There’s an extraordinary admission about solar activity and cold winters in the UK from the Met Office in an article in FT Magazine.
It is as if the blinders have been removed.
The relevant passage is below from the much larger article.
“We now believe that [the solar cycle] accounts for 50 per cent of the variability from year to year,” says Scaife. With solar physicists predicting a long-term reduction in the intensity of the solar cycle – and possibly its complete disappearance for a few decades, as happened during the so-called Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715 – this could be an ominous signal for icy winters ahead, despite global warming.
Read the article – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/35145bee-9d38-11e0-997d-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1RacNghPj
h/t to WUWT reader “Lord Beaverbrook”
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savethesharks says:
July 9, 2011 at 9:13 pm
Once again RGates hijacks a thread. Like a virus…really.
Anything to advance his/her AGW agenda.
It really is getting to the point though, of being of zero value, to even discuss.
Why can’t you stick to the topic of the thread?
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
____
Chris, you’re a bright guy, and so you must know that all these topics are related…”all roads lead to Rome” so to speak. If topics come back to some foundational issues, then so be it. I did not “hijack” this thread in the least. People ask me questions and I respond. And I have no “AGW Agenda” …whatever that may mean. This is fun and interesting site with bright people such as yourself who happen to believe things that are much different that what I do. The topic of this thread was about the Met office’s statement about the effects of solar variation on weather (though some would like to think they were talking about the climate). My first post was directly about that, and then I was challenged or asked questions. That’s how conversations evolve. Chill, really.
The issue is that AGW theory ascribes a positive feedback to an increase in water vapour in the models whereas in the real world the feedbck is strongly negative whatever the source of a forcing process whether it be towards warming or cooling.
The water cycle speeds up to minimise warming influences and slows down to minimise cooling influences..
Thus the proportion of non water vapour GHGs in the air just goes primarily to the speed of the water cycle and is not a significant contributor to the equilibrium temperature of the system as a whole. We should look to the oceans and atmospheric pressure plus solar shortwave radiation to set that system equilibrium tewmperature and not the atmospheric composition.
In ignoring the influence of the oceans and atmospheric pressure, in focusing entirely on the atmosphere Tyndall et al got it seriously wrong.
The fact that the atmospheric temperature is higher than it ‘should’ be has hardly anything to do with atmospheric composition at all dur to the variable speed of the water cycle.
The entire system is modulated by the speed of the water cycle which is perfectly apparent from observation of the ever changing surface pressure distribution and the ever shifting climate zones.
R. Gates said:
“Don’t see any mention anywhere of a cessation of stratospheric cooling.”
Lots of the diagrams show it. Try Fig 18.
The words however do not mention it as you say.
Seems to me that any paper that completely ignores a mid period change in trend is not very helpful.
and:
“talking about climate, the shorter term thermal effects seem not so important to me as the longer term issue of changes in the earth’s energy balance brought about by increasing amounts of CO2”.
Then I suggest you alter your priorities. Setting one thermal effect against another where both act in opposite directions seems a pretty essential step to me. It is the central omission of AGW theory and fully explains the so called ‘missing’ heat.
@R.Gates
Why?
J Martin says:
The only blinkers (“k” moved to “d” in the US) worn in the UK Met Office are most likely worn by the head of the Met Office as he is a politicised fan of AGW. This makes him unsuitable to be in charge of the Met Office since it prevents open discussion of a full range of views and ideas within the Met Office. The head of the Met Office should not take a position on co2 and global warming. To do otherwise is a conflict of interest and can only reduce the likelihood of the Met Office ever producing accurate climate or weather predictions.
Somehow I doubt that their intentions are honest. I think that the AGW zoo are looking for an exit strategy and this is part of that, along with the recent publication of graphs from GISS showing no rise in temperature, and graphs from Hadcrut showing a decline in temperature over the last ten years, and the recent amateurish excuse of aerosols from China.
They will be looking to reposition themselves as being the discoverers of cooling and will adopt and claim all the science done by the sceptics as their own. They will likely be fairly successful in this as they have positions and status eg. Hanson – NASA.
They will state that it was their invaluable work on co2 that lead them to this discovery and that it confirms that they were right about co2 all along. And that the Global cooling was simply masking the co2 problem and that the need to destroy the economy of the Western World remains urgent.
I live in hope that Santor, Mann, Hanson, Jones, will all go to jail, but I don’t expect to see it.
Mike Jonas says:
July 9, 2011 at 3:40 pm
A scientific question : Am I right in saying that IR doesn’t penetrate sea surface, so all its energy goes into evaporation? If so, then the energy goes back up into the atmosphere as latent heat. On condensing prior to coming down again as rain (etc), the heat is released back into the atmosphere, basically exactly where it came from. That creates more IR, half of which goes out into space. The cycle keeps repeating, so over time, a greater and greater proportion of the IR ends up in space. Net effect : very little global warming. Is that correct?
Mostly correct yes, Check this post:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/tallbloke-back-radiation-oceans-and-energy-exchange/
Stephen Wilde says:
July 10, 2011 at 12:06 am
R. Gates said:
“talking about climate, the shorter term thermal effects seem not so important to me as the longer term issue of changes in the earth’s energy balance brought about by increasing amounts of CO2″.
Then I suggest you alter your priorities. Setting one thermal effect against another where both act in opposite directions seems a pretty essential step to me. It is the central omission of AGW theory and fully explains the so called ‘missing’ heat.
Lol. R. Gates isn’t interested in the shorter term thermal effect because it nixes the extra co2 as the cause of the late C20th warming. Now he wants you to get worried about the rate rocks weather at. Listen up R. Gates, the rate rocks weather at and shells grow is a problem, they are absorbing too much co2 at the timescale you now say you are interested in. Atmospheric co2 is at dangerously low levels on the geological timescale.
If and when there’s enough cooling to substantially reduce agricultural output there might be some mobs out looking for climate boffin butt to kick. While these nattering nabobs of negativity were trying, with some success, to limit anthropogenic CO2 it’ll become apparent that we should have been increasing it to ameliorate the devastating of effect of global cooling. When starvation rate accelerates there will be millions more deaths directly attributable to the political chicanery the climate boffins have so vigorously embraced.
tallbloke says:
July 11, 2011 at 2:53 am
“Atmospheric co2 is at dangerously low levels on the geological timescale.”
As factual as can be. Bears repeating. So I did.
Mike Jonas says:
July 9, 2011 at 3:40 pm
“A scientific question : Am I right in saying that IR doesn’t penetrate sea surface, so all its energy goes into evaporation? If so, then the energy goes back up into the atmosphere as latent heat. On condensing prior to coming down again as rain (etc), the heat is released back into the atmosphere, basically exactly where it came from. That creates more IR, half of which goes out into space. The cycle keeps repeating, so over time, a greater and greater proportion of the IR ends up in space. Net effect : very little global warming. Is that correct?”
I don’t know about “very little” but it’s essentually correct that you can’t heat a body water by shining infrared light on its surface. It’s all true that the ocean doesn’t effectively cool by emitting long wave infrared because it can only be emitted by a surface layer thinner than a human hair. Conductive and radiative heat loss in the ocean is a whopping 30% combined while evaporation is responsible for the other 70%.
This doesn’t happen over land so 30% of the earth’s surface can indeed be warmed by GHGs. Greenhouse warming is almost entirely a land based phenomenon which handily explains why the climate boffins are desperately trying to find the missing heat. It ain’t missing, is was just never absorbed because water can’t be heated from above via LWIR and LWIR from above is THE mechanism by which GHGs do their thing.
@tallbloke
Read the post of yours discussing ocean warming by downwelling IR.
Suggest you check out this and similar papers confirming that 70% of ocean heat loss is through evaporation, 20% radiative, and 10% conduction.
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 108, NO. C5, 3146, doi:10.1029/2002JC001584, 2003
Seasonal mixed layer heat budget of the tropical Atlantic Ocean.
Moreover it shows that the tropical Atlantic stores a fair amount of summertime insolation and releases it in the winter when the air is dryer and evaporation is increased. This is why there’s a lot less seasonal variation in surface air temperature over the ocean as compared to same latitude inland over continents.
The bottom line is that for greenhouse gases to produce downwelling infrared they first need upwelling infrared to absorb and the plain fact of the matter is that the ocean doesn’t supply much upwelling infrared as radiation is a bit player compared to latent heat loss from evaporation. Latent heat in water vapor drills right through the lowest, densest layer of greenhouse gases like they weren’t there and releases the latent heat high above the surface when adiabatic cooling causes it to condense. Adding insult to injury in the GHG ocean heating hypothesis is that the densest layer of greenhouse gases which were bypassed by latent heat transport then serve to INSULATE the ocean surface against downwelling infrared released when the water vapor condenses. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. GHGs insulate in both directions so if the infrared source is high in the sky as it is in the case of latent heat of fusion the GHG layer belows impedes the return of said radiation.
Significant GHG warming over land is a fair topic for discussion. Significant GHG warming over the global ocean is a physical impossibility that doesn’t warrant more discussion than it takes to point out the physics which makes it impossible which are the very same physics that makes significant over land.
R. Gates says:
July 9, 2011 at 10:39 pm
“This is fun and interesting site with bright people such as yourself who happen to believe things that are much different that what I do.”
This is your fundamental problem, Gates. Science isn’t about what you can believe. It’s about what you can know.
Mate, you you are like Shakespear. Your text is really good. You ought to do it for money