Solar contribution to 'global warming' predicted to decrease

British Antarctic Survey ^ | 1 October 2003 | Press Office

[AdmSmith]

New research on the sun's contribution to global warming is reported in this month's Astronomy & Geophysics. By looking at solar activity over the last 11,000 years, British Antarctic Survey (BAS) astrophysicist, Mark Clilverd, predicts that the sun's contribution to warming the Earth will reduce slightly over the next 100 years.

This is a different picture to the last century when solar flares, sunspots and geomagnetic storms, increased in number. This rise is simultaneous with emissions of greenhouses gases and an estimated increase in solar heat output, which together have warmed the Earth's temperature by a global average of 0.7 degrees centigrade.

The solar contribution to the increase is variously estimated to be around 4-20% leaving greenhouse gases to make up the remaining 80%. Clilverd and colleagues conclude that solar activity is about to peak and predict less activity in the next 100 years, with the occurrence of space storms likely to decline by two thirds. Their assumption is that the solar heat output will decline slightly accordingly.

Clilverd examined data from sun spot activity, geomagnetic storm indices and looked at the variation of atmospheric radiocarbon derived from studies of tree rings and marine sediments to make his predictions.

He says, "This work is speculative and relies on the idea that the sun shows regular cycles of activity on timescales of 10 - 10,000 years and that its heat output and activity are related. But we believe the work is well grounded and the effect of solar activity on Earth's environmental system will not increase in the way it has during the last century. We should take this into account when trying to understand the impact of human activity on our climate system."

Although solar activity may reduce in 2100, Clilverd predicts it will return to its current levels by 2200.

Clilverd continues, "This research is important for understanding the severity and impact of climate change in coming centuries. As noted by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the Third Assessment Report, published in 2001, anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are highly likely to cause warming of the Earth, but factors such as solar variability could amplify or subdue the effect."

[AdmSmith]

Beware of the sun!

[boris]

Here Comes The Sun
(George Harrison)

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it's all right
Little darlin' it's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darlin' it feels like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it's all right
Little darlin' the smiles returning to their faces
Little darlin' it seems like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it's all right
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Little darlin' I feel the ice is slowly meltin'
Little darlin' it seems like years since it's been clear
Here come the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it's all right
Here come the sun, here comes the sun
It's all right, it's all right

[LiteKeeper]

SUNREP

[joesnuffy]

Oh Oh we may be about to experience global cooling....if sun activity decreases
The SUVs will save us...and all who own drive them lauded as heros
who saved the planet from the death star..

[Wonder Warthog]

"The solar contribution to the increase is variously estimated to be around 4-20% leaving greenhouse gases to make up the remaining 80%."

WHO "estimated" this ratio?? Everything I have seen says that the "extraterrestrial" factors (solar contribution, variations in earth's orbit, and variations in cosmic ray intensity) account for virtually ALL of the "global warming" phenomenon, with "greenhouse gases" contributing only a tiny fraction.

[Consort]

The solar system is just passing through a warm spot in the aether. We should be out of it soon.

[RightWhale]

It's been 60-70 in Fairbanks for a couple of days. Chinook wind due north brought this tropical climate up here for a few days. It won't last. Going to get cold. It's going to snow. Hasn't been a real winter for 20 years, and these sunshine Alaskans are going to gain a new appreciation for Alaska about the same time the government jobs dry up.

[ancient_geezer]

The solar contribution to the increase is variously estimated to be around 4-20% leaving greenhouse gases to make up the remaining 80%.

Hmmm! 80% of what?

 

Mankind's impact is only 0.28% of Total Greenhouse effect

" There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, (the Kyoto Protocol) would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures -- one-twentieth of a degree by 2050. "

Dr. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia,
and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service;
in a Sept. 10, 2001 Letter to Editor, Wall Street Journal

 

Anthropogenic (man-made) Contribution to the "Greenhouse
Effect," expressed as % of Total (water vapor INCLUDED)

Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics	% of All Greenhouse Gases	% Natural	% Man-made
Water vapor	95.000%	94.999%	0.001%
Carbon Dioxide (CO2)	3.618%	3.502%	0.117%
Methane (CH4)	0.360%	0.294%	0.066%
Nitrous Oxide (N2O)	0.950%	0.903%	0.047%
Misc. gases ( CFC's, etc.)	0.072%	0.025%	0.047%
Total	100.00%	99.72	0.28%

Climate Catastrophe, A spectroscopic Artifact?

"It is hardly to be expected that for CO2 doubling an increment of IR absorption at the 15 µm edges by 0.17% can cause any significant global warming or even a climate catastrophe.

The radiative forcing for doubling can be calculated by using this figure. If we allocate an absorption of 32 W/m² [14] over 180º steradiant to the total integral (area) of the n3 band as observed from satellite measurements (Hanel et al., 1971) and applied to a standard atmosphere, and take an increment of 0.17%, the absorption is 0.054 W/m² - and not 4.3 W/m².

This is roughly 80 times less than IPCC's radiative forcing.

If we allocate 7.2 degC as greenhouse effect for the present CO2 (as asserted by Kondratjew and Moskalenko in J.T. Houghton's book The Global Climate [14]), the doubling effect should be 0.17% which is 0.012 degC only. If we take 1/80 of the 1.2 degC that result from Stefan-Boltzmann's law with a radiative forcing of 4.3 W/m², we get a similar value of 0.015 degC."

CO2-Temperature Correlations

• "(1) correlation does not prove causation, (2) cause must precede effect, and (3) when attempting to evaluate claims of causal relationships between different parameters, it is important to have as much data as possible in order to weed out spurious correlations.
  
  ***
  
  Consider, for example, the study of Fischer et al. (1999), who examined trends of atmospheric CO2 and air temperature derived from Antarctic ice core data that extended back in time a quarter of a million years.  Over this extended period, the three most dramatic warming events experienced on earth were those associated with the terminations of the last three ice ages; and for each of these climatic transitions, earth's air temperature rose well in advance of any increase in atmospheric CO2.  In fact, the air's CO2 content did not begin to rise until 400 to 1,000 years after the planet began to warm.  Such findings have been corroborated by Mudelsee (2001), who examined the leads/lags of atmospheric CO2 concentration and air temperature over an even longer time period, finding that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lagged behind variations in air temperature by 1,300 to 5,000 years over the past 420,000 years."

[ see also: Indermuhle et al. (2000), Monnin et al. (2001), Yokoyama et al. (2000), Clark and Mix (2000) ]

• "Other studies periodically demonstrate a complete uncoupling of CO2 and temperature "

[see: Petit et al. (1999), Staufer et al. (1998), Cheddadi et al., (1998), Raymo et al., 1998, Pagani et al. (1999), Pearson and Palmer (1999), Pearson and Palmer, (2000) ]

• "Considered in their entirety, these several results present a truly chaotic picture with respect to any possible effect that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration may have on global temperature.  Clearly, atmospheric CO2 is not the all-important driver of global climate change the climate alarmists make it out to be."

---

 

Global warming and global dioxide emission and concentration:
a Granger causality analysis

http://isi-eh.usc.es/trabajos/122_41_fullpaper.pdf

•  "We find, in opposition to previous studies, that there is no evidence of Granger causality from global carbon dioxide emission to global surface temperature. Further, we could not find robust empirical evidence for the causal nexus from global carbon dioxide concentration to global surface temperature."

More on CO2 & Global Temperatures:

 

Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time 

Late Carboniferous to Early Permian time (315 mya -- 270 mya) is the only time period in the last 600 million years when both atmospheric CO2 and temperatures were as low as they are today (Quaternary Period ).

Temperature after C.R. Scotese
CO2 after R.A. Berner, 1994

•     There has historically been much more CO2 in our atmosphere than exists today. For example, during the Jurassic Period (200 mya), average CO2 concentrations were about 900 ppm or about 2.5 times higher than today. The highest concentrations of CO2 during all of the Paleozoic Era occurred during the Ordovician Period, exceeding 6000 ppm -- more than 16 times higher than today.

•     The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today.
  
  To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age, with CO2 concentrations nearly 15 times higher than today-- 5500 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming.

[AdmSmith]

I think that we should focus on the new information, i.e. that the sun has a varying activity. He probably has to write the greenhouse stuff to get the fundamentalists to read the article.

[ancient_geezer]

As noted by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the Third Assessment Report, published in 2001, anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are highly likely to cause warming of the Earth, but factors such as solar variability could amplify or subdue the effect.

Also known as the CYA syndrome:

http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/cap/2003/cap_03-02-20.html

"The Economist, which provides the best environmental reporting of any major news source, carried a small story last week about a simple methodological error in the latest U.N. global warming report that has huge implications. The article, "Hot Potato: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Had Better Check Its Calculations" (February 15 print edition), reviews the work of two Australian statisticians who note an anomaly in the way the IPCC estimated world carbon dioxide emissions for the 21st century."

......

"The IPCC's method has the effect of vastly overestimating future economic growth (and, therefore, CO2 emissions) by developing nations. The fine print of the IPCC's projections, for example, calls for the real per-capita incomes of Argentina, South Africa, Algeria, Turkey, and even North Korea to surpass real per-capita income in the United States by the end of the century. Algeria? North Korea? The IPCC must be inhaling its own emissions to believe this."

 

---

Estimation of the Solar Fraction and Svensmark Factor (30 June 99) by Peter Dietze (Germany). Warming from the sun is 4 times greater than the initial forcing.

The Cause of `Global Warming' (4 Nov 2000)  by Vincent Gray (New Zealand). Dr Gray shows how `global warming' is produced, not by warming of the climate, but by warming of the instruments that measure climate.

The Surface Temperature Record (25 Jan 2000) - Dr Vincent Gray (New Zealand) -

 

[citizen]

"This work is speculative...

As is all this global warming crap.

[talleyman]

I thought I remembered it getting really cold at the end of the Ordovician Period - we had to walk through hip-high snow to get to school - and it was even worse in the winter!

[petuniasevan]

Lots of good information in this thread.

[petuniasevan]

Global Warming Hoax bump list!

[Billthedrill]

Well, actually it's variations in solar activity they're talking about (the headline is a bit misleading). The sun is, technically, responsible for 100% of global warming...

[ancient_geezer]

I think that we should focus on the new information, i.e. that the sun has a varying activity.

Hardly new information, and indeed not the only variation going on to explain global temperature variations.

Review the piddling variation, (a return to mean), the "global warming" alarmists would have us get excited about, in context of climate variation based in variations of earth's postion in the solarsystem & galaxy:

 

Ice Ages & Astronomical Causes
Brief Introduction to the History of Climate
by Richard A. Muller

Figure 1-2 Climate of the last 2400 years

 

Figure 1-3 Climate of the last 12,000 years

 

Figure 1-4 Climate of the last 100,000 years

 

Figure 1-5 Climate for the last 420 kyr, from Vostok ice

 

Origin of the 100 kyr Glacial Cycle
by Richard A. Muller

Figure 2. Spectral fingerprints in the vicinity of the 100 kyr peak: (a) for data from Site 607; (b) for data of the SPECMAP stack; (c) for a model with linear response to eccentricity, calculated from the results of Quinn et al. (ref 6); (d) for the nonlinear ice-sheet model of Imbrie and Imbrie (ref 22); and (e) for a model with linear response to the inclination of the Earth's orbit (measured with respect to the invariable plane). All calculations are for the period 0-600 ka. The 100 kyr peak in the data in (a) and (b) do not fit the fingerprints from the theories (c) and (d), but are a good match to the prediction from inclination in (e). return to beginning


Far more important to our present analysis, however, is the fact that the predicted 100 kyr "eccentricity line" is actually split into 95 and 125 kyr components, in serious conflict with the single narrow line seen in the climate data. The splitting of this peak into a doublet is well known theoretically (see, e.g., ref 5), but in comparisons with data the two peaks in the eccentricity were merged into a single broad peak by the poor resolution of the Blackman-Tukey algorithm (as was done, for example, in ref 8). The single narrow peak in the climate data was likewise broadened, and it appeared to match the broad eccentricity feature.

***

Figure 3. Variations of the inclination vector of the Earth's orbit. The inclination i is the angle between this vector and the vector of the reference frame; Omega is the azimuthal angle = the angle of the ascending node (in astronomical jargon).. In (A), (B), and (C) the measurements are made with respect to the zodiacal (or ecliptic) frame, i.e. the frame of the current orbit of the Earth. In (D), (E), and (F) the motion has been trasformed to the invariable frame, i.e. the frame of the total angular momentum of the solar system. Note that the primary period of oscillation in the zodiacal frame (A) is 70 kyr, but in the invariable plane (D) it is 100 kyr.

 

---

 

As well as variations that occur due to our position with respect to the galactic plane that occur of much longer timeframes:

Here Comes the Sun

"Veizer and Shaviv calculated that the solar brightening of the past 150 years by itself might account for one-third of the warming during that time. But add to that their new discovery that solar wind gusts prevent the formation of cooling clouds by blocking cosmic rays, and the effects of brightening alone are greatly magnified. (Solar winds were unusually strong during the 20th century.)

So how great is the magnification of solar brightening caused by solar winds' effects on cosmic rays and clouds? Veizer thinks it is enough to explain away all of the warming since the end of the Little Ice Age, without any contribution by carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gasses."

***

"The greenhouse chorus has been able to say that solar activity and carbon dioxide have both been increasing in lockstep with global temperatures, so there is no way to prove one is a "driver" and the other not.

Veizer and Shaviv's greatest contribution is their time scale. They have examined the relationship of cosmic rays, solar activity and CO2, and climate change going back through thousands of major and minor coolings and warmings. They found a strong -- very strong -- correlation between cosmic rays, solar activity and climate change, but almost none between carbon dioxide and global temperature increases.

In an article in the July 14 issue of Canada's National Post newspaper, Tim Patterson, a respected Canadian paleoclimatologist, explains that Veizer and Shaviv "have now provided the missing data." No longer can the pro-Kyoto types in their legislatures or laboratories take cover behind the lockstep excuse. "

[LTCJ]

Solar contribution to 'global warming' predicted to decrease

Yikes! Global cooling. The irony, of course, is that the logical solution by the GWarmer's own asumptions would be to increase emmissions of greenhouse gases. I propose a Otoyk Treaty.

[Old Professer]

The solar contribution to the increase is variously estimated to be around 4-20% leaving greenhouse gases to make up the remaining 80%.

Well, we had better start pumping as much CO2 into the air as we can to offset the inevitable burn-out of the sun some 5 million years from now.

[AdmSmith]

Thanks for your graphs, they are as always very useful. The problem is that most of the meteorologists seems to have slept during their physics classes or not heard of sun weather. Neither have they had any classes in paleontology. The best way to educate them is probably to gradually provide them with information, otherwise they will deny the facts. It is like the Pope and Galileo. I took the Catholic church 359 years, in 1992, to admit that they were wrong.

[Mike Darancette]

Clilverd and colleagues conclude that solar activity is about to peak and predict less activity in the next 100 years, with the occurrence of space storms likely to decline by two thirds. Their assumption is that the solar heat output will decline slightly accordingly.

These guys got it wrong, the solar output of heat does not increase during periods of high solar activity, but increased solar activity does allow the earth to warm because increased solar winds keep out cosmic dust. Larger amounts of cosmic dust causes high altitude condensation of water creating ice clouds that reflect the sun's heat.

See post #16.