: click
More “adjusted” GISS data: click Looks like another bogus hokey stick. Here’s another GISS “adjustment”: click
Finally, here is a graphic showing the difference between raw temperatures, and “adjusted” temps: click
John B will look at these “adjusted” charts and conclude that they’re not lying to us or trying to alarm people. But other folks can make up their own minds.
And if John B likes, I can provide more charts like these.
Well after going through all 213 responses up to this time, I can only remember 2 that said “correlation does not prove causation”. Yes, it was cold when there were no sun spots. The temperature also went up with CO2 in the atmosphere from around 1978 to 1998. The best advice I’ve seen here is to wait and see. Whatever happens we won’t be endangering life on earth over the next 40 years if we do nothing but sit and watch.
R. Gates says:
June 17, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Thanks for the link Smokey, really, I find Daly’s thinking very interesting, but it seems the facts would not be falling in line with what he was saying. The Arctic would seem to warmer over the past 5 years than any time in the past 2000:
http://www.adn.com/2011/06/16/1921104/arctic-ice-melting-faster-than.html
If this is the case, it is not hard at all to understand why the sea ice would be running so low.
You said my mind is “made up”. This is absolutely not true. I will look at any scientific data I’m supplied. For example, I am anxiously awaiting the next paper related to the CLOUD experiments from CERN.
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One of the biggest problems with the AGW debate is that in truth we have no idea how accurate any of the proxies are that are used to reconstruuct past temperatures or for that matter past CO2 levels. In my opinion this is an incontrovertible fact and thus any reconstruction needs to be cautiously expressed and with caveats.
Whilst not quantative, past recorded historical events can provide useful insight. Whilst there is a debate as to the global extent of the MWP there can be no doubt that Greenland was colonised by the Vikings in areas which are today still ice covered or subject to permafrost. This is an incontovertiblke fact. As the Greenland glaciers/ice retreats we are finding new Viking settlements. Again, it is a fact that in these areas, the Vikings farmed. It is a fact that farming in these areas is not possible today. For farming to be possible in these areas, given that greenhouses were not then invented, the temperatures in these parts of Greenland must have been several degrees warmer than today. By how much, this is not clear but somewhere between 3 to 6 degC would seem to be necessary for farming on any scale (by which I mean of sufficient size and resource to sustain a settlement for many years). Accordingly, this archaelogical evidence provides firm and incontrovertible evidence that Greenland (or at any rate the coastal areas) was warmer than today by some 3 to 6 deg C (and may be even more). That being the case and given the close proximity of these areas of Greenland to the Artic, it is overwhelmingly likely that much of the Artic was considerably warmer than today and also overwhelmingly likely that at this time, there was less Artic ice.
The proxy evidence referred to by R Gates suggesting that the Artic has not been this warm in the past 2000 years would therefore seem to be highly dubious since it runs contrary to known and undisputable facts that we know about the colonisation of Greenland during the MWP/Viking warm period.
As Smokey said, John Daly knew a thing or two. I can remember reading as a young boy (one of the first books that I bought) the story of th Nautilus submarine journey under the Artic. This book had many pictures of the submarine having broken through thin ice and there is a plethora of Naval documentation (incliuding photographs of US and UK origin) showing the Artic to have less ice or at any rate thinner ice than the Artic possess today at various times in the 50s, 30s and going back to the second part of the 19th century. THe bold assertions by R Gates appear unstainable in the face of this evidence (lets call this recorded historical evidence human experience proxy evidence).
It seems to me that it would be useful for climate scientists to learn some history since this would show that many of their conclusions drawn from their research are flawed due to conflicting historical events/records.
phlogiston says: “Close to minimum now? I cant see how that can be.”
My mistake. Sunsposts this year have ranged from the 20s to the low 50s, according to the SIDC. I’ll remove that offending sentence from my post. The other portion of my question still stands.
@Smokey June 17, 2011 at 6:16 pm. Thanks. You can always be depended upon to keep the discussion truthful.
Smokey says:
June 17, 2011 at 6:16 pm
John B says:
“Are they ALL lying?”
Affirmative. They are playing eye games with their chart by using a bogus zero reference line, when there is actually a clear upward trend from the LIA. This chart shows how they fool folks like John B: click The top two charts look alarming, don’t they? But when the natural trend line is used in the bottom chart… not so scary.
So, they are all lying! Truly the paranoia is strong in you, Smokey.
But just look again at your first link. I honesty do not see how you think the bottom chart is any less “scary” than the two above it. And the zero line is not arbitrary, it is the mean (or maybe median) for the period being looked at. Or just take it away altogether, the rise is still there.
I think you mistake “scary” for “clear”.
Anyone else have an opinion?
And clicking another of your links, you have a temperature chart for Greenland (yes, just Greenland). Cherry picking, yet again. It’s called Global Warming for a reason, you know! The reason being that the globe, taken as a whole, is warming – not every single spot on its surface.
And “eliminating many rural stations”. What happened is that old weather stations were not designed for climate recording, so a reduced set of stations that are actually up to the job was settled on. That is well documented. If there is a bias from that process, BEST will find it, right? You know, the study that Anthony and others said they would accept, no matter what its findings.
Do you really believe the conspiracy runs so deep? As Naomi Orekses said, “liberals should be so organized!”
@Smokey
Do you really think the bottom chart on your first link is less scary than gthre two above it? I really can’t see that. Anyone else?
And most of your other links – cherry picking, pure and simple. Sometimes you cherry pick the time frame, sometimes the location, sometimes the study, sometimes the y-axis, but it’s all cherry picking. Climate science, like any other science, is about the weight of evidence. And you, my friend, do not have it on your side.