Climate Change: It Is Not the Sun
Posted by
Kevin
The “evidence” for this was always rather weak and now the very mechanism by which it was supposed to happen has been pretty strongly shown to be incorrect:
The Svensmark hypothesis is that when the solar wind is weak, more cosmic rays penetrate to Earth.
That creates more charged particles in the atmosphere, which in turn induces more clouds to form, cooling the climate.
The planet warms up when the Sun’s output is strong.
Professor Sloan’s team investigated the link by looking for periods in time and for places on the Earth which had documented weak or strong cosmic ray arrivals, and seeing if that affected the cloudiness observed in those locations or at those times.
“For example; sometimes the Sun ‘burps’ - it throws out a huge burst of charged particles,” he explained to BBC News.
“So we looked to see whether cloud cover increased after one of these bursts of rays from the Sun; we saw nothing.”
Over the course of one of the Sun’s natural 11-year cycles, there was a weak correlation between cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover - but cosmic ray variability could at the very most explain only a quarter of the changes in cloudiness.
And for the following cycle, no correlation was found.
The kicker? It never made any bloody sense to begin with:
The Svensmark hypothesis has also been attacked in recent months by Mike Lockwood from the UK’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory.He showed that over the last 20 years, solar activity has been slowly declining, which should have led to a drop in global temperatures if the theory was correct.
New rationalization for ignoring human created climate change coming in 5 ..4 …3 …
Uh, Mars got warmer as well with no clouds being formed…
I’m just sayin’
Comment 4/3/2008
Matt:
Thanks for getting that one out of the way, so I can go ahead and link this again, as we always do in these discussions, and move along. Among other things, we’re not even sure Mars is undergoing a long-term warming trend.
But, of course, even if Mars is warming, the question of whether the cause of its warming is also the cause of our warming is an empirical one, and one for which there’s simply no evidence.
Comment 4/3/2008
there is no evidence or we have no evidence?
We also don’t know why the oceans stopped warming this past 4-5 years even though CO2 output continued to increase. There’s also this.
What I seem to notice most is that we really don’t understand how climate works very much at all. It casts doubt on the idea that CO2 causes warming.
Comment 4/3/2008
Kevin, you’re just flat out wrong on this one.
This report won’t cause anyone to use “[n]ew rationalization[s] for ignoring human created climate”.
Comment 4/3/2008
Matt:
there is no evidence or we have no evidence?
A distinction without a difference, in my estimation, but if you want to pick that particular nit, I’ll concede that I should have worded it in the latter fashion.
I wouldn’t be too hasty to jump on the “ocean warming” report. If you look at the details, there’s lots of circumstantial evidence that the oceans are, in fact, warming; it’s just not showing up in their initial data — a fact they acknowledge could be a result of improper methodology or an insufficient sample size. Basically, when all the evidence except for one piece points to the same thing, it’s more likely (although not certain) that the one piece is the wrong part, not the “everything else” part.
Regarding the 1998/2002 data, I’m afraid you’ve fallen victim to the worst sort of cherry-picking. They pick 98 and 02 very deliberately, for a very specific reason: those two years were unusually high even for the current warming trend. If you start from just about any other recent year (2005 was another spike), the warming trend is clear.
Further, picking a single year to start from and doing year-over-year comparisons is the most disingenuous sort of lying with statistics. In gauging long-term trends, a simple year-over-year comparison doesn’t tell you much. What’s statistically significant is when you start looking at five-year moving averages. When looked at that way, the trends are still clearly upward.
This despite the fact that we’re currently at a solar minimum, which — if the solar irradiance theory were true — would predict that we should be cooling right now. Yet another problem for the solar irradiance folks.
It casts doubt on the idea that CO2 causes warming.
No, it doesn’t. The greenhouse effect, and CO2’s role in it, is beyond dispute. Virtually nobody seriously argues that CO2 doesn’t cause warming; some argue that current warming trends are attributable to something other than CO2, but the evidence is not on their side.
Your problem here is that you vastly overvalue the evidence against AGW, and vastly undervalue the evidence for it.
If you’re genuinely interested in what the science says, I strongly suggest that you start here. You can also look here.
Comment 4/3/2008
I did just a few minutes of digging to come up with this regarding that linked bit in The Australian, now to be filed under the heading “consider the source.” Working from the inside out:
- The Institute of Public Affairs, where interviewee Jennifer Marohasy (who is a biologist, not a climatologist) works, describes itself as Australia’s “Leading Free Market Think Tank.” It’s a right-wing, corporate funded think tank that is known as a climate change denier.
- Marohasy’s interviewer, Michael Duffy, is a right-winger hired for Counterpoint specifically for that reason.
- The Australian, where the column appeared, is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. empire.
- Column author Christopher Pearson calls himself a “radical libertarian.”
- His column is cited here by one of our resident deniers.
Kind of a perfect storm of mutually-reinforcing ideology.
As for the other link, about how “the oceans stopped warming,” the article mentions a variety of possibilities, including a “hiatus” in warming, loss of heat to the atmosphere as part of the El Nino cycle, the ocean still warming but at a different depth than being measured, even misinterpretation of the data. None of the possibilities mentioned questions either the overall warming trend or the role of CO2 and it is at best disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
Indeed, that last bit - misinterpretation - calls to mind another time the deniers harped on a supposed anomaly to claim climate change was bogus: when one layer of the atmosphere appeared to be cooling when the models said it should be warming. It turned out it was warming; the initial results has failed to make a correction required by changes in the measuring satellites’ orbits. So may it yet prove to be here. We’ll have to see.
In any event, as the article does make clear to anyone who reads it without “Gotcha!” in mind, even if it turns out that the oceans have not warmed over the last few years, it provides no evidence at all against climate change because, contrary to what seems to be the notion, there is no straight-line relationship between CO2 concentrations and global warming in general, much less one aspect (ocean warming) in particular. It is a connection, a pattern, but not one that operates on a precise schedule such that a rise in CO2 levels in a given period must give rise to equivalent warming in that same period.
(Which, I note in passing, makes it amusing how the nanny-nanny naysayers, who not long ago were saying that 100 years of weather records was “not enough” to argue for climate change are now trying to make flat declarations based on spans of five or ten years.)
Finally, it is true that there is much still to be understood about the incredibly complex fluid dynamics of the Earth’s climate. But some is known - and what is known points in one direction: The planet is warming and if we do not take steps necessary to slow or stop that warming, the consequences will be disastrous for human society.
Comment 4/3/2008
Haven’t ice core samples shown that CO2 increases have followed periods of warming rather than preceded them? Also, what caused those global warming and cooling periods millions of years ago, certainly not burning fossil fuels?
If we can’t predict things with this scientific theory then how how can it be science? If you can’t make a prediction and test for it you can’t conduct an experiment.
How do we know the consequences of warming will be disastrous for human society? There’s a lot of land in the north, I’d think a longer growing season and more harvests would be a good thing for human society.
The Global Climate is always changing. The Sahara used to be a forest, was it wiped out because the Roman’s didn’t tax horse farts?
Comment 4/3/2008
“what caused those global warming and cooling periods millions of years ago, certainly not burning fossil fuels?”
It was probably caused by the aliens who came here to create life on earth. They weren’t green. If that isn’t a satisfactory answer, we can always fall back on the standard liberal answer for all humanities’ problems — “It’s Bush’s fault!”
Comment 4/3/2008
Matt:
Haven’t ice core samples shown that CO2 increases have followed periods of warming rather than preceded them? Also, what caused those global warming and cooling periods millions of years ago, certainly not burning fossil fuels?
Asked and answered, in the first link I provided you (which you obviously didn’t bother to look at).
If we can predict things with this scientific theory then how how can it be science?
How you got “we can’t predict things” from LarryE’s comment is baffling to me. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you simply misunderstood him, rather than intentionally misrepresented what he wrote. The reader’s digest version: it’s not that we can’t predict things, it’s that the relationship that we can and do predict isn’t a straight line — it’s messier than that. The fact that it’s messy doesn’t mean we don’t know anything useful, or can’t make useful predictions, however.
I can tell you with great certainty that over time, roughly 50% of the spins of a roulette table will end up with the ball on black. The fact that I can’t tell you what it will be on the next spin doesn’t in any way discredit my 50% prediction. (Actually, I think there’s at least one slot that’s neither black nor red, so that would mean it’d be just slightly less than 50%, but I digress.)
How do we know the consequences of warming will be disastrous for human society? There’s a lot of land in the north, I’d think a longer growing season and more harvests would be a good thing for human society.
If only you knew how much you sounded like you were reading from a script. Every time we post on global warming, someone comes along and posts pretty much exactly the same objections you’re posting here, even though we’ve been through them a dozen times.
The idea of “a longer growing season” up north doesn’t really work all that well, because the growing season is as much a function of the length of a day — which warming isn’t expected to change, unless the Earth somehow gets knocked off its axis — as it is of the temperature. Further, warmer temperatures don’t do your agriculture a whole lot of good if they’re accompanied by extended periods of drought, which most models predict.
Remember, too, that much of North America’s fresh water supply comes from Rocky Mountain snow melt. 25% of the world’s fresh water is tied up in glaciers in the Canadian Rockies. If we hit a point where it gets warm enough to melt those glaciers completely away (and they’ve been melting at an alarming rate), access to fresh water becomes a Very Serious Problem. Might not affect you right away, what with that giant puddle you’re sitting next to, but the Western US (and Canada, and Mexico) would be in a world of hurt.
The Global Climate is always changing.
So what’s your point? Should we stop trying to understand how and why it changes, and how that might affect us? That seems silly.
The fact that the climate has changed in the distant past doesn’t mean that it’s changing for the same reasons now.
When it comes to understanding the climate, as the old saying goes, it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Bottom line: If you’re seriously interested in engaging on this topic, I’ll be glad to engage and go over the facts. But if you’re not willing to keep an open mind — if your only interest is to be contrarian and trite — then it’s not worth the effort.
Comment 4/3/2008
Matt -
It would help if you could obtain a basic grasp of science and scientific method before continuing this conversation.
If we can’t predict things with this scientific theory then how how can it be science? If you can’t make a prediction and test for it you can’t conduct an experiment.
First, stop confusing experiment - which is a scientific method - with the whole of science. Controlled experiment is a way of learning about life, the universe, and everything, but it is not the only way. (If it was, then much of, for example, astronomy, cosmology, and relativity physics would not be science.) Another way is to observe, establish hypotheses, make predictions about what will be seen or found through further observation, then see if you’re right. (Which is why astronomy, etc., are science.)
Second, climatology does make predictions about global climate change and it is another example of disingenuousness to suggest I said anything to the contrary. If you know anything about scientific method, then you are familiar with “error bars” and “confidence levels.” Global warming theory does predict with a very high level of confidence (which is about as certain as scientists ever get about something not already observed under controlled laboratory conditions) that increasing CO2 concentrations will lead to further warming. But there is a range of uncertainty about how much of an increase in the one will lead to how much of an increase in the other and over what time span. In fact, because CO2 is not the only forcing (factor tending to push effects in a certain direction) on global warming, it’s clear that there is, as I already said, no straight-line relationship between the two.
That does not mean there is no connection, it does not mean that there is no general pattern, it does mean that you can’t say that “this much of an increase in CO2 this year will lead to this much warming next year.” Which is why both “the oceans haven’t warmed in a few years” argument and the “we’re not setting records every year” argument are both bogus.
Haven’t ice core samples shown that CO2 increases have followed periods of warming rather than preceded them?
Apparently so, but it’s irrelevant because it has nothing to do with CO2 being a climate forcing. The most it would show is that CO2 concentrations did not initiate those cycles. But they did contribute to them and the facts remain that over the course of history, temperature and CO2 levels have risen and fallen pretty much in tandem and there is a well-established mechanism for CO2 to add to the greenhouse effect and so enhance warming. Higher CO2 levels lead to warming. Period.
[W]hat caused those global warming and cooling periods millions of years ago, certainly not burning fossil fuels?
Again with the ignorance. Large-scale cycles of warming and cooling (with smaller cycles of cooling and warming within them) are old stuff to scientists. Don’t come off like you think you’ve come up with something no one else has noticed; you only make yourself look lame.
The issue here is simple: The Earth has its natural cycles. By pouring unprecedented amounts of CO2 into the environment, we are screwing around with those cycles. Yes, the Earth no doubt could take everything we throw at it and re-establish its own climate equilibrium - but that could easily take millennia. Suppose it took 10,000 years, no, suppose it took just 1000 years. That’s almost nothing to the Earth, the rough equivalent of 15 minutes to someone who’s lived 100 years. But to us, a thousand years of climate disruption could easily be devastating.
Which brings me to this:
How do we know the consequences of warming will be disastrous for human society?
The IPCC has laid it out in necessarily brutal language. Increased droughts. Crop failures. Hunger. Inundated coastlines - which is where most of the human population lives, leading to a dramatic increase in refugees. Disrupted economies. Resource wars. A greater number of more severe storms, as weather events become concentrated - i.e., you may, for example, get the same amount of rain but get it in a small number of destructive, raging storms rather than a large number of ordinary rainstorms. The spread of disease and crop blights as areas previously too cold for certain pests become warmer. The list goes on.
The IPCC does say that certain areas will actually benefit in the short term but even those areas in the longer term will suffer. The idea that some people advance, that all the “bad stuff” will happen “over there” somewhere leaving “us” unaffected, is not only grossly immoral it is shamefully short-sighted and ultimate delusional.
Will all that necessarily happen? Of course not and no scientist worthy of the name will guarantee that all hell will break loose. But is it, based on best current knowledge, best current understanding, a reasonable forecast of what will happen if we don’t act, even more, one that can be made with a high level of confidence? Absolutely. Period.
Final point:
The Global Climate is always changing.
Don’t be childish.
Comment 4/3/2008
Thanks for belittling my intelligence and insulting me LarryE. You really make me want to listen to what you have to say and understand your point of view by doing so.
Comment 4/4/2008
Oh, Matt, did big bad Larry hurt your feelings? I thought it was us “liberals” who had the oversensitivity issues…
The climate change issue isn’t my expertise, so I’ll, as usual, stand aside and let TG, Larry, etc do the heavy lifting here.
But just to play the Tony Reali role from PTI, TG, the roulette wheel has two green spaces, zero and double zero. Therefore, a red or black bet has a 18/38 shot at hitting, 47%, I believe. Those two green squares are good enough to give the best odds in favor of the house of any game in the casino.
And, as far as year to year data and it’s place within consistent long term trends, Joe Dimaggio hit .409 over his 56 game hitting streak, Ted Williams amassed no comparable streak, but outhit Joe D. to the tune of .412 over the same exact games. The conclusion, the random 0-4 is meaningless (or in Ted’s case, more likey 0-2 with three walks). Extrapolate…
Comment 4/4/2008
digglahhh, there’s no need to be insulting in these types of debates. Does LarryE really want to convince me of the correctness of his position or does he just want to call me a dunce for being skeptical of humanity’s role in global climate change?
Comment 4/4/2008
Matt:
You’re not going to cut and run, are you?
Larry was harsh (he and I both often can be — you should see what happens when we disagree about stuff) but you need to understand why. You may not realize it, but the objections to global warming that you’ve raised here are ones that we’ve heard raised by many objectors literally dozens of times. After a while, when you keep hearing the same tired, long-since-refuted objections over and over again, it tends to wear on one’s patience, and that tends to wear on one’s tone.
Now add in the fact that most of the people with whom I’ve had these debates (and, I assume, Larry, but I can’t speak for him) have been entirely disingenuous in making those arguments. My experience with you personally is that you’re generally not disingenuous, which is why in this case I assume you’re simply ignorant of the science. But you’ve basically come in here and, knowingly or not, recited a litany of right-wing think-tank talking points that have been dealt with so many times that it’s exhausting.
We’ve blogged several times before (see here, here, here, and here, for example) about the disingenuousness and outright intellectual dishonesty of the anti-AGW movement, so this is old news to us, and where a lot of our impatience comes from. You yourself may not be disingenuous, but you’re following in the footsteps of a lot of disingenuous people.
That’s why I say: If you want to have a serious discussion about this, I’d be glad to do so, but you have to show a willingness to move beyond John Stossel talking points and start getting into a serious discussion.
Comment 4/4/2008
Since there is absolutely nothing new in this thread re global warming, I’ll limit my comments to roulette and gambling. There are two green numbers (0 and 00) on American tables (and in an increasing number of other places) but some casinos outside the US still use the traditional single green configuration.
Second, house odds on slot machines are much, much better than on roulette, which is why such large percentages of casino real estate are dedicated to slot machines. Also, depending on the game, the house rake on a poker game can be as high as 10%, which is about 3X higher than the house take at roulette. Of course in poker you are not playing the house, just paying the house, and if you are a better player than your opponents (an almost universally held opinion) you can still make money in the long run, which is statistically impossible with roulette.
Comment 4/4/2008
Okay I guess I should ask, how do we know the warming will be catastrophic? Why is it wrong to look at the warming from 1000-1300 and see increased prosperity of human civilization and the population of Europe double in that time period, and then turn around and say, we know that this warming will destroy us?
Comment 4/4/2008
Matt -
Perhaps my language was somewhat intemperate, but the truth is, your comments at #7 made it clear to me that you are criticizing a scientific result without understanding the process by which it was achieved, something like criticizing the route I drove from Redruth to Mousehole without knowing where they both are - which for for the sake of the illustration I’m assuming you don’t.
Note that this was not a matter of understanding the science - you don’t have to be a climatologist to have a sufficient understanding of global warming - but of the process. It certainly appeared, that is, that you were simply reciting arguments made by others without understanding either those arguments or their refutations.
And yes, that made me impatient, as did the arguments based on the frankly banal observations that there was climate change before there were humans and that climate is not static. (Parenthetical note on the latter: I continue to assume you’re not confusing climate with weather.)
As T. said, you’re making arguments we have heard over and over again. It’s hard to stay calm and dispassionate when faced yet one more time with the same arguments that have been positively refuted long ago. How would you feel if every time you mentioned, say, space travel someone responded with arguments about crystalline spheres and how the moon landings were faked?
The bottom line here is that the science of global warming is, in an overall, general, sense, settled. Global warming is real, it is happening, it is related to CO2 levels, CO2 is a forcing, we are screwing with the climate. The remaining questions - and there are questions here - revolve around exactly what the effects will be, exactly how bad they will be, exactly when the impacts of various effects will be felt, and exactly how dramatic our response has to be to head off the worst. (That last point bears repeating: It is not if dramatic action is needed, but just how dramatic it needs to be.)
I’ll also second T.’s contention that he and I can both be harsh. In fact, there is one topic I will no longer discuss here because every time we tried we wound up having to apologize to each other a couple of days later. In comparison to some of we’ve thrown at each other, hell, here I was damned polite.
Finally, a footnote related to your remark about land and growing seasons: A one-meter rise in ocean levels, which is within the range projected for the next 100 years, would inundate one-third of the world’s arable land.
Comment 4/4/2008
LarryE:
In comparison to some of [what LarryE and tgirsch have] thrown at each other, hell, here I was damned polite.
Hear, hear!
I’m not proud of it, but we’ve even dropped F bombs at one another. Such mature adults we can be!
Matt:
We have already exceeded the relatively warm mean temperatures from the Medieval Warm Period:
And the planet is continuing to warm. We’re heading into territory that’s uncharted in human history.
Also note that in CE 1000, the population of the entire world was about the population of the US today, so they didn’t have quite the water and arable land requirements that we have today.
So yet again, you’ve raised an objection that’s been asked and answered numerous times in these debates, and the answer to that question wouldn’t have been hard to find with a simple Google.
Are you beginning to understand where our terseness is coming from?
Also, we don’t “know” that warming will be catastrophic. We know that there’s a range of possible effects, and that range runs from “generally bad” at the low end to “catastrophic” at the high end. As we learn more and get more information, the most likely outcomes seem to drift closer to the “catastrophic” end of the spectrum. It’s always possible that there’s some forcing we’re not accounting for that could lessen the impact, but it doesn’t make sense to wait around and hope we find one. Everything we know right now points in pretty much the same direction — very bad.
Comment 4/4/2008
LarryE:
I wouldn’t worry about the next hundred years. Everyone knows the world will end at 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038.
Comment 4/4/2008
Matt -
The so-called “Medieval Warming Period” c. 1000-1300 did not exist.
It was at most a time of some slightly warmer periods in an overall millenium-long (or longer) cooling trend. (Remember how I mentioned small reverse cycles within larger ones?) In particular, what data exists simply does not support the contention made by some of the naysayers that temperatures were as warm or warmer than now; in fact they ranged up to about 1 degree C. (1.8 degrees F.) colder and none were as warm. And even those periods of moderation appear to have been a regional event, unlike the worldwide changes being seen now.
There were various reasons for European growth during the period you mention, including greater political and social stability, improved technology, and the breakdown of the feudal system. A period of global warming such as we’re seeing now was not among them.
And there is one more reason why we shouldn’t use 1000-1300 C.E. for sociological predictions of climate impact: It was, as sometimes it’s necessary to point out these sorts of things, 700-1000 years ago. Politically, socially, culturally, environmentally, scientifically, technologically, we simply do not live in that world. History can be a good teacher - but its wisdom is not limitless and the past remains, as L. P. Hartley famously called it, “a foreign country” with which we must first share a language to obtain what wisdom there is.
Comment 4/4/2008
Tgirsch -
Okay, you got me. I had to look that one up to see what the hell you were talking about.
Comment 4/4/2008
I thought the world was ending on December 21st 2012?
Comment 4/4/2008
As a footnote to this exchange, I have to retract my statement about a one-meter rise in ocean levels inundating one-third of the world’s arable land.
I have seen the figure in more than one place but after a search I’ve been unable find any “official” source, that is, one that could cite actual scientific data. I did find figures for certain countries showing a 15% to 20% loss of arable land via inundation, but nothing saying 33% worldwide.
I would, however, note that the actual loss of arable land from sea level rise is more than just what is flooded; salinization of lands, deltas, and water supplies will spread the effects further. Additionally, including all effects of global warming (including such as increased drought) will lead to the loss of far more arable land than sea level rise alone; it could, for example, be a contributing factor to the loss of as much as 75% of Africa’s rain-fed cropland.
Comment 4/5/2008
As a footnote from me, this helps illustrate a big part of why I am where I am on the global warming debate: you virtually never see a global warming denialist do what LarryE just did — issue a retraction and a correction, never mind one that’s unsolicited. When the denialists’ objections are addressed, they just move on to the next objection, without even acknowledging that their prior objection has just been refuted.
Matt, if you read back through the comments here, you’ll see that you fit that pattern about perfectly. Each time we address one of your objections, you change the subject to another objection, without so much as acknowledging our responses, with the exception of your response at #7, which didn’t really address anything that anyone actually said. So again, this is why the harsh response: you walked like a duck, and you quacked like a duck, whether or not you realized it.
Comment 4/5/2008
To whichever sysop fixed it, thanks for the edit.
I think Matt has done a fine job here of making my point.
Comment 4/5/2008
Don’t apologize to Matt for your tone. Just send him to this guy>
if he doesn’t like it.
Comment 4/6/2008