FReepmail me to get on or off
Climate Research News
Click on POGW graphic for full GW rundown
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
Worth a look...
Climate Research NewsClick on POGW graphic for full GW rundown
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
I witnessed my first anti-warming agenda commercial tonite on FNC. It was informative and smacked Algore pretty good.
Not So Fun in the Sun
How Solar Activity Affects Temperatures on Earth
If CO2 didn’t cause the warming we experienced through the 1990s, what did cause it? In 1801 astronomer William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus and of infrared radiation, is said to have predicted the price of grain from counting the number of observable sunspots. When the sunspots increased, the weather warmed and the price of grain came down. During periods of low activity, the weather cooled, crops diminished, and the price rose. The relationship between solar activity and temperature has been noted for years, but the increase in solar irradiance can be shown to be too small to account for significant changes in temperature. However, the correlation was far too close to be coincidental and is a far better correlation to Earth’s temperature record than CO2 as a climate forcing agent. It seems we were looking in the wrong direction. In 2004, Nir Shaviv and Jan Vetzer of the Hebrew University showed empirical evidence that “cosmic ray flux” had an impact on climate variability.
Though increases and decreases in solar irradiance wouldn’t directly produce Earth’s measured temperature changes, solar activity appears to have an indirect effect. A supernova sends out swarms of cosmic rays (mostly protons and electrons) that cause small particles in our atmosphere to attract one another, becoming nuclei for cloud formations high in the atmosphere. During periods of high solar activity, solar winds and magnetic fields act to block these cosmic intruders and prevent the formation of clouds. As high clouds reflect sunlight, preventing their formation increases the radiation reaching the surface and increases the global temperature. In other words, high solar activity, evidenced by sunspots, disrupts cloud formation, thus allowing more solar heating of the Earth.
The ‘90s were a period of high solar activity, but this has slowed down. In fact, it has virtually stopped. The total solar irradiance, as reported by NASA’s David Hathaway, is at the lowest point on record — although the record is only a few decades long. Furthermore, sunspots migrate across the sun as the sunspot (solar) cycle matures. Usually a new sunspot cycle would have already been active by this time — but it hasn’t started. This is very bad news for the global-warming alarmists, as the data show this is the precursor of a cooling trend. Actually, it is not such good news for skeptics either, as colder weather is much more dangerous and uncomfortable than warmer weather for many reasons. Personally, I’m not a big fan of driving a team of horses across a frozen Arkansas River.