Superior Climate Prediction Tool Unveiled

Battered greenhouse experts welcome to study history -

Has carbon dioxide let you down, scientist? You are looking a little beat up. Is the CO2 gravy train drying up? Try some sunspots instead. Just remember, we count more today because the tools are better now.

Jan Janssens has updated the table as of September 1. I doubt very much if government funding has influenced this data (yet); but greedy statists are not yet involved.

Great Big Tax Will Keep Earth Cool

How about a great big new tax, to keep Earth cool, and government absolutely swimming in cash to spread around?

H/T: NC Media Watch, Russ Steele: Cap and Trade is a TAX! Really?

Just when we need to make sure we have enough energy, Obama and big “progressive” government will destroy energy resources by taxing them wildly and massively.

Peter Foster: The crumbling case for global warming

President Obama is considering a cap-and-trade system with which Canada would be forced to co-ordinate its own policies. The conference made clear how damaging and pointless such a policy would be.

… Vaclav Klaus, the professorial president of both the Czech Republic and the European Union, pointed out at the conference’s first session on Sunday evening that the global political establishment was still in the grip of thinking reminiscent of the Communism under which he once lived. He noted that few if any politicians seemed even aware of, or interested in, either the shortcomings of officially cooked climate science, or the potential disasters of climate policy.

Professor Richard Lindzen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, also stressed that climate alarmism was a political and not a scientific matter. Particular worrying, he said, was that various scientific bodies had been seized by alarmists, who now issued statements without polling the members. This played into the appeal to authority rather than science. He called climate modelling “unintelligent design” and global warming a “postmodern coup d’état.” He stressed that “Nature hasn’t followed the models” used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There has been no global warming for 10 or 15 years. Countering all the blather about Exxon’s (former) support for Heartland that appeared in coverage of the conference by climate-change cheerleaders at The New York Times and The Guardian, he noted that skeptics in fact had minimal resources to rectify the incipient policy horrors. (article continues)

So Anthropogenic Global Warming is no longer in evidence; in fact Earth is cooling ominously, and here is the most likely cause:

H/T: Dalton Minimum Returns, Russ Steele Sun and Sea connection:oceans as a calorimeter

The oceans as a calorimeter Nir Shaviv, Science Bits

. . . all three sets give consistently the same answer, that a large heat flux periodically enters and leaves the oceans with the solar cycle, and this heat flux is about 6 to 8 times larger than can be expected from changes in the solar irradiance only. This implies that an amplification mechanism necessarily exists. Interestingly, the size is consistent with what would be expected from the observed low altitude cloud cover variations.

When sunspots go away, here is the result, and the probable cause and link is low altitude cloud cover variation:

What do you eat, during years with no summer?

The bottom line? There is a liklehood that the energy resources Obama wants to tax to death could save your, or your children’s lives, in the next two or three decades.

What do you eat in decades with no summer? Obama has not a clue; but you have been eating too much anyway.

Update To Solaemon’s Spotless Days Page

Sunspots have now been all quiet for 47 days; since 1849, this interval without sunspots is about the 6th largest. The chart has been recently updated as of September 1, however Jan Janssens marks the end of the recent interval as August 20; it is ongoing.

As noted by commenter ThePenguin, in Emergency Sunspot Appears Two Weeks Ago, today’s sunspot-free periods likely are biased short, compared to previous observations, decades ago, by greatly improved tools which detect smaller spots.

See Jan Janssens’ Solaemon’s Spotless Days Page

Next update: January 2009

Also blogging: The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE: How Is Solar Cycle 24 Doing? (Omniclimate)

Maurizio points out that the interval would be 64 days if the puny spots around July 19 weren’t counted – the third largest interval ever.

Maurizio again: Actually It’s 71 Days Without A Sunspot

Emergency Sunspot Appears Two Weeks Ago

Actually, 0.5 sunspots, as it were. A scientist in Sicily just remembered he saw it.

Relax, warmests! Absence of sunspots, which items have no role whatever in the Earth’s climate (only cabon emitted by man can do it) has not occurred.

Maybe sunspot numbers should be corrected just like temperature records. Makes perfect sense, no?

Necessity again is the mother of invention.

Story here.

Hathaway Tune Wavers

Still No Sunspot Action on the Sun

Linda Moulton Howe

On July 11, 2008, NASA headlined one of its press releases as, “What’s Wrong with the Sun? (Nothing).”

All I know is, Earth is Warming

David Hathaway, Ph.D., Solar Physics Team Leader
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama

That was then; this is now:

RIGHT NOW, YOU REALLY DON’T KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN?

Yes, I think that is a correct assessment. In fact, that became clear in the meeting in Boulder. There still are aspects of the sun that we thought we understood, but further evidence and modeling are showing us we still have a lot to learn here.

WHAT DO YOU AND PETER GILLMAN PLAN TO DO WHEN THE SUN STARTS POPPING SUNSPOTS AGAIN?

If it’s a big cycle, we’ll be going around to a lot of our friends and saying, ‘We told you so!’ (laughs) On the other hand, if it’s a little cycle, we’ll get a little sheepish (laughs).

WELL, BOTTOM LINE: CYCLE 24 ON OUR SUN IS GOING TO BE TEACHING YOU A LOT.

Yes, that’s exactly the conclusion I’ve come to – that there is no doubt we’re going to learn important things about the sun from this cycle 24. We have very significant disagreements about how big it’s going to be.

AND CONFUSION ABOUT WHY IT’S TAKING SO LONG.

Confusion – but Gilman would say this is exactly what we said because of the slow meridianal flow. That’s why it’s taking so long. But there are others who say, ‘There’s more to it than that!’ So this cycle will help us to understand the sun. There’s no doubt about it.
. . . .

And

he argues our planet today . . . is already warming too rapidly from the greenhouse gases blanket that human industry has created over the past century.

The rest here.

We have no clue about what the Sun is going to do; but we know for sure the Earth has a fever? We know for sure Earth is warming, and must continue to warm? If the vaunted Solar Physics Team Leader cannot figure out what the temperature on Earth is; and that Earth’s temperature is not going up, how does he propose to ever understand what’s happening on the Sun?

The odds are not good.

Maybe John Ray (Greenie Watch) has a good point here: . . . we are dealing with Leftist politics rather than science.

H/T: Ice Age Now!

Totally More Likely Than AGW

That is not water covering Manhattan

At least, not liquid water.

Hurry and fork over your carbon dioxide tax ASAP . . . stop carbon dioxide emissions now. Send in your money to develop wind turbine power, just in time to save the Earth. Our central bureaucrats know the future; they just don’t know the past.

Certain parties (including James Hansen) may soon wish they had not blocked energy infrastructure in the world. On the other hand, they are kooks anyway – wealthy kooks. Destroying your own credibility can have global repercussions, Jim, however much you enjoyed it.

Dearth Of Sunspot Activity To Herald New Ice Age?

Forecasts of a sharp cooling trend are backed by the UK’s Armagh Observatory, which has been observing solar activity for over 200 years.

The observatory notes that solar cycles 21 and 22, which were characterized by being short and intense in their activity, led to the natural global warming observed in the 80’s and 90’s.

“Cycle 23, which hasn’t finished yet, looks like it will be long (at least 12 to 13 years) and cycle 24, which has still to start, looks like it will be exceptionally weak,” writes one observatory scientist.

“Based on the past Armagh measurements, this suggests that over the next two decades, global temperatures may fall by about 2 degrees C — that is, to a level lower than any we have seen in the last 100 years….“Temperatures have already fallen by about 0.5 degrees C over the past 12 months and, if this is only the start of it, it would be a serious concern,” concludes David Watt.

“Summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century’s opening decade,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That’s by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.”

The reason? Sunspot activity has dwindled. There have only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar cycle.

“The sun’s surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun’s 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century,” reports one science blog.

Long-time man-made global warming advocates NASA assure us that significant sunspot activity will return in 2012, but a recent a paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, predicts that sunspots will all but vanish after 2015.

Since the sun, and not carbon dioxide, is the principle driver of climate change, a dearth of sunspot activity would herald a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare and contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age during which Europe and North America were hit by bitterly cold winters and the Thames river in London completely froze.

H/T Ice Age Now: Dearth of sunspot activity to herald new ice age?

Clue: Sunspots and Global Cooling

Sunspots may be related to Global Cooling (which is dangerous) and Global Warming, which is not.

At least, sunspots always were in the past.

From the Eau Claire Leader Telegram; via ICECAP

Sunspot cycles may hold key to global warming, cooling
The 2008 winter was the coldest in 40 years for the upper Midwest, Plains states and most of Canada. Minnesota newspapers report that this year’s opening of the locks to Mississippi barge traffic, delayed by three weeks, was the latest since the modern waterway opened in 1940.

Eau Claire, where “old-fashioned winters” have been a thing of the past, recorded 43 days of below-zero temperatures, while folks down in Madison shoveled away at a 117-year record snowfall throughout the season, as did many in New England and Canada.

Rare snowfalls struck Buenos Aires, Capetown, and Sidney during their mid-year winter, while China continually battled blizzards. Even Baghdad experienced measurable snowfall.

Antarctic pack-ice far exceeded what Captain Cook saw on his 18th century voyage into the Southern Ocean. On the continent itself the miles-thick ice continues to accumulate despite peripheral melting along the Antarctic Peninsula and occasional calving of an ice block. At the opposite pole, flow-ice once again spans the entire Arctic Ocean, and by April it had extended into the Bering Strait, making up for the much heralded melt-back last summer.

From January 2007 through the end of January 2008, the average global temperature fell by nearly a degree Fahrenheit, based on data obtained by the MET Office in Great Britain and other international temperature monitoring networks.

What are we to make of this? The recent climate conference held in New York City, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, provides some answers. Several hundreds climatologists in attendance dispelled notions that the global warming debate is over. Most attendees, who readily acknowledge the existence of post-Little Ice Age warming, believe man-made emissions are unlikely to cause major climate change and signed a declaration to that effect.

Bill Gray, dean of hurricane forecasters, attributed short-term climate change to slow-moving deep ocean currents that result from variation in the salinity of water sinking near the poles and ultimately welling up again along the coast of South America. These fluctuations account for the comings and goings of the familiar El Nino/La Nina cycles and the longer Pacific Decadal Oscillation that stretches over a large area of the eastern Pacific.

Solar experts highlighted how sunspots, and associated magnetic storms on the Sun’s surface, affect Earth’s weather and climate. The previous (very strong) 11-year sunspot cycle, associated with the recent warmth, ended in 2007, after having peaked in 2002. The new cycle should have already begun, but hasn’t yet.

In the absence of sunspots, solar flares are minimal. Flares eject massive streams of electrons and protons outward from the Sun. A portion of this stream, called the “solar wind”, bathes our planet producing the aurora and interfering with communications. The solar wind, as it interacts with Earth’s magnetic field, also protects us from the harmful effects of cosmic radiation.

During periods of weak solar activity – as at present – cosmic rays (high-energy protons originating in interstellar space) penetrate through the troposphere and ionize oxygen and nitrogen molecules. The ions become nucleating sites for water vapor that condenses into clouds. And when sunspots are at a minimum, more clouds form and correspondingly more sunlight is reflected back into space. The enhanced reflectance (albedo) cools the Earth. We all have experienced how quickly the temperature drops when the sun ducks behind a puffy white cloud on a warm, dry afternoon.

Past cool periods, identified with the late stages of the “Little Ice Age” and with the Maunder and Dalton climate minima, closely correlate with low sunspot numbers (astronomers have kept close tabs on sunspots since Galileo’s time). Some solar-physicists are now saying if the current cycle doesn’t begin to produce spots soon, we can expect a cool-down like the 19th-Century Dalton minimum – or worse. Decades-long cooling in the past brought crop failures to Europe from repeated summer frosts and restricted growing seasons.

With grain shortages already staring us in the face, we’d be advised to begin thinking about a global cool-down instead of a warming that may or may not continue. We might consider ways to transform semi-desert into arable land and to develop seed with shorter maturing cycles suitable for a sub-boreal grain belt. If cooling should begin in earnest, we will quickly forget global warming as we face the new challenges ahead.

Balgord, a consultant and writer, heads Environmental and Resources Technology in Middleton.

Please see SOURCE for numerous, relevant, links. (In edit, the links at Leader Telegram are useless. Sorry).

Sun Flashes Cycle 24 Spot

Will Cycle 24 please come on down? Trained eyes (Anthony Watts) say the polarity is correct (reversed, since below the Sun’s equator). Now, will it stick this time? About 3 or so previous Cycle 24 spots have quickly vanished.

(Photo From Gong)

The Chilling Stars (redux)

Read ASAP “The Chilling Stars: The New Theory of Climate Change” by Prof. Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder 

Circa 1950, scientists confirmed that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a spiral galaxy. Our Sun, a small star, is not fixed in an arm of the spiral, but orbits outside the galaxy’s center, moving from arm to arm, over hundreds of millions of years. The galactic environment of our system actually changes pronouncedly, from age to age. Inside a dense galactic arm, populated with large, short lived stars, there are many star births, and catastrophic star deaths. Our solar system passes through dense arms periodically, and also through the much less dense space between the arms.

Large stars typically “die” in a massive explosion called a super nova. Such stellar explosions result in highly energetic subatomic particles called “cosmic rays.” Cosmic rays are much more frequently encountered, in the dense arms of the galaxy, and of course, near super novae. Two cosmic rays on average zip through your head every second, unobserved by you. If you are reading this at jet cruising altitude, the number is higher. At present, we are located in a minor or spur arm, called Orion.  Only within the last 15 years have scientists discovered that these energetic particles, creating cascades of free electrons in the atmosphere, contribute effectively to low cloud formation.

Only within the last 15 years have scientists discovered HOW clouds form! Astounding that it took so long.  (What were they working on?  Carbon Credit sales, instead)

We know for sure that our Sun itself effectively regulates the flow of cosmic rays reaching the Earth, through the Sun’s magnetosphere, which extends far beyond the planetary orbits. When the Sun is magnetically active (sunspot maxima) cosmic rays are more often deflected from reaching Earth. There is a well known 11 year sunspot cycle, highly correlated with the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere. There are more cycles, clearly correlating Earth’s temperature and solar activity. At a sunspot minima, more cosmic rays interact with our atmosphere, resulting in more formation of low clouds, over vast areas of the Earth. The upper aspect of low clouds is highly reflective, like the ice of Antarctica. Low clouds reflect most of the Sun’s energy which otherwise would be absorbed by the ocean or the land mass at the surface.  Sunspot activity can also slow dramatically for long periods. A very recent such period, prior to 1725, is called the Maunder Sunspot Minimum. It is also called the “Little Ice Age.” They are intimately related. With the Sun’s magnetic activity at a prolonged null, more cosmic rays interacted with Earth’s atmosphere creating more low clouds, and Earth’s atmosphere was cooled, fast. When the Sun became magnetically active again, low cloud formation slowed, and the atmosphere warmed.

Carbon dioxide comes mostly from the ocean, to a large extent generated by sea life. When the ocean warms, carbon dioxide normally dissolved in sea water is forced into the atmosphere. The temperature of the ocean is slow to change, because it is so massive, and also because water takes more energy to heat than does the same mass of atmosphere. Hundreds of years after a major reversal in solar activity, ocean temperature follows. So does carbon dioxide. Human activity generates a tiny fraction of the carbon dioxide which the ocean periodically takes up, or gives off, depending on its temperature. The carbon dioxide content of our atmosphere is a result of ocean temperature, much more than a cause.

If you want a clear explanation of all this and much more, read “The Chilling Stars” by Prof. Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder, or watch “The Great Global Warming Swindle” at http://www.rightalk.com . There is still much more to learn; climatology is practically a reborn science, as a result of the recent research of Svensmark and others!

What If Sunspots Remain Stopped?

Sunspots are all but stopped. 

Remember . . . 

Hey, sunspots have stopped before.   And what happened? (Keywords:  Dalton, Maunder).   Disease, malnutrition, and death resulted.  Even for the noble polar bears. 

Should history matter?  Can history ever repeat?  Or is the debate over?  Is the solar magnetic cycle shut off, as easily as debate? 

The solar magnetic cycle, and its impact on Earth, can be practically ignored, for hundreds of years.  But very suddenly, it becomes a reality of mortal significance; again.  Inevitably.

History, and carbon dioxide chemistry (cold ocean absorbs a bunch of it) is not your forte, Al.