Re: A Veneer of Certainty Stoking Climate Alarm
Jack, you yourself posted a link to research indicating that solar activity has fallen to a 100 year low (actually, more like a 200 year low) over the past few decades. Yet the temperature continues to rise. Can you not see that this pretty much scuppers the solar forcing theory?
Edit: And why are you spamming the thread with links that have nothing to do with this topic? It's almost as though you don't want to have a serious conversation about it.
It only "scuppers the solar forcing theory" for people who don't understand it.
The Sunspots 2.0? Irrelevant. The Sun, still is.
Blog topic:
cosmic rays, global warming, personal research, weather & climate
After being asked by 5 independent people about the new sunspot number reconstruction and that it doesn’t show that the sun should have contributed any warming to the 20th century, I decided to write about it here. I have one word to describe it – irrelevant. It is also a good opportunity to write about new results (well, one that saw the light of day a few months ago) showing again that the sun has a large effect on climate. Yet, the world will still continue to ignore it. Am I surprised? No I’m not.
By shaviv 0 CommentsRead more...
[FONT="]. . . What does it tell us? Given that long term variations in Earth's climate do correlate with long term solar activity (e.g., see the first part of [/FONT]
this[FONT="]) and given that some solar activity indicators (presumably?) don't show an increase from the Maunder minimum, but some do, it means that climate is sensitivite to those aspects of the solar activity that increased (e.g., solar wind), but not those more directly associated with the number of sunspots (e.g., UV or total solar irradiance). Thus, this result on the sunspots maxima (again, if true), only strengthens the idea that the solar climate link is through something related to the open magnetic field lines, such as the strength of the solar wind or the cosmic ray flux which it modulates. [/FONT]
[FONT="]The second point I wanted to write about is a recently published analysis showing that the sun has a large effect on climate, and quantifying it. In an earlier work, I [/FONT]
showed[FONT="] that you can use the oceans as a calorimeter to see that the solar radiative forcing over the solar cycle is very large, by looking at various oceanic data sets (heat content, sea surface temperature and tide gauges). How large? About 6-7 times large than one can naively expect from changes in the solar irradiance. [/FONT]
[FONT="]More recently, [/FONT]
Daniel Howard, Henrik Svesmark and I[FONT="] looked at the satellite altimetry data. It is similar to the tide gauge records in that it measures how much heat goes into the ocean by measuring the sea level change (most of the sea level on short time scales is due to thermal expansion). Unsurprisingly, we found that the satellite altimetry showed the same solar-cycle synchronized sea level change as the tide gauge records. However, because the satellite data is of such high quality, it is has a higher temporal resolution than the tide gauge records which allows singling out the thermal expansion component from other terms (e.g., associated with trapping of water on land). This allows for an even better estimate of the solar forcing, which is 1.33±0.34 W/m[/FONT][FONT="]2[/FONT][FONT="] over the last solar cycle. You can see in fig. 4 how much the sun and el-Niño can explain a large fraction of the sea level change over yearly to decadal time scales. . . . [/FONT]