Climate Change - General Discussion : Read the Mod Note in post #1 before posting

sryanbruen wrote: »

I'm starting to see why predictions have been made about us going into a mini ice age that I've always been skeptical about but now I'm beginning to think so too.

If we compare solar cycle 24 (2008 to present) to historical solar data, it's been the weakest solar cycle since the Glassberg minimum back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Every solar cycle since the early 1900s was stronger than solar cycle 24

In history, there have been 3 minimums of solar activity - the Glassberg Minimum of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Dalton Minimum of the mid to late 1700s and early 1800s, and the Maunder Minimum of the 1600s. Solar cycle data only goes back to the Dalton Minimum so does not include the Maunder Minimum. But data of other solar activity show solar activity during the Maunder Minimum was the lowest on record and that the Northern Hemisphere was having an Ice Age. There was plenty of brutal cold Winters back then - same with the Dalton Minimum but not to the extremes or frequency of the Maunder Minimum.

Here's the chart showing the solar cycles and periods of solar activity.



Each peak is a different solar cycle. As you can see, the latest one solar cycle 24 (which is the last one on the chart) is very weak compared to anything since the early 20th century. Notice how low activity was during Maunder Minimum. Solar Cycle 25 (should begin in 2019 or 2020) is expected to be even weaker than Solar Cycle 24.

However, there are a few things that push me off of believing in these outlooks or predictions for a Mini Ice Age or severe drop off in solar activity. Time and space has changed a lot since then including warming of the planet via greenhouse gases and human activity but like I've said before, we can only compare back to a certain period so are these so called global warming records like record breaking warm years all that fascinating when you look down to the punctuation mark on the data we have?

There's a lot of speculation about this in the media and I just wanted to give my opinion on the matter.

The best we can hope for is that the Solar Minima give us more time to correct the CO2 issue.

dense wrote: »

Do you not think that this whole "C02 issue" is being over egged for the sake of mollifying activists bent on implementing wacky global "let's all be poor together" economic policies?

It wasn't that long ago that NOAA was openly stating the obvious, and to my knowledge, there has been no major scientific breakthrough since then to explain how "climate experts" have now decided that there is some "issue" with C02 that requires "correcting".

Bullet points added for impact.

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/jetstream/atmos/ll_gas.htm

Short answer, no.

Up until a few years ago, maybe, but the evidence is stacking up. As I said, hopefully, we will get lower than average solar minima which will give us a chance to correct the problem.

blanch152 wrote: »

Short answer, no.

Up until a few years ago, maybe, but the evidence is stacking up. As I said, hopefully, we will get lower than average solar minima which will give us a chance to correct the problem.

That would be the very least of your problems. A repeat of cycles like the Dalton or Maunder minimums would be catastrophic for large populations most notably food prices would rise, fuel poverty would increase and there would be even more excess winter deaths. In such circumstances it will become much less feasible for politicians to continue pushing a scheme that that is fundamentally a wealth transfer mechanism from low income people to wealthy people disguised in green wrapping paper.

dense wrote: »

Yes, it may well show that it is the sun that controls temperatures.

I thought it was all our body heat that was warming the planet?

Can't seem to stick to one story Dense?

But anyway, everyone knows the sun affects our climate. Only an idiot would disagree with that. Also, only an idiot would think that the sun is the only driver of climate on our planet. The atmosphere is the reason Earth is warm, and the moon is cold, The moon and the Earth are both the same distance from the sun more or less.

This is the big problem with the 'skeptic' movement. Of the small number of scientists who don't accept the established view, they can't agree amongst themselves on anything of substance and the 3% of papers that dispute the established science are full of errors and contradict each other.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00704-015-1597-5

dense wrote: »

The scientific community is quite clearly confused about this.

On the one hand we have NASA claiming that the sun is responsible for 25% of warming in the 20th century.


On the other hand we have the UNIPCC claiming that the change in measured C02 is responsible for that 25% and the rest.

We also had NOAA saying there's no link between C02 and temperatures and claiming a decrease in reported temperatures.

Are you now suggesting that the sun, which you previously agreed had virtually no affect, can actually significantly control temperatures?

The scientific community is not confused. The science denialist community are confused because they're being fed deliberately misleading information by professional PR and media organisations that is designed entirely to instill doubt and confusion.

dense wrote: »

Why does it need to be "one story"?
C02 may play a minimal role.
The sun could actually have a larger role.

Sceptics are actually open minded.

I listened to the UN's Professor Sweeney, and heard what he had to say, and funnily enough he also "disputed the established science" in his interview.

(That's the clanger you couldn't hear, but everyone else could )

What's so odd about suggesting that the barely measurable alleged increase in "global average temperature" may actually have something to do with the heat that mankind has been cumulatively generating on the globe, a globe which we are told is encapsulated in some sort of greenhouse?

It certainly seems to have hit the target!

There seems to be just one paper which has tried to assess it, from almost 10 years ago


Flanner 2009



"Nearly all energy used for human purposes is dissipated as heat within Earth's land–atmosphere system. Thermal energy released from non-renewable sources is therefore a climate forcing term. Averaged globally, this forcing is only +0.028 W m−2, but over the continental United States and western Europe, it is +0.39 and +0.68 W m−2, respectively."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL036465/full

Dense, you're at it again. First of all, this Flanner paper doesn't measure just human body heat, it tries to quantify all human energy generated heat from non renewable sources, and even after doing this, it arrives with a figure that says radiative forcing from GHGs is 100 times more powerful than all the human energy used in the planet.

The least populated places on the world, the arctic regions, are the fastest warming places on earth.

Also, you say there is only 'one paper' studying this, you're wrong again, there have been hundreds of papers studying UHI effects, and AHF and AHR and AHE and they have been studying this for at least half a century.

Your world view that the climate scientists are simply ignoring everything except for GHGs couldn't be further from the truth. The science is much more mature than you pretend it is.

dense wrote: »

Is he one of those people who'd claim a potential maximum 00.66% power saving from the EU regulating domestic vacuum cleaners is going to deliver a "significant" energy reduction?

That kind of thing is a problem for "sceptics".

And this exact type of post, is the reason why I do not believe you are arguing on this topic from a position of good faith.

When I bring in an expert opinion on how solar activity will affect the future climate, you hide behind a glib comment about vacuum cleaners. Obfuscation, frustrate, denial of basic facts, misrepresentation, quote mining in order to give the worst impression of someone rather than a fair representation of their views etc. These are not the behaviors of someone who wants to discuss something honestly.

dense wrote: »

Yes, it may well show that it is the sun that controls temperatures.

Which would force a rethink about the alleged C02 problem, where the sun heretofore has all but been discounted by the UNIPCC.

NASA has previously stated that the sun is responsible for 25% of warming in the last century.

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/solar_variability.html

When one considers the subsequent disconnect between observations and models, that figure would appear conservative, but not only that, it also suggests a seriously mistaken and exaggerated climate sensitivity to C02.

The sun is one of the factors that controls temperature.

However, if the sun was the only factor, Venus would be cooler than it is. It is not, because atmosphere also plays a part, quite a big part as the greenhouse effect on Venus displays.

I really hope that there is an exaggerated climate sensitivity to CO2. That would be the best news in climate change for a long time. However, even you are implicitly acknowledging that there is some sort of a climate sensitivity to CO2 levels in making that statement.

If the climate sensitivity to CO2 is overstated, it just means that we could avoid the worst outcomes of climate change. That is a small comfort, but not enough to prevent big problems.

Right, that's Dense back on my ignore list.

blanch152 wrote: »

The sun is one of the factors that controls temperature.

However, if the sun was the only factor, Venus would be cooler than it is. It is not, because atmosphere also plays a part, quite a big part as the greenhouse effect on Venus displays.

I really hope that there is an exaggerated climate sensitivity to CO2. That would be the best news in climate change for a long time. However, even you are implicitly acknowledging that there is some sort of a climate sensitivity to CO2 levels in making that statement.

If the climate sensitivity to CO2 is overstated, it just means that we could avoid the worst outcomes of climate change. That is a small comfort, but not enough to prevent big problems.

There are indications that climate sensitivity may have been overstated. Maybe I'm also on Akrasia's ignore list, or maybe he missed the question I posed to him last week (below).

@ Akrasia, what's your reason for rejecting the two-zone idea of Bates' paper, given the very different physical radiative processes at play in each? Given that observations are lagging the forecasts, despite a very strong El Niño, how do you reconcile this difference? The ocean heat sink idea is all well and good, but then why aren't these forecasts able to account for such a sizeable lag? Forecast projections such as below is the be-all and end-all of all the hype, yet so far anyway it's proving next to useless.

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

I'd like to know why you think that his 2-zone argument is not scientifically plausible, given the data he shows in the paper. To me is seems plausible, given the drastically different radiational properties of the two zones.

Gaoth Lag wrote: »

Ignore lists? Come on chaps.

If I responded to him the way I feel his posts deserve, I would be banned from this forum. Better to just not engage with him anymore.

Akrasia wrote: »

The observed climate change is still well within the predicted range in those models, and we all know about natural variability and that can temporarily dampen down warming.

Regarding Bates' paper, the original criticisms of Lindzen's methodology still stand, but Bates' new paper has had such a low impact that I can't find anyone who has properly responded to it.

Maybe if it wasn't rejected for publication in a proper peer reviewed journal and he didn't have to go open access then there might have been more of an impact.

this is what Dessler had to say about it

No, I asked what YOU think of it and the two-zone method. Give me details of why you think it's wrong.

I would not call the observed climate well within the range. Going back to 1990 it in the upper members, but with a shallower slope it crosses over is now right down the bottom, despite a strong El Niño. The slopes of observations and projections are not the same. That is far from convincing. And tell us more about this "natural damping" that the models know nothing of?

You keep quoting former papers (Lindzen, Choi, etc.) without actually commenting on the content of this one. You try to sling mud at it claiming that as it's open source it must be substandard. Take it on its merits and explain why you reject its content. The fact is that it can explain the difference between forecast and observations, while the other "97%" cannot.

The ironic truth might be that a natural trend towards repeating the Dalton minimum climate (I think the Maunder is off the table because it involved a much longer shut down of solar activity from about the 1660s to about 1715) combined with a realistic lower-end AGW component might stabilize the climate in almost a perfect (for agriculture) modality for the next five decades. A warmed up Dalton would look about like the past twenty years with perhaps less tendency to drought.

I think the degree of cold in both Dalton and Maunder periods has been understated by some posters here. The CET temperature record shows more than a full degree of warming from 1659-1710 to 1711-1739, and that was year-long not confined to winter. The Dalton had even colder winters than the Maunder on average, but the cooling was more confined to winter (in Britain at least), however, there was a slight cooling of other seasons too (relative to any relatively recent normals).

The effects on agriculture are likely to come in just a few seasons rather than every year. With volcanic dust added to the mix, the year 1816 went almost without a growing season in the northeastern U.S., with frosts in each summer month, and very low mean temperatures. The problem in the Maunder cooling was more a lack of sunshine and an excess of rain judging by the anecdotal evidence.

I find it fascinating that people can hold such rigorous views about what will happen to our climate when the range of uncertainty is almost the entire range of possible outcomes. But science can only be done in a predictive framework. There is no such thing as a science based on consensus of experts if the experts cannot predict. We see this in many time scales in weather forecasting, for example, a consensus that a given summer will be hot and dry, or a winter cold and snowy, when nobody in that consensus has any demonstrated non-random ability to predict anything on that time scale.

Now I realize that the predictions for 20-50 years are based on a physical theory and that many believe that these predictions "should" be true. The problem is that in science, you can't declare a theory valid until what "should" be true is actually true.

On the other hand, it's a judgement call, and one that must be left ultimately in the hands of the citizens through the electoral process. If this was just a debate about a theory, it would be interesting but not very urgent (as in, what makes some frogs all white and some all green). Since it's partly a call to address a potential future problem, then the citizens need to arm themselves with all possible information and choose the people they think most likely to deliver the best solution.

That part of this discussion has been under-explored but hinted at, and I think it's the only part that really matters. Is it better to take certain economic measures that could limit or even destroy wealth creation, in order to "save the planet" broadly speaking, or is it better to take the risk that nothing too extraordinary will happen and stick with an economic plan that has fewer risks to it? That is the choice really on offer to voters in all countries where people have an actual choice, but of course it is blended in with dozens of other choices that are largely unrelated (although some seem to find ways of relating them, for example, blaming the mess in Syria on climate change, which I find to be a bit absurd).

And I don't claim to have an answer or good advice to offer. My personal choice is to vote for parties that seem level-headed on this question and not prone to filling the landscape with bird-killing machines (some call it wind power). I figure there's no point in saving the planet by killing off millions of birds. I also just don't see the trend curves in actual data that might alarm me, there is something to it, but not so much that I would want to gamble the future of generations to come on a scheme that I suspect is mainly about increasing pensions of civil servants.