Posted on 05/14/2007 10:46:56 AM PDT by beebuster2000
Skeptics of manmade global warming have found further support in research linking solar output with the planet Neptunes brightness and temperatures on Earth.
The findings appeared in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The authors of the article, H.B. Hammel and G.W. Lockwood from the Space Science Institute in Colorado and the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, note that measurements of visible light from Neptune have been taken at the Observatory since 1950.
Those measurements indicate that Neptune has been getting brighter since around 1980. And infrared measurements of the planet since 1980 show that Neptune has been warming steadily as well.
The researchers plotted on a graph the changes in visible light from Neptune over the past half-century, changes in temperatures on Earth during that period, and changes in total solar irradiance.
The results: The correlation between solar irradiance and Neptunes brightness was nearly perfect; so was the correlation between changes on Earth and solar output, according to a report on the research appearing on World Climate Report, a climate change blog.
When the sun is more energetic and putting out more energy, the Earth tends to warm up, and when the sun cools down, so does the Earth, World Climate Report notes. The Hammel and Lockwood article reveals that the same is true out at Neptune when the suns energy increases, Neptune seems to warm up and get brighter . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at news.newsmax.com ...
cogitator:
I’m just curious.
Don’t you some times feel, when it comes to Global Warming, that you are playing the part of Ptolemy when everyone else here is Copernicus?
Just wondering.
Gets there? You mean passes by? I'm pretty sure it will only have a couple, three weeks, to do its thing near Pluto/Chiron.
I feel more like this guy:
Equo ne credite, Teucri -- Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
Note that three of the four individuals noted in the Acknowledgments are skeptics (Christy, Knappenberger, and of course, Michaels).
Kind of old, but has some numbers, notably:
" The sensitivity of climate to solar radiation changes, as defined earlier, is not well known. A conservative estimate is that a 0.1 percent change in solar total radiation will bring about a temperature response of 0.06 to 0.2°C, providing the change persists long enough for the climate system to adjust. This could take ten to 100 years."
Using just this number, let's say that solar radiation increased 0.5% in the 20th century. The maximum expected temperature response would be 1 deg. C (minimum 0.3 C). The observed increase over the entire 20th century was 0.6 C, which falls in this range.
However, over the past 25 years, the global temperature increase has been 0.8 C. The decadal maximum solar radiation increase is 3 x 0.05% = 0.15% -- from the numbers above, this could result in a maximum 0.3 C increase due to solar radiation. Observations indicate much more than that. As from this figure, the late 20th century temperature rise (into the 21st) doesn't appear to be attributable to solar forcing. And studies of the entire 20th century have stated that about 0.2 C of the 0.6 C could be attributed to solar forcing, with a more significant solar contribution in the early part of the century.
It's clear from multiple indicators that solar variability has become one of the bastions of scientifically-minded climate change skeptics. I view that position as assailable. (Which you might have guessed.)
Snakes and Trojan Horses. What a mix.
But I agree, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean we aren't out to get you.
We understand the steady state of stars quite well. Basically the fusion inside is supplying heat energy that counteracts very strong gravity pulling the upper layer of the star inward. The size of the star is set by the point where the two forces balance. It takes more energy release per unit time inside, to hold the surface layers of the star higher above the core. So, if the rate of energy production inside the star increases, it gets hotter, emits more light (though with a significant lag, as it takes energy a long time to fully work its way out to the surface), and then expands somewhat. Now occupying more area and radiating faster, its surface cools somewhat compared to what it was originally (it is also less dense etc). This all re-establishes an equilibrium again between the rate of energy production inside, and the light energy emitted, at which point the star stops increasing in size.
The size changes involved are modest unless the change in energy production in the core is quite dramatic. Late stage main sequence stars (like the sun, but best guess several billion years older) get substantially more energy inside from fusion of helium into carbon rather than hydrogen into helium - which can only start after the core compresses due to running out of hydrogen to fuse. That leads to a very large expansion into a red giant star.
But without changing over the fuel source from hydrogen fusion to helium fusion, the power output is only going to change by a few percent at most (say 10 as an upper bound), and that will always be compensated by a modest change in size, nothing like the huge expansion and diffusion involved in the transition to a red giant. Eventually the sun will expand to a red giant - but only after exhausting hydrogen in the core, probably a billion years from now.
Quasars, on the other hand, are thought to be active galactic nuclei - in other words, super massive black holes millions of times the mass of the sun, fed by rapid intake of surrounding matter, which a rotating black hole can convert into pure energy (light in all wavelengths mostly) with up 40% efficiency. They are associated with much younger galaxies than ours and only occur at galactic centers.
What the CO2 warming nuts are doing is using a double standard. To sun forcing they ask for the absolute scale and ignore the correlation. For CO2 forcing they ignore the absolute scale, and pretend the correlation must be causation, and that the difference between them is "climate sensitivity". In plain English, this is nonsense.
The sun hypothesis has two explained amplifiers. One set of researchers focus on sun initiated changes driving CO2 concentrations themselves, independent of human uses, through dissolved oceanic carbon, and is alluded to in this article. Another group (Danish mostly) thinks increases in solar output decrease net low altitude cloudiness, via an effect of solar wind shielding from a specific energy band of cosmic rays that they posit seed cloud formation.
The cloud feedback again comes out to an absolute scale of a few tenths of a degree C, via a total net contribution of order 20-30 watts per square meter and single digit percent changes in average cloudiness.
What none of the schools of thought on the subject, including the CO2 warmer group, has every been able to allege in any way that withstands physical scrutiny and measurement, is any set of linked feedbacks (which are getting more and more epicycle baroque as time passes and the hysteria holds) that generate sufficient power to keep the entire world continually glowing 5C hotter.
Every one of the forcings involved has a measured scale or variation on the order of low single digits watts per square meter. Indeed, only a handful rise to above the full watt threshold. Most of the handwaving feedbacks alleged on any side, when measured, have proven to be random in sign and 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than the main direct forcings. And it takes on the order of 25 watts per square meter, net new power, to maintain a 5C hotter world indefinitely.
The first order effects fully account for the *observed* warming, without any need for giant amplifiers. They point to a further warming from additional CO2 concentration increases, on the order of 0.5C over the next century.
There is also a pretty compelling argument now that CO2 partial pressures will not rise above about twice what they are today, even if all known fossil fuel deposits (including all the coal and shale and tar sands) were burnt. The reason is the ocean is a great sink for carbon and rapidly re-equilibriates with air. Force the partial pressure of CO2 away from its S curve steady point in either reservoir, and a restoring force is immediately set in motion, as the rate of CO2 flux out of that resevoir into the other one rises.
There is a lag, so the speed at which CO2 is added matters. In 500 to 1000 years, it would not matter at all if all the fossil fuels were burned. Burn all of it faster and you can elevate atmospheric CO2 by a factor of 70% and keep it there for a few hundred years. It is a stretch to get double, though that is the usual figure the CO2 warmer crowd projects, and pretends can continue to get worse indefinitely.
A 70% increase in CO2 concentrations would led directly to only a few tenths of a degree C of warming. Exactly the same absolute scale logic deployed against the direct sun warming group, applies against the CO2 driver group.
The most irresponsible and least supported claim in the whole subject, all sides, is the standing prediction of 3-5C ice age scale warming, when none of the causes being discussed and currently varying, has the physical power to drive lasting mean temperature changes of that magnitude. This has been shown repeatedly for nearly two decades now, and it has never yet led the CO2 driver group to drop the prediction. Which originated in a demonstrably false theory of the origin of ice ages themselves, and has refused all revision in the light of vastly better evidence.
The bottom line is that warming is real and modest, human activity does account for a portion of it, roughly similar in magnitude to present natural drivers like changing average cloudiness and changing solar output, all of them scale tenths of a degree C, and all of them adding up to future temperature changes of less than 1C, regardless of what humans choose to do for their energy needs. And there never was and is not now, any reason to believe modest temperature changes on that scale, will have any significant negative effects on human welfare.
The only world leader being rational about any of this at the moment in Valclav Klaus of Czechoslovakia. Nearly everyone else is in thrall to hysterics tendentiously pushing one-sided byzantine arguments, that are by now towers of epicycles. And it is all going to collapse into its physical incoherence within our lifetimes.
New Horizons is not flying a magnetometer. The two particle instruments are SWAP (Solar Wind Around Pluto) and PEPSSI (Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation). However, the particle instruments would detect a magnetoshock or magnetotail, as they are currently doing at Jupiter.
I don't see why this is a big deal, Neptune and Earth are two totally different planets in size, atmospheric makeup, distance from the sun, orbital eccentricity, etc. You wouldn't expect them to react in the same exact matter over the same period of time to changes in solar varibility. But what we are seeing is both are showing a warming trend along the same period of time.
And that's what the AUTHORS themselves wrote.
They are doing real science that's why.
But what I find funny, while you and that left wing post you link to try to make a big deal of this, the paper they/you use to try and debunk it contains a whole section titled "Conflicting observations"
I'd take "Low formal statistical significance" over "Conflicting observations" anytime
But one of these "Conflicting observations" stands out as particularly interesting (which conveniently you and the left wing post do not comment on)
Quote "Although our simple seasonal model fits most disk-integrated observations at 467 and 472 nm well, it is not consistent with the local brightness increase beyond 30°N, especially between 1998 and 2002; that hemisphere ought to be declining in overall brightness according to the seasonal model.
Which means seasonal changes can not totally account for the warming trend seen on Neptune which confirms what the Suggestive correlations between the brightness of Neptune, solar variability, and Earth's temperature paper you are trying to debunk it with says.
So the correlations they describe in the paper could very well be -- spurious. Meaning basically nothing more than coincidence.
Suuuuurrree, 7 out of 7 planets all showing a warming trend at the same time earth is, Yeah it's all just one big coincidence, George Bush and those evvviiill Republicans must be hurting beloved Gaia, Al gore says so.
A double standard by liberals, nah can't be
But excellent point, that solar irradiance vs Temperature graph looks pretty correlated to me, there are too many other factors that you are never going to see a point by point perfect correlation but that's pretty close
But I guess only using Liberal Logic can you say
This is not correlated
But this is
Best educational video I have seen by far on the Environment. Check it out,
NASA Study Finds Increasing Solar Trend That Can Change Climate
"Although the inferred increase of solar irradiance in 24 years, about 0.1 percent, is not enough to cause notable climate change [on Earth], the trend would be important if maintained for a century or more. Satellite observations of total solar irradiance have obtained a long enough record (over 24 years) to begin looking for this effect."
Solar Irradiance and Long-Term Climate Variability (this is old, but good info on the Maunder Minimum)
LONG-TERM TOTAL SOLAR IRRADIANCE (TSI) VARIABILITY TRENDS: 1984-2004
"Using the discontinuous nonoperational Nimbus-7, SMM ACRIM, and UARS ACRIM mission TSI data sets, Wilson and Mordvinor (2003) suggested the existence of an additional long-term TSI variability component, 0.05 %, with a period longer than a decade. Analyses of the ERBS/ERBE data set do not support the Wilson and Mordvinor analyses approach because it used the Nimbus-7 data set which exhibited a significant ACR response shift of 0.7 Wm-2 (Lee et al,, 1995; Chapman et al., 1996)."
...
The SORCE (SOlar Radiation and Climate Experiment) Science Working Group Meeting (July 17-19, 2002) (note Judith Lean's PDF presentation available here)
Sun's Role in Climate Change Continues to Spark Controversy
" Has an increasing trend in the Sun's brightness contributed to global warming over the last few decades? One study published recently says it has but Judith Lean will tell a joint session of the UK/Ireland National Astronomy Meeting and Solar Physics Meeting in Dublin that a different study has come to the opposite conclusion when she tackles the controversial topic of the relationship between our climate and the Sun on Tuesday 8 April [2003]."
...
"Temperature changes in concert with solar activity are indeed apparent during the past millennium," reports Dr Lean, "but are typically of order 0.2 to 0.5 degrees C on time scales of hundreds of years. Since 1885, global warming in response to changes in the Sun's brightness is now thought to have been less than 0.25 degrees C."
----
Summary of all the above: It cannot be demonstrated that there has been sufficient/significant solar variability (particularly an increase in solar output/irradiance) sufficient to cause climate change on Earth, or on other bodies in the Solar System, over the past 25-30 years. There is an apparent solar component to the global warming observed over the past 150-160 years, with a maximum 30% contribution, most notably contributing to the temperature rise in the early part of the 20th century.
I'll post all these links and my summary in my profile, if you consider them informative. I'll leave that to you. If you want to me to go ahead and do so, so you can consider this another "win", feel free.
See what you think of the information I provided in post 73. Is that open-minded enough for you?
Or are fudge factors of 5-10 times kosher for CO2 but 2-3 times illegitimate for solar forcings?
Production is Destruction
Wealth is Poverty
Population is Death
They easily beat Orwell's originals as aggressive contradictions, and the modern left believes them wholeheartedly.
Of course not. There are two "measures" of climate sensitivity.
1. Climate sensitivity to doubled CO2. This appears to 2.9 +/- 1.5 degree C.
2. Climate sensitivity to increased radiative forcing. This appears to be 3/4 deg. C for every 1 Watt per square meter of additional radiative forcing. Doubling CO2 adds about 4 Watts per square meter of radiative forcing.
The full atmosphere temperature increase directly attributable to doubled CO2 is 0.8-0.9 C. The rest is due to feedback, predominantely positive water vapor feedback.
You know these things.
And there is no reason whatever to believe the bootstrapped imaginary feedback 3-4.5 figure instead. And if there were, then there would be just as much reason to expect the equilibrium temperature effect of increased *solar* forcing, to be 3 to 10 times larger than you rightly insist it is.
Why isn't there a special new 3, climate sensitivity to modestly increase solar output, with a spanking new fudge factor of 3 times, allowing solar variation to account for all observed temperature changes? Because it is physical nonsense to tie a temperature change to a physical effect that does not have sufficient power to sustain that temperature change.
"Feedback" is in this context a weasel word for "additional power source besides the one we are alleging is a cause, since the one we are alleging is a cause is demonstrably too small to cause the effect we wish to predict".
If positive water vapor feedback is supposed to supply 2-5 times as much power as direct CO2 forcing - by your figures, mine say 3-10 times - then why isn't positive water vaopr feedback supposed to supply 2-5 times as much power as direct *solar* forcing? Is one supposed to be magically different from the other? (Both are supposedly operating through temperature).
Meanwhile, there is in fact no such observed and huge positive water vapor feedback. The reason is the atmosphere is largely saturated with water vapor. Yes it provides virtually all greenhouse power - but is also does so pretty constantly. Very little outgoing IR that can be stopped by water vapor isn't. And raising temperatures by less than 1C, isn't going to make a huge difference in the amount that gets out.
Clouds are global net coolers with a total power of 20 watts. If all of them drop out of the sky completely, then you can get 20 W to add to the 4 direct and that will get you 3-4C warming. But all clouds are not going to drop out of the sky because of an original temperature increase of less than 1C. In fact, best estimates of past changes in average cloudiness put it at 5% variations on a time scale of a few years, and more like 1% secular variation when those swings are averaged over periods more like 25 years.
Oh and also they are in the wrong direction. (Cloudiness has very marginally increased as temperature rose).
Past solar variation accounts for a quarter of a degree of past warming, concentrated in the first half of the 20th century. Past CO2 increases account for another quarter to a third of a degree. Both do so by the direct forcing and do not require non-existent mythical amplifiers an order of magnitude larger than the original signal. Combined, they fully account of actually observed temperature changes - with a climate sensitivity of 1. (SB law, no fudge, power goes as 4th power of absolute temperature).
Sometimes, however, it is easier to understand by difference. The link below is to the full (now complete) report of the IPCC Working Group I (the scientists). Examine it. Find where you disagree with their conclusions (and the explanation of those conclusions). Show me what they say and contrast it with what you say. Maybe then I can get a handle on your hypotheses.
If you don't care to devote the time to explaining yourself in this way, then don't bother continuing to try and explain yourself in the same manner that you have used for years.
Working Group I: The Physical Basis of Climate Change
You can start with section 3.4.2, and also you might want to address Held and Soden 2000.
This is a very good explanatory article. Just a very brief perusal allowed me to see an interesting relationship between increasing temperature and increasing water vapor pressure. Note that this article, does, however, predate the important Minschwaner and Dessler 2004 paper.
Have fun.
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