Putting The Smack Down
Posted by tgirsch

The Blogger Formerly Known As Bubba lays some serious waste to the TNGOP’s talking points. Go check it out.

February 9th, 2008 | Politics | no comments

Global Cooling? Perhaps Not.
Posted by tgirsch

It looks like Investors Business Daily is getting in on the “grasping at anti-global-warming straws” act. They write:

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.

To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better “eyes” with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth’s climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.

And they’re worried about global cooling, not warming.

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Tapping reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.

Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a “stethoscope for the sun.” But he and his colleagues need better equipment.

In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun’s emissions more rapidly and accurately.

As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth’s climate over time has been the sun.

Of course, never one to think critically when somebody tells him what he wants to hear, frequent anti-AGW commenter Number9 eats this up over at TennesseeFree.com:

Better hope this is not the case. It would make Global Warming look like a good deal. This has actually happened before. It wasn’t pleasant.

Of course, I pointed out in comments that for one thing, the Maunder minimum is still quite controversial as a cause for the “Little Ice Age,” and I’ve pointed out several times that the best information we have says that solar variance could account for at most a quarter of the warming we’ve been seeing.

But I’m not a scientist. I just do basic research. And, when I noticed that the IBD never actually directly quoted Dr. Tapping, and only talked about him (all of the direct quotes come from R. Timothy Patterson, a fairly well-known AGW denier), I decided to do something that the “fine journalists” over at IBD couldn’t be bothered to do: I contacted Dr. Tapping directly and asked him about it. Dr. Tapping responds:

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the message. The stuff on the web came from a casual chat with someone who managed to misunderstand what I said and then put the result on the web, which is probably a big caution for me regarding the future.

It is true that the beginning of the next solar cycle is late, but not so late that we are getting worried, merely curious.

It is the opinion of scientists, including me, that global warming is a major issue, and that it might be too late to do anything about it already. If there is a cooling due to the solar activity cycle laying off for a bit, then the a period of solar cooling could be a much-needed respite giving us more time to attack the problem of greenhouse gases, with the caveat that if we do not, things will be far worse when things turn on again after a few decades. However, once again it is early days and we cannot at the moment conclude there is another minimum started.

Thanks for the heads-up.

Regards,

Ken

Wait, what? A business magazine and a mostly right-wing web site took a scientists statements and work out of context in the service of a political agenda? Stop the presses!

Given the history of the anti-AGW movement and their ever-moving target, $10 says they ignore how wrong they were on this one, and instead seize on the “might be too late to do anything about it” part as their next windmill to tilt at.

NOTE: Upon requesting permission to publish the above, Dr. Tapping responds:

Please feel free to quote what I said. I think it is a real shame that we sometimes see the downside of the freedom of the web, and that an investment journal would quote reports like that without going to their source.

Clearly, Dr. Tapping is a tough man to get a hold of, given that John Q. Nobody in Memphis, TN [that would be me] was able to correspond with him twice in one day. Mental note: Don’t trust anything you read in the Investors Business Daily.

And extra-special thanks to Dr. Tapping for being so cooperative in all of this.

Cross-posted at TennesseeFree.com

February 9th, 2008 | Politics, Environment, Science, Climate Change | 92 comments