This press release was provided by Sandia National Labs:
In an effort to shed light on the wide spectrum of thought regarding the causes and extent of changes in Earth’s climate, Sandia National Laboratories has invited experts from a wide variety of perspectives to present their views in the Climate Change and National Security Speaker Series.
Predictions by climate models are flawed, says invited speaker at Sandia
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, a global warming skeptic, told about 70 Sandia researchers in June that too much is being made of climate change by researchers seeking government funding. He said their data and their methods did not support their claims.
“Despite concerns over the last decades with the greenhouse process, they oversimplify the effect,” he said. “Simply cranking up CO2 [carbon dioxide] (as the culprit) is not the answer” to what causes climate change.
Lindzen, the ninth speaker in Sandia’s Climate Change and National Security Speaker Series, is Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology in MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and is the lead author of Chapter 7 (“Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks”) of the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Third Assessment Report. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.
For 30 years, climate scientists have been “locked into a simple-minded identification of climate with greenhouse-gas level. … That climate should be the function of a single parameter (like CO2) has always seemed implausible. Yet an obsessive focus on such an obvious oversimplification has likely set back progress by decades,” Lindzen said.
For major climates of the past, other factors were more important than carbon dioxide. Orbital variations have been shown to quantitatively account for the cycles of glaciations of the past 700,000 years, he said, and the elimination of the arctic inversion, when the polar caps were ice-free, “is likely to have been more important than CO2 for the warm episode during the Eocene 50 million years ago.”
There is little evidence that changes in climate are producing extreme weather events, he said. “Even the IPCC says there is little if any evidence of this. In fact, there are important physical reasons for doubting such anticipations.”
Lindzen’s views run counter to those of almost all major professional societies. For example, the American Physical Society statement of Nov. 18, 2007, read, “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.” But he doesn’t feel they are necessarily right. “Why did the American Physical Society take a position?” he asked his audience. “Why did they find it compelling? They never answered.”
Speaking methodically with flashes of humor — “I always feel that when the conversation turns to weather, people are bored.” — he said a basic problem with current computer climate models that show disastrous increases in temperature is that relatively small increases in atmospheric gases lead to large changes in temperatures in the models.
But, he said, “predictions based on high (climate) sensitivity ran well ahead of observations.”
Real-world observations do not support IPCC models, he said: “We’ve already seen almost the equivalent of a doubling of CO2 (in radiative forcing) and that has produced very little warming.”
He disparaged proving the worth of models by applying their criteria to the prediction of past climatic events, saying, “The models are no more valuable than answering a test when you have the questions in advance.”
Modelers, he said, merely have used aerosols as a kind of fudge factor to make their models come out right. (Aerosols are tiny particles that reflect sunlight. They are put in the air by industrial or volcanic processes and are considered a possible cause of temperature change at Earth’s surface.)
Then there is the practical question of what can be done about temperature increases even if they are occurring, he said. “China, India, Korea are not going to go along with IPCC recommendations, so … the only countries punished will be those who go along with the recommendations.”
He discounted mainstream opinion that climate change could hurt national security, saying that “historically there is little evidence of natural disasters leading to war, but economic conditions have proven much more serious. Almost all proposed mitigation policies lead to reduced energy availability and higher energy costs. All studies of human benefit and national security perspectives show that increased energy is important.”
He showed a graph that demonstrated that more energy consumption leads to higher literacy rate, lower infant mortality and a lower number of children per woman.
Given that proposed policies are unlikely to significantly influence climate and that lower energy availability could be considered a significant threat to national security, to continue with a mitigation policy that reduces available energy “would, at the least, appear to be irresponsible,” he argued.
Responding to audience questions about rising temperatures, he said a 0.8 of a degree C change in temperature in 150 years is a small change. Questioned about five-, seven-, and 17-year averages that seem to show that Earth’s surface temperature is rising, he said temperatures are always fluctuating by tenths of a degree.
As for the future, “Uncertainty plays a huge role in this issue,” Lindzen said. “It’s not that we expect disaster, it’s that the uncertainty is said to offer the possibility of disaster: implausible, but high consequence. Somewhere it has to be like the possible asteroid impact: Live with it.”
To a sympathetic questioner who said, “You are like a voice crying in the wilderness. It must be hard to get published,” Lindzen said, adding that billions of dollars go into funding climate studies. “The reward for solving problems is that your funding gets cut. It’s not a good incentive structure.”
Asked whether the prudent approach to possible climate change would be to prepare a gradated series of responses, much as insurance companies do when they insure cars or houses, Lindzen did not shift from his position that no actions are needed until more data is gathered.
When another Sandia employee pointed out the large number of models by researchers around the globe that suggest increases in world temperature, Lindzen said he doubted the models were independently derived but rather might produce common results because of their common origins.
The Climate Security lecture series is funded by Sandia’s Energy, Climate and Infrastructure Security division. Rob Leland is director of Sandia’s Climate Security Program.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.
h/t to Marc Marano
But, he (Lindzen) said, “predictions based on high (climate) sensitivity ran well ahead of observations.”
…
Modelers, he said, merely have used aerosols as a kind of fudge factor to make their models come out right.
___________
I agree with the above statements by Richard Lindzen. I have said so many times before…
… and IF actual aerosol data is used rather than fudged, fabricated data, THEN climate sensitivity to CO2 is necessarily much lower than modellers estimates and is probably so small as to be inconsequential.
This excerpt is from 2009:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/18/recent-differences-between-giss-and-ncdc-sst-anomaly-data-and-a-look-at-the-multiple-ncdc-sst-datasets/#comment-133887
(Excerpt)
Sallie Baliunas, Tim Patterson and I wrote in 2003:
“Computer models that predict catastrophic human-induced global warming have consistently failed to accurately reproduce past and present climate changes, so their 100-year forecasts are suspect. These models speculate that the air’s increased carbon dioxide concentration is a major driver of atmospheric warming, by way of amplification processes. Without these speculative processes, even a doubling of CO2 concentration would lead to a theoretical surface warming of only approximately 1 degree (C).”
http://www.apegga.org/Members/Publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
__________________
This leads to the conclusion that increased atmospheric CO2 is no cause for alarm. Politicians, please take note.
More recent data and analyses suggests to me that even this 1 degree C is high due to negative feedbacks, and actual “climate sensitivity” to atmospheric CO2 is so close to zero as to be practically inconsequential.
The only known impact of increased atmospheric CO2 is improved plant yields.
Furthermore, CO2 lags temperature at all time scales, so we don’t even know if CO2 drives temperature at all, and the evidence suggests that temperature drives CO2. When I wrote this conclusion in January 2008 I was criticized by both sides of the global warming debate, but we’ll see who is right.
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/carbon_dioxide_in_not_the_primary_cause_of_global_warming_the_future_can_no/
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. Faites vos jeux.
Regards, Allan
Notes:
The above was written ~2 years before Murry Salby’s address to the Sydney Institute in 2011.
Here is a more recent presentation to the Sydney Institute by Salby – it takes a while to load:
http://podcast.thesydneyinstitute.com.au/podcasts/2012/THE_SYDNEY_INSTITUTE_24_JUL_MURRY_SALBY.mp3
@Dana Nuccitelli
How can you claim climate inertia, when at the same time the rest of the AGW community is falling over each other to produce a hockey stick. Not much intertia in those?
Brian H says:
July 26, 2012 at 10:58 pm
When testifying in public fora, scientists like Lindzen need to abandon their delicate sense of “appropriate professional vocabulary.” Use phrases that communicate to their audiences, like “Crippled incompetent junk”, or “Laughably inaccurate cartoons”.
“Flawed” just doesn’t cut it, Richard.
===================
You make a very valid point and express it in a very easy to understand manner. 😉
But I’m not sure the politicians or MSM would even understand that. Some simply refuse to understand. It’s that CAGW worshiping thing.
One more thing for KR and the +- 60 year cycle. A strong argument could be made that there has been much focus of the immediate need to take action on CAGW because the window of the upward slope of the sinusoidal curve was nearing the apex of the cycle in temp and an all out push had to be made to get the desired regulations and agendas secured before the coming decline that would last for the next 30 +- years. In other words lie, cheat, steal, beg, obfuscate, anything goes because it’s the last chance for CAGW goodies.
Will Climategate 3 prove this?
@Dana Nuccitelli @MrV
I recently looked into the climate inertia story using GISS II GCM model, Hadcrut3 temperature data and the Mauna Loa CO2 data. The GCM model fits with an e-folding time of ~15 years so 3 decades after an impulse the climate will have warmed to 86% of its final value. If you assume that only CO2 greenhouse effects temperatures (ignoring 60 year oscillations etc.) and then fit the temperature data to the CO2 data, including climate inertia effects then I find:
– climate sensitivity (to a doubling of CO2) = 2.1 deg. C.
– 2012 CO2 levels eventually leads to 1 deg. warming over pre-industrial levels.
– If the world carries on burning fossil fuels under business as usual scenario A1B) until 2100, but then slowly switches to nuclear fusion then the temperature peaks at 3 degrees warming in 2250 recovering by 3000. By then we may well have another glaciation to worry about.
more information here…
Willis Eschenbach – Regarding volcanic aerosols, I would disagree with you rather strongly, as the evidence in the field supports a negative aerosol effect and because (although Pinatubo and similar events have led to refinement of various models) the models in existence at that time were still close matches. But this is quite frankly a bit off topic.
Lindzen claimed that “We’ve already seen almost the equivalent of a doubling of CO2 (in radiative forcing) and that has produced very little warming.” This is incorrect in all respects. Doubling of CO2 should cause a 3.7 W/m^2 forcing. CO2 alone since 1750 has a forcing of 1.66 W/m^2, while adding up all GHG’s, insolation, black carbon, and aerosol influences (all the forcings) sums to a change of 1.6 W/m^2 since 1750.
Lindzen error 1: That’s about 40% of a doubling, not 100%.
We’ve seen ~0.8°C warming since 1750. If all warming were realized, no imbalances whatsoever (which hasn’t happened yet), that means a climate sensitivity of ~0.8°C / 0.40, or >= 2°C/doubling. Given the continuing increasing trend of ocean heat content (meaning a continuing imbalance, thermal inertia on the part of the oceans), the full sensitivity will be perhaps 25-50% higher, or 2.5-3°C/doubling.
Lindzen error 2: His claimed <1°C/doubling of CO2 sensitivity is contradicted by even the most sympathetic view of the observed change in temperatures, which limit minimum sensitivity to 2°C/doubling of CO2.
Lindzen’s statement is wholly incorrect.
The claim is often made that “aerosol forcing is uncertain” – but again that does not justify claiming an extreme value as ground truth. Aerosol forcing estimates are a best estimate -1.3 W/m^2, full range of -0.4 to -2.7. If it’s -0.4 W/m^2 (a 1/20 chance given the evidence), then climate sensitivity (with no thermal inertia, mind you) might be as low as 1.84°C/doubling. Another 1/20 chance, though, is that aerosol forcings are -2.4 W/m^2, and climate sensitivity is at least 7.4°C/doubling! Those have equal chances given the data – selecting the most favorable end of the range is simply wishful thinking.
Skepticism should be believe apportioned proportionally to the evidence – and the mean estimate of aerosol forcing (-1.3 W/m^2) is consistent with a climate sensitivity of ~2.5°C/doubling of CO2, right in the IPCC range established with multiple lines of evidence.
—
So – Lindzen’s claim in this regard is ridiculous, and I’m personally rather saddened that someone as intelligent as he would make such unsupportable statements.
Regarding my last post – I may have mistyped; absolute minimum sensitivity if you assume rolling all snake-eyes with aerosols would be ~1.184C/doubling, while rolling all sixes would give a sensitivity of 7.4C/doubling. If I mistyped 1.84, my bad. Either way, Lindzen’s <1C/doubling sensitivity claim is out of range with this data, even with the rather unphysical assumption of zero thermal inertia – real sensitivity will be higher.
And neither snake-eyes or double 6’s are very likely…
KR: these estimates of ‘forcings’ due to GHGs are fundamentally wrong.
It’s because direct thermalisation is quantum excluded. I had thought you would get indirect thermalisation, mainly at clouds, with the GHGs being an energy transfer medium, so the forcing would be much lower [the energy is spread to the atmospheric window in clouds].
However, the only proper conclusion is that for IR self-absorbing GHGs, [CO2>~200 ppmV] the apparent absorption of those bands is not absorption in the atmosphere, instead it’s the restriction of IR emission from the earth’s surface. There can be NO CO2-AGW, the GHE of a water planet is fixed by the first small concentration of water vapour.
This is controversial, but there’s no experimental proof of any CO2-AGW [the PET bottle experiment is warmed by the bottle walls] and the total GHE can only be ~9 K once you remove the lapse rate contribution in the flat Earth model.
This is buit one area which climate science has got wrong. there are four more.
KR says
Doubling of CO2 should cause a 3.7 W/m^2 forcing.
Henry says
I could not find actual test results supporting this claim.
AR4 ex IPCC seems to have evaluated the increases in relevant GHG’s and other relevant factors versus the actual increase in temp. observed since 1750 and then allocated a “forcing”
to each, rather like putting the horse behind the cart. The worst mistake a scientist can make: assume you know the cause of a problem, and then work from the wrong end to find a solution for the problem (of global warming).
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
in the meantime I found the global warming was natural
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
and I don’t trust much of the temp. “global” record before 1935…..
please provide me with a calibration certificate of a thermometer from, say,
1750?
KR says: July 27, 2012 at 9:18 am
I think you are wrong on all points – please show your math.
Allan MacRae – “”…please show your math
All numbers in my previous two posts come from the ratio(s) of forcings (with/without/at extremes of aerosol effect range) to the well-accepted no feedback forcing of doubling CO2, or 3.7 W/m^2. That by itself would lead to a warming of ~1.1°C, whereas various feedbacks based upon that change provide the various estimates of sensitivity. What I did was to compare forcing levels against observed instrumental temperature change to look at what total climate sensitivity to forcing might be.
I had thought that fairly easy to calculate, but since you ask, here are the numbers _without_ any thermal inertia (unrealistic, the climate has not yet adjusted to current forcings, let alone ongoing ones, but…):
1.6 W/m^2 (since 1750) /3.7 = 0.4, 0.8°C/0.4 = 2°C/doubling of CO2. (lower limit without thermal inertia, most likely aerosol forcings)
2-sigma least negative aerosol forcing of -0.4 (compared to -1.3 best estimate), gives 0.8 / (2.5 / 3.7) = 1.184°C/doubling.
2-sigma most negative aerosol forcing of -2.4 gives 0.8 / (0.5 / 3.7) = 7.4°C/doubling.
All of these estimates are low by 25-50% due to ongoing imbalances (the oceans haven’t caught up with the forcing deltas, that takes decades, and we’re still adding GHG’s), and hence should be somewhat higher. Lindzen’s claim of <1°C/doubling is absurd, and his claim of doubling and insufficient warming even more so.
If you feel I've made a math error, please point it out.
Allan MacRae – You are quite correct, I did make a math error. 2-sigma most negative aerosol forcing leads to an estimate of 5.92C/doubling, not 7.4. I had neglected the 0.8 scaling in my worksheet.
But again, Lindzen’s claim is _still_ invalid.
KR says
If you feel I’ve made a math error, please point it out.
Henry says
it’s chemistry where you and all made a mistake
Any chemistry student knows that the first smoke from the (warmed) water in a kettle is the CO2 being released. There are tons and tons of carbonate , mostly as bicarbonate dissolvced in the oceans. So, quite a number of scientists have reported that the increases of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past lagged the warming periods by quite a few hundred years. e.g. see here:http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/
Cause and effect, get it? Smoking causes cancer but cancer does not cause smoking.
So the graph that started all this nonsense from Manoa Loa actually depicts clearly what is happening: (natural) global warming is gassing CO2 out of the oceans, naturally, mostly, so to speak. Remember that that graph only started in 1956, which is after global warming had already started, if you can follow the maths from my stats,
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Now, to prove that I am right, you can watch the CO2 graph from Barrow or Burrow (in Alaska) from NOAA where cooling has started quite seriously (see my results in the table for Anchorage): the results for CO2 are completely flat, and have been for quite some time.
Brian H says: @ur momisugly July 26, 2012 at 10:58 pm
When testifying in public fora, scientists like Lindzen need to abandon their delicate sense of “appropriate professional vocabulary.” Use phrases that communicate to their audiences, like “Crippled incompetent junk”, or “Laughably inaccurate cartoons”.
“Flawed” just doesn’t cut it, Richard.
===================
eyesonu says: @ur momisugly July 27, 2012 at 7:32 am
You make a very valid point and express it in a very easy to understand manner. 😉
But I’m not sure the politicians or MSM would even understand that. Some simply refuse to understand. It’s that CAGW worshiping thing.
=====================
No it is the POWER and MONEY worshiping thing for those in power. CAGW is just another form of The Innocents’ Club for the unthinking sheeple. We still suffer from Willi Münzenberg’s Propaganda genius.
Henry@KR
in case you don’t know:
heat + HCO3- => CO2 + OH- is what is called “outgassing”
cold + CO2 + 2H2O => HCO3- + H3O+ is what is called “sinking”
HenryP – “…(natural) global warming is gassing CO2 out of the oceans…”
There’s a very, very big problem with that hypothesis for the last 150 years, Henry. The atmospheric CO2 is increasing (quickly). But oceanic CO2 is increasing as well, as shown by the changes in ocean pH, just as expected from anthropogenic CO2 input. If the oceans were the source the ocean CO2 would have to be declining – it is not. Your claim of ocean outgassing is therefore contradicted by the data.
And no, our CO2 data doesn’t start in 1956 – see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2mZyCblxS4 for the last 800,000 years of data.
And finally, regarding your Alaska data – if you can show global cooling, then you have something worth looking at. But not local, or even regional – that’s cherry-picking. And don’t forget the oceans, 93% of the climate thermal mass, http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/ where we see ongoing warming through 2000 meters! Warming has _not_ stopped.
KR says:
July 27, 2012 at 9:10 am
=====================================
KR repeats his intial assertions. Despite numerous links showing that observations do not support the particulate cooling, despite the posts showing that the first portion of a doubling always do more work then the second, despite intially ignoring the obvious, that Lindzen was referring to all forcings, plus estimated delayed feedbacks, and he was REASONABLY discounting the negative forcing of particulates, used to save the day for the P.C. CO2 weighting popular among warmist . KR further ignores the observed sixty year ocean cycles and the fact that most of the satellite trend has been in a warming PDO phase. This post is just a repeat of his intial post, with no evidence of learning or a scientific attitude.
It’s worse than that… Warmists love arguments from authority except when it’s turned on them. Not being an expert in atmospheric physics who should I believe? A professor of MIT with 240 published papers to his credit (Lindzen) who happens to be a specialist on climate sensitivity issues, or, arrogant anonymous guy on the internet (KR), who is implying that Lindzen is a cheat or fool or both, and who can spot all of Lindzen’s ‘errors’. If I had to choose, KR sounds like a crank to me.
KR says:
July 27, 2012 at 3:09 pm
HenryP – “…(natural) global warming is gassing CO2 out of the oceans…”
There’s a very, very big problem with that hypothesis for the last 150 years, Henry. The atmospheric CO2 is increasing (quickly). But oceanic CO2 is increasing as well, as shown by the changes in ocean pH, just as expected from anthropogenic CO2 input…..
_______________________________
OH, what crap. The darn oceans are:
1. BUFFERED
2. Full of phytoplankton
Do you really think the people here at WUWT are so completely uneducated they would believe the ocean acidification drivel. Good grief the oceans are BASIC not acidic! The pH is above 7. GEESHhhh…. (Oh, and if I remember correctly Henry P. is a chemist like me)
KR says:
July 27, 2012 at 3:09 pm
where we see ongoing warming through 2000 meters! Warming has _not_ stopped.
Let us assume for discussion sake that the waters that were between 1000 m and 2000 m warmed from 4.0 C to 4.2 C. Why would that have been a problem and how much money should have been spent to prevent this from happening?
How annoying> it seems my comment has gone lost because I typed an error in my e-mail address.
Henry @ur momisugly KR
I was not cherry picking. I merely wanted to illustrate to you that(extra) cold will induce the sinking of CO2 into the oceans, as is happening right there in Alaska: the CO2 has been flat, because the extra that we put in the air is already being sunk.
I also checked that pH story out: it seems there are 3 stations reporting (on ocean pH) and only one of them reported an increase, but it is so small that it falls outside the accuracy of any pH meter. I have been doing pH measurement all of my life and I know how quickly they drift and how often they must be calibrated.
Even so, I know that allmost all human mining and production processes and de-salination processes produce acidic water, so if you are looking for blame on that very slight rise, if there is one,then don’t immediately start looking at the CO2.
Obviously you have no clue as to how many gigatons of carbonate are dissolved in the oceans and I also found that we really have no clue as to how many tons are added daily by under water volcanic activity (pacific and mid atlantic rifs).
My maths on my stats show that the net result is currently cooling of earth, be it ever so slight as to go largely unnoticed i.e. ca. 0.2 degrees C since 2000.
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
KR says:
July 27, 2012 at 3:09 pm
And finally, regarding your Alaska data – if you can show global cooling, then you have something worth looking at. But not local, or even regional – that’s cherry-picking.
It most certainly is not cherry-picking. According to warmist doctrine, the Arctic is the bellweather — evidence of warming will manifest most strongly in those *regions* in the higher latitudes.
And don’t forget the oceans, 93% of the climate thermal mass, http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/ where we see ongoing warming through 2000 meters! Warming has _not_ stopped.
It hasn’t stopped because it’s still in the middle of a 100-year cycle:
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/ocean.html
Hi Werner
you say
“Let us assume for discussion sake that the waters that were between 1000 m and 2000 m warmed from 4.0 C to 4.2 C”
Actually this observation, if correct, is consistent with my theory that the ca. 50 year warming and cooling periods are caused by the subsequent fall and rise in ozone. I heard somewhere on WUWT that the atmosphere is now contracting which would (also) cause rising ozone levels. In the warming period 1944- 1995 , the extra warming was then caused by more energy laden radiation of <0.4 um reaching earth which is absorbed in water and then converted to heat. During the cooling period, less radiation of <0.4 um comes through, due to the rising ozone levels.
Bill Tuttle says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/25/lindzen-at-sandia-national-labs-climate-models-are-flawed/#comment-1046114
That is an impressive paper you gave; to quote something that struck me:
“The Pacific and Atlantic have been warming since the 1950s, and the Indian since the 1960s. The delay in the Indian Ocean may be caused by the sparsity of data before 1960″
Again, it appears that those data seem to confirm my own findings. http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Note that I calculate that global warming, as seen from the energy in-put, turned in 1995.
Because my rsquare is almost 0.998, I can even do a rough mathematical estimate on the observed curve. Note that the curve is parabolic, suggesting a completely natural process.
There is no AGW. There never was. Looking at the root of the curve on the other side I come to 1944. Those old enough to know will remember how cold the winter was of 1944.
I agree that around the zero point there will be a few years that everything looks completely flat, giving you the impression of a longer than 50 or 51 year cycle.
However, whichever way you look at it, either from the energy input by the sun, or earth’s (delayed) energy output: It does not change the fact that there is a 50 year warming cycle followed by a 50 yr cooling cycle. We are on our path back to 1944 and we will be there around 2045.
HenryP says: @ur momisugly July 28, 2012 at 8:36 am
….. I heard somewhere on WUWT that the atmosphere is now contracting which would (also) cause rising ozone levels…..
____________________________
Here is your link on that Henry.
However I would think the atmosphere is expanding a bit again due to solar cycle 24 being near solar max. however it is such a weak cycle I doubt it has returned to “normal levels” since TSI has not TSI monitoring 1978 to present
ATMOSPHERIC TRANSMISSION OF DIRECT SOLAR RADIATION AT MAUNA LOA (graph) appears to have dropped a bit. Article link and the data set is HERE (stops at Feb 2011)
Real time solar wind info HERE
And a good article by astrophysicst Dr. Nir J. Shaviv