Posted on 09/14/2006 1:34:00 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
Study acquits sun of climate change, blames humans
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) - The sun's energy output has barely varied over the past 1,000 years, raising chances that global warming has human rather than celestial causes, a study showed on Wednesday.
Researchers from Germany, Switzerland and the United States found that the sun's brightness varied by only 0.07 percent over 11-year sunspot cycles, far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution.
"Our results imply that over the past century climate change due to human influences must far outweigh the effects of changes in the sun's brightness," said Tom Wigley of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Most experts say emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars, are the main cause of a 0.6 Celsius (1.1 F) rise in temperatures over the past century.
A dwindling group of scientists says that the dominant cause of warming is a natural variation in the climate system, or a gradual rise in the sun's energy output.
"The solar contribution to warming over the past 30 years is negligible," the researchers wrote in the journal Nature of evidence about the sun from satellite observations since 1978.
They also found little sign of solar warming or cooling when they checked telescope observations of sunspots against temperature records going back to the 17th century.
They then checked more ancient evidence of rare isotopes and temperatures trapped in sea sediments and Greenland and Antarctic ice and also found no dramatic shifts in solar energy output for at least the past millennium.
SUN NOT GUILTY
"This basically rules out the sun as the cause of global warming," Henk Spruit, a co-author of the report from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, told Reuters.
Many scientists say greenhouse gases might push up world temperatures by perhaps another 3 Celsius by 2100, causing more droughts, floods, disease and rising global sea levels.
Spruit said a "Little Ice Age" around the 17th century, when London's Thames River froze, seemed limited mainly to western Europe and so was not a planet-wide cooling that might have implied a dimmer sun.
And global Ice Ages, like the last one which ended about 10,000 years ago, seem linked to cyclical shifts in the earth's orbit around the sun rather than to changes in solar output.
"Overall, we can find no evidence for solar luminosity variations of sufficient amplitude to drive significant climate variations on centennial, millennial or even million-year timescales," the report said.
Solar activity is now around a low on the 11-year cycle after a 2000 peak, when bright spots called faculae emit more heat and outweigh the heat-plugging effect of dark sunspots. Both faculae and dark sunspots are most common at the peaks.
Still, the report also said there could be other, more subtle solar effects on the climate, such as from cosmic rays or ultraviolet radiation. It said they would be hard to detect.
Average of 200W per square meter from the sun. There's 1 million square meters per square kilometer. So that's 200MW of solar energy per square kilometer. An increase of 0.07 percent would be 140 kW extra energy per square kilometer.
Here's where it gets fun - there's roughly 500,000,000 square kilometers on the earth. At any given time, half of those are illuminated by the sun. So that's an extra 35,000 GW of energy delivered to the earth - EVERY DAY.
About what the state of California uses every day.
Now ask your "it's all MAN'S FAULT!" moonbat if they'd like to remove the equivalent energy use of California to combat Global Warming and they'd be all over it...
See, it's hard to beat the energy output of the sun... When you get 200W per square meter that is a LOT of energy. Even small changes - a few ten-thousandths - adds up REALLY QUICK because of the size of the earth, and that much power radiated from the sun...
btt
Gosh, really? I kinda thought we got all of our warming from the sun. (Can you imagine how many SUVs it would take to heat the earth?) Seems to me that without the sun, well, we'd be rather cold.
Which is to suggest that any line of inquiry that doesn't look at the sun's energy first, especially sunspots—which are known to increase the solar energy reaching the earth—is silly.
A 1 degree shift in temperature over last century proves the other scientists theories that the sun itself may be the cause for solar energy output. Surely, 1 degree temperature change can't be considered 'dramatic', especially when measured against unreliable devices used back during the 17th through 19th centuries. We are talking back to Martin Luther time period here.
I never thought that accountants and physicists would share the same desire to make the numbers say what they want them to say!
I remain convinced that we are near the end of an Interglacial Period, in which case these enviro fart-chasers will be irrelevant, and cold.
Not only that, those villians were the direct ancestors to George Bush thus it is George Bushes's fault :)
Just so. The current warming trend fits right in with the historical pattern, so it seems likely that it too is caused by "cyclical shifts in the earth's orbit". (Which is a poor description of the actual phenomena, but it'll do)
The study underlying this article was given a serious beat-down on an extended FR thread yesterday. Even those who believe that there are extraterrestrial climate forcings do not believe that variations in the sun's energy output is important. Instead, solar cycles affect cloud formation through their effect on the amount of ionizing radiation coming from space.
They don't use measurements from the period, they use "surrogates", things which are sensitive to temperature, and which leave a "fossil" record of those things.
OK, lets put out the sun and see what happens.
BTW in the last 60 years industry has decreased its particulate emissions probably close to 90%. Therefore there is a lot more sunlight actually hitting the ground now than there was 100 years ago when everyone was burning unfiltered coal and driving on dirt roads and freely spewing all manner of particulate matter into the air.
Does anyone stop to think that maybe all these modern and very effective smog devices and paved roads are contributing to or causing global warming? We certainly didn't have all this global warming when the smog was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
"We certainly didn't have all this global warming when the smog was so thick you could cut it with a knife."
Right, and we didn't have global warming before the women got the right to vote, either.
I thought his study was on the sun, not human activity. Scientific objectiveness on parade again. Much like, "We've ruled out cancer as a cause of death, and that can only mean its murder."
Yet another group spewing the standard alarmist line. They must have a standard manual of lies.
You're right, the reason the earth warmed is because the Vikings burned so many villages. The burning villages heated the clouds which caused rain to fall instead of snow, and soon the Vikings were growing grapes in Greenland.
With the warm weather, the Vikings found they could employ their slaves to grow grapes and other food. This left time for the Vikings to pursue other activities like counting their loot. Laying about while overseeing slaves, counting loot and ogling maidens was certainly a less dangerous line of work and more pleasurable.
The Vikings pursued this occupation for about 200 years. And since they weren’t burning villages anymore, the clouds didn’t heat up. So the earth stopped warming, the snow returned, the Earth got hit with a 300 year mini-ice age and the marauding Vikings sailed off into history.
Albedo (a measure of earth's reflectivity contolling solar insolation (incidence of sunlight with the surface) varies more more readily to variation in Solar activity effecting changes in the amount of sunlight reaching surface and hence temperature.
Variation of brightness of the sun is not the only variable related to solar activity at work here.
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate
Figure 3: The correlation between cosmic ray flux (orange) as measured in Neutron count monitors in low magnetic latitudes, and the low altitude cloud cover (blue) using ISCCP satellite data set, following Marsh & Svensmark, 2003.
The solar-activity – cosmic-ray-flux – cloud-cover correlation is quite apparent.
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