theyeti

I sincerely hope you don't actually believe that.

It appears that they've remained flat for the last 50 years. So tell me, how does this explain a sudden sharp spike in temperature during the last 30 years? The fact is, solar activity ceases to correlate with temperatures during the late 20th century. Climatologists aren't stupid you know, they've actually considered this.

No, most of it happened between the 1970s and today. Here is a graph of 20th century temperatures:



The warming from 1910 - 1940 was largely a reversal of a previous cooling trend (in other words, 1910 is a cherry-picked year; it wasn't until the late 30s that temperatures began to exceeded those of the 19th century). The truly abnormal warming is late 20th century. This is what any alternative explanation has to account for.

It's just what you'd expect thanks to negative forcing from aerosols and particulates released by human activity. Those have been dropping, so the temperature has continued to rise accordingly.

Solar activity didn't rise from the late 70s to the late 90s, it stayed flat. That's the problem with the solar theory -- it cannot account for the warming. And it's nonsense to say that temperatures "leveled out" during the 2000s -- of the six hottest years on record, all but one were during the 2000s.

Okay, I'm going to call your bluff.

Name for us the financial, political, and religious (!?!) reasons that Realclimate has for its acceptance of global warming. Be specific. Show us actual evidence, don't just speculate or engage in armchair psychology.

theyeti

fragment

Just to address the last part...

No, you wouldn't. Greenhouse gases reduce the net rate at which the surface loses energy through radiation. That means warmer night-time temperatures.

Greater than what? Formation during the day? Fine... but the relevant comparison would be between night-time cosmic rays now and night-time ones at some time in the past. According to you, that will have been a reduction.

Besides, I don't see how clouds at night are supposed to reflect solar radiation...

Water vapour reflects very little solar radiation. See here. Even if that little bit is significant, it would only reduce the warming from an albedo change, not limit it. On the other hand, the greenhouse effect from water vapour is as active during the day as during the night - so S2Focus' statement, "a decrease in cloud cover should be accompanied by a decrease in average overnight low temperatures (or at least a smaller increase in overnight lows than daytime highs)" is accurate about what the cosmic ray theory predicts.

MeinGeist

To add a couple graphs to the general shredding:

Why do you refer to this paper?
Neutron monitor data may be obtained here:
http://ulysses.sr.unh.edu/NeutronMon.../neutron2.html

Realclimate offers this plot of temp and cosmic ray intensity.
http://www.realclimate.org/cicerone0203_fig3.jpg

Texas sharpshooter fallacy

False.


False.
1)Most of the increase happened after 1975.
2)There has been no increase in solar activity during that time.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2_lrg.gif

False.
Temperature has not leveled off.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2_lrg.gif

Dorje

Cosmic rays? Global warming denialists will latch on to anything, won't they? Anything to prevent them from accepting any personal responsibility for global warming.

MeinGeist

Heh, I've looked at the paper. It contained some info that was new to me. I haven't assessed the credibility of this.
It doesn't support the claim in support of which it was invoked.

I think these bits are relevant here:
The quote with the number:
Our observation results show that in the absence of a meteorological front, trough or solar effects, the day count of the CR is usually smaller than the night count by 3-4 %. As discussed in the introduction, this can be attributed to the day-night temperature effect of muon decay.

Explanation of that effect:
The cosmic rays (CR) at sea level comprise particles from the extensive air showers (EAS). Their major components are muons, which are the decay products of pions or kaons from high altitudes. Despite a lifetime of only about 2 μs, muons can penetrate the atmosphere down to the sea level before they decay because of the relativistic time dilation effect.
[...]
The intensity of CR at sea level is not a constant. Many factors, including the barometric effect, solar cycle modulation effect, solar flares effect, geomagnetic effect, etc., may affect its value (3). For muons, because of decay effects, the sea level intensity is related to the height of production. Blackett (4) was probably the first pioneer to explain these decay effects. He pointed out that the pressure level in the atmosphere, where most of the muons were formed (now known to be at about 100 mbar), would be higher as the atmospheric temperature increased. Consequently more muons would have decayed before reaching the ground and thus resulting in a decrease of ionisation. This muon decay effect (or say temperature effect) explains the seasonal variations of the CR intensity at sea level.

Kind of interesting. This would imply that any correlation between weather and CRs, insofar as it is not just chance, may as well involve a causation in the opposite direction of the one usually claimed.

Here's spelled out what's wrong with the assertion wrt cloud formation. CR intensity is not really greater at night. We only pick up more of it at sea level because Muons "burn out" at higher altitudes during the day.
IF (big if) CR intensity has really an effect on cloud formation via the abundance of cloud condensation nucleii then what should matter is how far CRs penetrate into the atmosphere.
Given that there's not a lot of clouds at sea level (and anyway no lack of CCNs) I'd think that the higher CR count denotes less CCNs at altitudes where they might have an effect. If that effect exists.

fragment

Via Deltoid, a timely article on the cosmic ray theory. PDF of the paper they're talking about.

S2Focus

Well, it looks like this thread has pretty much run its course. And the take-home message here is that there are three words that you will *never* hear from a global-warming denier: "I stand corrected".

gnosis92

Henrik Svensmark does not deny global warming, only the relative contributory causes.

If Henrik Svensmark theory is correct, a very long-term decline in solar output (and an increase in cloud-seeding cosmic rays) would result in global cooling, and offsetting this with CO2 would be a good thing, conversely, a very long term increase in solar output would magnify warming from CO2 through positive feedback mechanism.

If Henrik Svensmark theory is correct, we need better models and predictions of solar dynamics to factor into long term climate change.

Henrik Svensmark and his research team has produced cloud chambers and has shown ionizing cosmic radiation do seed clouds.

MeinGeist

I don't think S2F was talking about Svensmark there.

Well, not really. So far, they haven't really shown more than that ionizing radiation is, well, ionizing.
Unfortunately, Svensmark's idea requires a number of factors to be juuust right. Aesthetically, I like the theory because it's so wonderfully circuitous but, rationally speaking, any effect is probably negligable. The number of factors that need to be just right simply means that there is a very narrow range in which the effect may operate.

Qam1

Sorry I was away on vacation for the holiday, I had more fun things to do than argue religious beliefs

Calling me a Denier: How Christian like of you

But now that's just funny
From Global Cooling in the 1970's, to the 2006 hurricane season was suppose to be worse than the 2005 one, how every year since 1998 is going to be the hottest, or one of my personal favorites how a 15-Year-Old Outsmarted the U.N. Climate Panel
In no human endeavor have so many been so wrong so often as those trying to predict the weather, and they never say "I stand corrected", instead they just go and make more & more predictions and expect us to believe that this time they are surely right

LOL! That's gotta be the most ironic thing ever posted on an Atheist board.

And further proof that Global Warming is just another Religion

Christians talk like that. Christians will say anyone who doesn't buy their BS are denying their religion in order to prevent them from accepting personal responsibility for their sins

The cast of characters and the sins (sexual vs capitalism)might be different but in practice and belief AGW just another religion, your words prove that.

Actually it's the AGW church members who are trying to change the physical properties of CO2 (as well as H2O)

The atmosphere is already saturated at the IR levels CO2 levels absorb



Being that there's only a finite amount of IR radiations it's the AGW pulpits who want us to believe that adding extra CO2 in the atmosphere will absorb IR waves that are already being absorbed or just flat out don't exist.

And that's a good thing the atmosphere is already saturated, because even with the small rise in CO2 we've seen we are still at historical lows. There have been times on this planet where the CO2 levels have been 10-18x higher than they are now. If CO2 was anything but a tiny fraction of the greenhouse effect, back then when CO2 levels were much higher all life would have fried and none of us would be here right now to discuss it.

HUH?

We would expect a more active sun if it were to affect the earth it would also have effects on all the other planets and that's what exactly we see

What's crazy is you believe the sun is heating up the other planets while leaving earth relatively unaffected or worse you believe all the planets in one big huge coincidence are all heating up magically all by themselves without any solar influence.

Just as bad you know in the past solar activity effected climate while CO2 didn't but somehow magically you think in the last 30 years they switched roles.


What graph are you looking at? It clearly peaks in the 1990s

Easy, along with the instantaneous effects from the sun there are also cumulative effects. Earth has buffers (i.e. the oceans as heat sinks/reservoirs) to immediate changes, so even if the sun reached its peak earlier and holds at a high level it's still going to take years to decades before its full effects are seen. For example, The Little Ice age is associated with the Maunder Minimum which we know the dates for, yet scientist still debate when exactly TLIA started and ended.

Another example is between ~1870-1910 when you had 3 solar cycles with very low activity and the earth continued to cool throughout this time, so the last 3 solar cycles at the end of the 20th century were very active so we should suppect the temps to keep rising

Also these solar storms are correlated with El Nino and Southern Occultation cycles

So we have a higher number of SSCs in the 1990s and powerful El Nino's, as the rate of SSCs decreased in the 2000's (but are still historically high) the El Ninos have gotten weaker

See the above examples, they've been wrong way more often then they've been right.

There's too many unknown and butterfly effects in Climatology for any long or short term predictions to be anymore than a guess

How am I wrong?

The 1910 temps are close to -0.6 and the 1940 temps are at 0, the current temps are at about +0.5. That's 0.6° to 0.5°, Am I missing something? I guess with a little truncation you can say they are equal, but either way equal or slightly greater it still doesn't make sense if CO2 is the culprit.

Even worse is it took 30 years (1910-1940) to rise the 0.5°F and almost twice as long at 58 years to rise the next 0.5°F

hhmmm. So the Earth can cool and heat without the influence of man………..

You don't say

1976 is also a cherry-picked year, go back further you will see the 20th century is a reversal of a long term cooling trend called the Little Ice Age. Going back the 20th century just looks like a normalization between the medieval warming period and the Little Ice age

And there's nothing unprecedented about the rise in temps at the end of the 20th century. There have been many time in earth's history (including early in the 20th century) where the temps have rose and fell like they did in the late 20th century

Yeah it's all just one big coincidence that all solar data shows a decrease in activity at this time also.

But on the sulfates, Bull

1) Most of the cooling between 1940-1976 occurred between 1945-1950 when
most of the world was recovering from WWII and between 1950-1960 when everything ramped up the world warmed slightly only to again fall. Sorry but there's no consistent pattern there to suggest sulfate aerosols or any other pollutant had anything to do with the cooling

2) While we in the US reduced Sulfate Aerosols since the 1940's-1970's, back
then China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, etc weren't as industrialized as they
are today, so there are actually more "sulphate aerosols" being released
today in the world then there was back then when it was basically just us,

Here see for yourself

Thick
aerosols blanket much of China's Huang He, or Yellow River, in this true-color
MODIS image from October 22, 2001


Nothing we released back then approached those levels, yet the Earth isn't cooling.

And all of them below 1998

And those aren't the real temperatures, those are adjusted temperatures and what a surprise climatologist whose funding depends on global warming adjust the temperatures to match AGW. Take out the adjustments and the late 20th century isn't much higher that of the 1930's (Yeah, they were so primitive in the 1930's that didn't know how to read a clock correctly, suuuurre). Here's a link to an example or one more on how after 69 years all of a sudden 1938 gets adjusted down by 0.5°

They are already trying to pull that shit with this year

February was coldest in 28 years and April was tracking to be the coldest in 113 years There's been snow in Portugal, Los Angles and South Africa for the 1st time in 40-50 years, record cold and snows in South America and Australia and there's a whole lot more I could list.

And yet already you have scientist claiming 2007 expected to be one of the warmest years

Bull – Shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We can fight all we want about these previous years, but unless something really crazy happens in the remaining part of this year, 2007 will not be anywhere near the warmest or second warmest.

I really hope they try and claim it as one of the warmest, after all that's happened this year it would only show more people the farce the AGW religion is


Bad Call

Financial, well that's obvious, no global warming = no funding = no job that you get to fly around the world in private jets to attend global warming conferences. And with the way Michael Mann has "altered" data in the past, I highly doubt there's a job waiting for him at any legitimate company as an accountant.

Political , again obvious, I don't think you will find any Republicans over at Realclimate, but RealClimate is hosted by Environmental Media Services

Quote from Wikipedia

Environmental Media Services (EMS) is a Washington, D.C. based nonprofit organization that is "dedicated to expanding media coverage of critical environmental and public health issues"[1]. EMS was founded in 1994 by Arlie Schardt, a former journalist, former communications director for Al Gore's 2000 Presidental campaign, and former head of the Environmental Defense Fund during the 1970s.

Also it's founder, Gavin Schmidt even admits he's a lefty, in the New York Times, in response to his hate man Quote from the New York Times "Really, the hate mail is because I am a bad, atheist, environmentalist lefty." And of course you don't see many AGW activist pushing for the only thing proven to reduce CO2 – Nuclear power but instead their answer to AGW is more and more Socialism.

Religious, start here http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speec...ligion.html%5b

And yes he is right, as an Atheist I see no difference between today's environmentalism and Christianity. From Carbon credits = Indulgences, the excusing of hypocrisy and corruption of your leaders and your death toll, the attack on people who don't believe your religion as only denying your religion because they want to live in sin, and you are even trying to start you own inquisition, etc, etc

In every characteristic today's environmentalism matches Christianity, especially in regards to AGW.

Those nighttime temps are taken in morning just before sunrise, the re-radiation rate should be at a minimum by then. And of course Water Vapor is the Main Greenhouse gas.

Water Vapor is the excuse given for why night time temperatures aren't cooling as much as the day is heating. If it's good enough for CO2 it's good enough for cosmic rays

But I was wrong to believe the initial premise about cloud cover

Basic cloud physics



Under the cosmic ray hypothesis the high clouds are still there, so at night they still will be keeping the extra heat received in the day because of a lack of low clouds

Ok Thanks

From the link



Looks like Cosmic rays have declined slightly by a few % since the 1950's, well expect the 1970's set which of course corresponds to cooling seen in the temperature record.

And you link only goes back to 1950, all indications are cosmic ray intensities were much higher before hand

Hardly as each of these does have an effect on earth's temperature, so there's no reason to believe combined they won't

What is a Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy are all the kooky reasons in defense of your religion you come up with to explain when the CO2 and temps don't match as well as how the planets are all heating up at the same time earth is but it's not the sun


LOL! And your "legitimate scientific source" is a letter to the editor by college students, Yeah OK

And also they are also using the discredited Hockey Stick to make their case, Sorry but not very convincing

Any graph trying to compare data points 9-12 years apart with ones 1 year apart will run into trouble, but here's the actual dates and length of the solar cycles uncharted. Easy to see the late 20th century cycles are shorter then previous ones (well except the 1960s and 1970's cycle when the earth was slightly cooling)

The study is severely flawed for several reasons

1) It's not really a study it's mostly just speculation, they do find a correlation with cosmic rays and cloud cover but their basic premise is they don't know exactly how that would cause heating therefore it's not.

2) They only take into account the effect of cosmic rays on cloud cover and thus heating over one solar cycle which is too short of time. What are the cumulative effects over several cycles and the whole century? They don't even attempt to speculate.

3) Trying to compare cosmic rays and cloud formation to what happened at Chernobyl is also a flawed comparison

a) The radiation from a nuclear accident is not the same thing as the radiation from cosmic rays. Most the radiation from Chernobyl was of much heavier elements that fell right out of the atmosphere. Cosmic rays don't contain much Plutonium, Strontium, Cesium, etc.

b) Because of the resulting fire, much of the radiation released was already in cloud form. How do you form a cloud from a cloud?

c) The Chernobyl disaster lasted one week which is way to short of a time to measure cloud cover variations. Cloud cover varies immensely (to say the least) over short periods of time and it's only over many years can you see an increase/decrease in the percentage. Just look at cloud cover at the same time of year in the years preceding and following the disaster, sometimes there's very few clouds and others there's a lot. Without an accurate forecast on what the cloud cover should have been in the week following the disaster there is simply no way to tell that the radiation didn't have an effect. We can't even forecast the expected cloud cover a week in advance accurately today, nevermind 21 years ago in Soviet Russia.

4) Their speculation that solar irradiance difference is the reason for the reduced cloud cover is just grasping at straws speculation and is not supported in the paper or by the evidence. They further their flawed reasoning by claiming that since an increase in solar radiation is only responsible for 10% (Though I've seen this number at 30%) of the heating cosmic rays must be less. Wrong, the estimates of solar irradiance heating (be they 10 or 30%) are the direct effects of heating, if irradiance also effects cloud cover that would be an indirect effect and would be in addition to the effects of the irradiance not part of it (The 5-15% they suggest would be added to the 10-30%).

Sorry but the conclusion of this paper is at best inconclusive and at worst just wild unsubstantiated speculation.