What Do We Think About Climate Change

[Guillermo]

The Milky Way Galaxy's Spiral Arms and Ice-Age Epochs and the Cosmic Ray Connection
by Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Different empirical evidence convincingly support the existence of a link between solar activity and the terrestrial climate. In particular, various climate indices appear to correlate with solar activity proxies on time scales ranging from years to many millennia. For example, small but statistically significant temperature variations (of about 0.1°C) exist in the global temperature, following the 11 year solar cycle. On longer time scales, the climate system has enough time to adjust, and larger temperature variations arise from the secular variations in the solar activity.

One mechanism which can give rise to a notable solar/climate link was suggested by the late Edward Ney of the U. of Minnesota, in 1959. He suggested that any climatic sensitivity to the density of tropospheric ions would immediately link solar activity to climate. This is because the solar wind modulates the flux of high-energy particles coming from outside the solar system. These particles, the cosmic rays, are the dominant source of ionization in the troposphere. Thus, a more active sun which accelerates a stronger solar wind, would imply that as cosmic rays diffuse from the outskirts of the solar system to its center, they lose more energy. Consequently, a lower tropospheric ionization rate results. Over the 11-yr solar cycle and the long term variations in solar activity, these variations amount to typically a 10% change in this ionization rate. Moreover, it now appears that there is a climatic variable sensitive to the amount of tropospheric ionization - clouds.

If this is true, then one should expect climatic variations while we roam the galaxy. This is because the density of cosmic ray sources in the galaxy is not uniform. In fact, it is concentrated in the galactic spiral arms (it arises from supernovae, which in our galaxy are predominantly the end product of massive stars, which in turn form and die primarily in spiral arms). Thus, each time we cross a galactic arm, we should expect a colder climate. Current data for the spiral arm passages gives a crossing once every 135 ± 25 Million years.


More at:
http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages

Nir Shaviv's first paper describing the link between the Milky Way spiral arms was published in Physical Review Letters:
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/articles/PRLice.pdf

[Boston]

this would be considered anomalous data by the scientific community as a hole
why
because it goes directly against about 97% of findings concerning the warming trend of the last few years with the official standing being that ten out of twelve of the last years were the hottest on record
what that means is that since such a major part of the reasearch is flawed
the research itself would be held in question and probably discarded

"The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001."

I liked 2642 dam interesting

2643 this was once true but mans dramatic alteration in the atmospheric chemistry has now resulted in our climate going out of sinc. with what was once a balanced system

[Guillermo]

Europe basked in unusually warm weather in medieval times – so much so that wine was produced in England – but why has been open to debate. Now the natural climate mechanism that caused the mild spell seems to have been pinpointed, according to Valerie Trouet at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research in Birmensdorf

To work out what the global climate was doing 1000 years ago during the so-called "Medieval Warm Period", Trouet and colleagues started by looking at the annual growth rings of Moroccan Atlas cedar trees and of a stalagmite that grew in a Scottish cave beneath a peat bog. This revealed how dry or wet it has been in those regions over the last 1000 years.

The weather in Scotland is highly influenced by a semi-permanent pressure system called the Icelandic Low, and that in Morocco by another called the Azores High. "So by combining our data, which showed a very wet medieval Scotland and very dry Morocco, we could work out how big the pressure difference between those areas was during that time," says Trouet.

This pressure difference in turn revealed that the medieval period must have experienced a strongly positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) – the ocean current that drives winds from the Atlantic over Europe. The more positive the NAO is, the more warm air is blown towards the continent. They found that the strongly positive NAO lasted for about 350 years from 1050 to 1400.

By combining their data with information from other regions of the world during medieval times and plugging it into different models, the researchers have also come up with a hypothesis of what made the warm winds so persistent.

"It turns out that in the tropical Pacific, the El Niño system was in a negative La Niña mode, meaning it was colder than normal," says Trouet. According to Trouet, a Pacific La Niña mode and a positive NAO mode could have reinforced each other in a positive feedback loop – and this could explain the stability of the medieval climate anomaly.

Trouet thinks external forces like abrupt changes in solar output or volcanism must have started and stopped the cycle, and hopes to pinpoint the most likely candidates in a workshop with other climatologists in May.

Journal Reference: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1166349)

[Landlubber]

Back to common sense....unfortunately not so uncommon.

[Landlubber]

what is "right"......?

we all have opinions, like arseholes......but right.......well that is indefinable.

[Jimbo1490]

[Jimbo1490]

[Jimbo1490]

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/3...mate-feedback/

[Boston]

hey Jim
Back from hacking into the real climate site
it was pretty dam funny
and a dam good trick to
must have had the hole team of oil and gas company reps helping out on that one eh

so I was wondering why it is that so many of your sources
haven't counted but it seems like well over half if not more
are industry sponsored and industry published opinion pieces unsuitable for review and publication in actual scientific and respected journal's but instead printed and deceitfully presented as scientific pieces in industry sponsored magazines pretending to be scientific journals

just curious
B

whats up with the absence Jim you doing ok in there

ps
be real interesting to know were you got those graphs Jim
want me to try and go find em

[Boston]

hey someone go check my math over on the hey these vawt generators are ease to make thread

http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/pro...-new-post.html

[Guillermo]

Only related to the GW discussion by showing our "level of ignorance", I found this interesting:

"A few decades after the Great Depression, the sardine fishery in California was suffering from a similarly devastating collapse. Fishers who had generally landed more than 500,000 tons of sardines annually during the 1930s caught fewer than 5,000 tons during the worst years of the 1950s and 1960s. Whereas a few Cassandras might have warned of trouble in each case, nobody could have predicted exactly when each collapse would come or how severe it would be.

The sardine collapse puzzled fisheries experts. Some blamed overfishing. Others suspected environmental swings—shifting wind patterns or cooling sea-surface temperatures. But nobody could prove either case. Eager to prevent another such collapse, California set up a monitoring system that has been collecting data on sardine larvae for the past 50 years. Sugihara, a mathematician and theoretical ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., analyzed that data and came to a surprising conclusion: both potential explanations of the sardine collapse were wrong.

His conclusion, in a study published in Nature in 2006, was that the problem was the harvesting of too many big fish. Fishing boats were leaving behind a population of almost all juveniles. Sugihara showed that mathematically such populations are unstable. A slight nudge can create a boom—or a catastrophic collapse."

More at: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=...lize-fisheries

Cheers.

[Guillermo]

The big temperature picture. Graph and insight from Dr Syun Akasofu
(2009 International Conference on Climate Change, New York, March 2009).

The global temperature has been rising at a steady trend rate of 0.5C per century since the end of the little ice age in the 1700s (when the Thames River would freeze over every winter). On top of the trend are oscillations that last about thirty years in each direction:

1882 - 1910 Cooling
1910 - 1944 Warming
1944 - 1975 Cooling
1975 - 2001 Warming

In 2009 we are where the green arrow points, with temperature leveling off. The pattern suggests that the world has entered a period of slight cooling until about 2030.

There was a cooling scare in the early 1970s at the end of the last cooling phase. The current global warming alarm is based on the last warming oscillation, from 1975 to 2001. The IPCC predictions simply extrapolated the last warming as if it would last forever, a textbook case of alarmism. However the last warming period ended after the usual thirty years or so, and the global temperature is now definitely tracking below the IPCC predictions.

[masalai]

I can happily accept that postulation, but the IPCC trend still bears watching - and repositioning slower and a bit less alarming - we (humanity) can still make a devastating mess of this little petri-dish called Earth...

[Guillermo]

RSS Global Temperature Anomaly for March 2009
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/0...or-march-2009/

The RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA) Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) lower troposphere global temperature anomaly data for March 2009 was published today and has dropped for the second month after peaking in January. The change from February with a value of 0.230°C to March’s 0.172°C is a (∆T) of -0.058°C.

Recent RSS anomalies
2008 10 0.181
2008 11 0.216
2008 12 0.174
2009 01 0.322
2009 02 0.230
2009 03 0.172

http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_mo...ml?channel=tlt

Cheers

[Guillermo]

For those who are interested in monitoring how the current month’s global average tropospheric temperature is shaping up, Dr. Roy Spencer and colleagues have a website where you can plot daily global average satellite-based temperatures since August 1998. The data come from the AMSU instrument flying on the NOAA-15 satellite, and the updates are made automatically once a day in the late afternoon; they run about 1-2 days behind real-time.

This web page should be used as only a rough guide, because there are some data adjustments made before they officially post the NASA's UAH monthly updated data.

http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/

Cheers