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If NASA scientists are right, the Thames will be freezing over again.

A

amdx

Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years
Met = UK's National Weather Service

"The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an
inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing
the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to
rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the
Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was
issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of
East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in
world temperatures ended in 1997."

Guess What? There's controversy!

Read more:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ight-Thames-freezing-again.html#ixzz1kx6soAc2

Mikek
 
M

Martin Brown

amdx said:
I'm sorry, did YOU reference wikipedia?
Mikek

You might like to note the fact that the Daily Wail has just been
awarded the 2011 Orwellian Prize for Journalistic Misrepresentation.

http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2012/01/2011-orwellian-prize-for-journalistic.html

They score incredibly badly on scientific accuracy. Setting a new all
time record for printing gibberish with their winning entry in 2011.

I suggest you go back to the original publication rather than rely on
their wilfully misleading selective misquoting of the actual research.

Regards,
Martin Brown
 
M

Martin Brown

John said:
Since the sun warms the earth, and sunspots indicate something serious
going on with the sun, there's a chance the sunspot-temperature thing
is actually causal.

Sunspots have been visible ever since people first started looking at
the sky. Naked eye sunspots are recorded by Chinese astronomers.

A more quantitative index vy Wolf of Zurich goes back nearly 150 years.
The Hale cycles are fairly well predictable and despite what you may
read in the rightard press the sun is really quite active at the moment.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3869753.stm

http://www.space.com/14387-biggest-solar-flare-2012-radiation-storm.html

Now is a relatively good time to go aurora watching or buy an H-alpha
solar prominence telescope. There is plenty to see on the sun.

Regards,
Martin Brown
 
J

Joerg

Bill said:
O.5C is small, and the variation of +/-0.1% in solar radiance is also
small and basically cyclic. There's one entertaining sentence on that
web-site "Their results also suggest that the sensitivity of climate
to the effects of solar irradiance is about 27% higher than its
sensitivity to forcing by greenhouse gases" which is as fine an
example of meaningless nonsense as you could hope to find.

The effect of a 0.2% chance in solar radiance is about 27% higher than
some totally unspecified change in greenhouse gas concentration?

English may not be your mother-tongue, but you should be able to spot
weasel-wording by now.

I did, in the climategate emails :)
 
M

Martin Brown

John said:
And how do you know that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot#Physics

"Although the details of sunspot generation are still a matter of
research, it appears that sunspots are the visible counterparts of
magnetic flux tubes in the Sun's convective zone that get "wound up"
by differential rotation. If the stress on the tubes reaches a certain
limit, they curl up like a rubber band and puncture the Sun's surface.
Convection is inhibited at the puncture points; the energy flux from
the Sun's interior decreases; and with it surface temperature."

It takes around a hundred thousand years for a photon from a nuclear
reaction at the centre of the sun to make it to the surface. Effectively
a diffusion style random walk in a highly scattering plasma medium.

Sunspots merely tweak the effective transport properties of the
relatively shallow uppermost surface layer slightly.

Although it is true that the *sunspots* are cooler than the main
photosphere there is one crucial point you are missing. The sun on
average is mostly *brighter* when there are lots sunspots visible as the
lost output from the spots themselves is more than compensated for by
the much larger areas of bright faculae that accompany them. An active
sun is a brighter sun this is not in dispute and is included in all the
climate models. The effect of the sunspot cycle variation in TSI of 0.1%
on the global climate is however right at the limits of detection.

You cannot blame the sun for all the recent warming - the satellite data
rules out magically making the sun brighter.

Regards,
Martin Brown
 
J

Joerg

Bill said:
There wasn't a lot of weasel wording in the climategate e-mails - the
researchers involved were talking privately, and didn't hesitate to
call a spade a spade. There was a lot of weasel wording in the
commentary on it.

I bought and read Fred Pearce's "The Climate Files"

http://www.amazon.com/Climate-Files-Battle-Global-Warming/dp/0852652291

He exonerates the scientists involved from dishonesty, but is unhappy
about the enthusiasm they displayed in getting rid of a denialist
editor on a journal that published a really bad paper that was useful
to the denialist propaganda machine. What he doesn't seem to realise
was that what motivated them was more that the editor had ignored the
advice of no less than four referees to not publish what really was a
very bad paper, rather than the fact that the paper was useful to
denialists - like most British science reporters Fred Pearce was never
trained as a scientist nor inculcated with the idea that scientific
literature is the basis of all scientific knowledge.

Bill, this has all been discussed here ad nauseam. You seem to stick to
your conspiracy theories, and I don't believe them.
 
J

John Devereux

Joerg said:
Bill, this has all been discussed here ad nauseam. You seem to stick to
your conspiracy theories, and I don't believe them.

Leaving the merits of the argument aside - a conspiracy theory would be
where you think all the experts in the field are wrong, suppressing
evidence and so forth. If this is what you think, then surely it is
*you* that believes in a conspiracy theory, not Bill?

E.g., you presumably think the "climategate" scientists were engaged in
a "conspiracy" to defraud the public or some such?
 
J

Joerg

John said:
Leaving the merits of the argument aside - a conspiracy theory would be
where you think all the experts in the field are wrong, suppressing
evidence and so forth. If this is what you think, then surely it is
*you* that believes in a conspiracy theory, not Bill?

Bill believes everything that opposes his climate panic is sponsored by
Exxon Mobil. He has put that in writing many times, right here in the
NG. To me that is like the mother of all conspiracy theories.

E.g., you presumably think the "climategate" scientists were engaged in
a "conspiracy" to defraud the public or some such?

No, I just think that some of them were rather dishonest and have
exhibited ethically questionable behavior. It does not matter whether
the emails were "believed to be private", it is unbecoming for a
scientist to write such words and has damaged the credibility of some of
the scientists beyond repair. This is merely an observation when talking
to others about climate change.
 
J

Joerg

Phil said:
That's pretty amusing--you're way outside your field, Bill, and it
shows. You've shot yourself in the foot again.

It seems by now we should have a staffed position here at s.e.d. ... a
foot surgeon :)

If basing a claim on the excellent agreement between physics-based
models and the best available observations isn't scientific, that sort
of knocks the pins out from under your climate research friends, even on
your showing.

Stellar structure calculations based on hydrostatic equilibrium have
been made since Kelvin, and with appropriately tweaked values for the
solar composition, they model the life cycle of main sequence stars
pretty well.
Schwarzschild's classic book on stellar structure was published in the
1950s, and we were still using it as a textbook in the 1980s.

My stellar structure prof at UBC, Dr. Jason Auman, was one of the first
to make a full numerical model of the Sun, back in the early 1960s when
that was hard. (Back in the day they used the photosphere to infer the
initial composition, and ran the nucleosynthesis model to figure out how
it changes with time. Progress has probably been made, but I haven't
followed it very closely.) The boundary condition used in the early
models was that the photosphere temperature was absolute zero--that
perturbed the luminosity calculation only a little.

So the previous received wisdom on the constancy of the solar constant
wasn't poorly supported at all. It was supported about as well as
anything in astronomy, and quite a bit better than anything in
climatology. It was just wrong, at least in detail. That's how science
advances.

I guess according to Bill solar activity changes are an invention of
Exxon Mobil :)

<snicker>
 
T

Tom Del Rosso

John said:
Since the sun warms the earth, and sunspots indicate something serious
going on with the sun, there's a chance the sunspot-temperature thing
is actually causal.

Even if it's not the sun, the Earth itself must have lots of mechanisms with
self-induced oscillation.
 
M

Martin Brown

Phil said:
That's pretty amusing--you're way outside your field, Bill, and it
shows. You've shot yourself in the foot again.

If basing a claim on the excellent agreement between physics-based
models and the best available observations isn't scientific, that sort
of knocks the pins out from under your climate research friends, even on
your showing.

Stellar structure calculations based on hydrostatic equilibrium have
been made since Kelvin, and with appropriately tweaked values for the
solar composition, they model the life cycle of main sequence stars
pretty well.

Although you should remember here that Kelvin used a model of the sun to
prove that no known fuel could possibly power the sun over geological
timescales and so used it as a stick to beat Darwin over the head with.
Young Earth Creationism was obviously correct - modern historians neatly
airbrush this out and state that Lord Kelvin anticipated nuclear energy.
Schwarzschild's classic book on stellar structure was published in the
1950s, and we were still using it as a textbook in the 1980s.

My stellar structure prof at UBC, Dr. Jason Auman, was one of the first
to make a full numerical model of the Sun, back in the early 1960s when
that was hard. (Back in the day they used the photosphere to infer the
initial composition, and ran the nucleosynthesis model to figure out how
it changes with time. Progress has probably been made, but I haven't
followed it very closely.) The boundary condition used in the early
models was that the photosphere temperature was absolute zero--that
perturbed the luminosity calculation only a little.

So the previous received wisdom on the constancy of the solar constant
wasn't poorly supported at all. It was supported about as well as
anything in astronomy, and quite a bit better than anything in
climatology. It was just wrong, at least in detail. That's how science
advances.

But it was only very slightly wrong. It was historically stated as fact
that the suns output was constant in Abetti's classic "The Sun" in 1934.

The solar constant was demonstrably reliable over all of geological time
as the Earth had liquid water over all of that time so we can put bounds
on the prevailing equatorial temperature at Earth of >273 and <373.
Taking todays global average as a nice round 300 that allows you -10% to
+25% slop in temperature and so using T^4 -35% to +144% in solar flux.
(in fact you get more slop on the cold side as prehistoric atmospheres
were CO2/CH4 rich with GHG until plants polluted the planet with oxygen)
And even if it froze completely with a gradually increasing solar output
and/or a bit of lucky vulcanism you eventually get back to a goldilocks
position - not so reversable if you boil the oceans off into atmosphere
as greenhouse effects then dominate and you end up with Venus.

It wasn't until computer simulation codes became possible and reliable
in the mid-60's that the early details of stellar evolution could be
determined. BTW I thought it was Icko Iben at UIUC who led on this.

The solar models for the sun gave something like 2.8x10^33 erg/s and
r=6.6x10^10 cm at zero age main sequence and a current value 3.90x10^33
erg/s and r=6.94x10^10cm for our sun (astronomy was cgs back then). In
astronomy and over billions of years that is pretty much a constant
output with a tiny systematic trend of +40% over 5 billion years.

It pales into insignificance when you compare it with the +/- 10% annual
variation of insolation that variations in the Earth's orbital elements
can produce as orbital eccentricity, perihelion and inclination to the
ecliptic vary.

Regards,
Martin Brown
 
T

Tom Del Rosso

Bill said:
Before you get too enthusiastic about using the Maunder Minimum to
explain the Little Ice Age, you may want to read

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2011GL050168.shtml

which explains it in terms of no less than four substantial volcanic
eruptions which produced significant and sustained growth in the
northern ice cap.

So how big a factor is the low level of volcanism since Krakatoa?

BTW, what do you think of Lomborg?
 
M

Martin Brown

Phil said:
I hadn't forgotten, I was just talking about hydrostatic equilibrium.
And whatever the merits of Darwin's work (his reputation in
philosophical circles is not very high just now AIUI), he was personally
a bit of a git. (The Geological Society produced a fair number of those
round about that time--if you haven't read Martin Rudwick's book, "The
Great Devonian Controversy", I highly recommend it. A classic of the
history of science, and enormous fun besides.)

Some of Darwin's supporters were worse and cartoonists had a field day!

But his basic hypothesis and the observational foundation was sound.
That's a bit of an overstatement, I think. In broad averages, the
hydrostatic solution has to work--there's nothing that's going to change
the mass of a proton or the charge on an electron, and the calculation
of luminosity on the basis of stellar mass and composition is pretty
fundamental stuff. (You can argue about the treatment of metals, but
that's a second order effect anyway.) So over timescales comparable or
longer than the thermal time constant of the Sun, I entirely agree.

I'd be wary of claiming universal constancy of output from stars in all
cases. A proportion of stars are variable and some like Cepheids and RR
Lyrae have periods that are determined by their absolute luminosity. The
solution may be OK on average but if it bounces around the equilibrium
it doesn't have to be constant. They provide excellent standard candles
for local galaxies now as Henrietta Lovett first observed. For anyone
interested:

http://www.astronomynotes.com/ismnotes/s5.htm

And even when we think we know how they behave there are still minor
twists and turns.

http://www.astronomy.com/News-Obser...tandard candle not so standard after all.aspx

And the sun itself is a bit quirky when you really look up close with
modern instruments. I can't find the latest but this will do:

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/Helioseismology.shtml
But the topic came up in regards to things like the Maunder minimum,
which was only 300 years ago. That's long compared with the acoustic
timescale, but short compared with the thermal time scale. Our
satellite data span what, 10% of the time since then? I'm not saying
that I have a good mechanism for larger variations, but who knows? Stars
do funny things sometimes.

No disagreement there and on the face of it there is now evidence that
lack of sunspots and consequent changes in UV output can alter the
position of the jetstream making Northern Europe colder in winter. Not
necessarily global cooling but locallised in highly populated areas.

There is no doubt that an active sun also fluffs up and dumps energy
into the thermosphere (mainly causing extra drag on satellites) but it
might also play a very small part in warming the Earth. The pure TSI
change on its own is too small to explain the periodic variation in
temperature so some additional feedback must occur on the Earth.

But the recent warming occurred during a period where there was good
satellite monitoring of TSI so magic hand waving will not hack it.
Jason got his Ph.D. in 1965, for doing a reasonably complete numerical
model of the Sun. I'm sure there were a fair number of people
involved--it was one of the pressing problems of the day. I haven't
seen his thesis, or read any of the other folks' stuff. I was mostly
passing on content from the class. (It was my favourite astronomy
class, closely followed by celestial mechanics.)

I rather liked the idea that more massive stars burn much faster.
Essentially since a bigger volume inside them met the conditions for
fusion and the surface area for light to escape from scales as r^2.
The measured changes do, I agree, but the very short data set we have
available doesn't prove that the Maunder minimum wasn't associated with
a century or two of lower solar output. Annual variation is too fast
and equinoctial procession is too slow to fit. Anyway, that wasn't what
I was mostly on about.

I agree there is a distinct possibility that some of what we see as
climate change on Earth is due to changes in the sun (roughly about half
of what has been observed since 1850). Certainly during the Maunder
minimum there is a real possibility that solar TSI was lower although
Keeling and Whorf offer another explantion that I personally find more
appealing - that the tidal influence of the Sun-Moon-Earth system has
certain key periodicities which seem to be reflected in climate data.

http://www.pnas.org/content/94/16/8321.abstract

Whilst I have technical reservations about parts of their analysis
(notably how they isolated the decadal variation) I think they might be
onto something. Unfortunately the non-linear coupled oceanic circulation
model folk are all in vogue to explain this at the moment.
Mostly I was subjecting Bill to mild ridicule for saying that it was
unscientific to believe stellar models, when he believes climate models,
which contain far more in the way of fudge factors and parameter fitting.

Although they do include adjustable parameters you must know as well as
I do that in astrophysics it is just the same but you don't get many
fossil fuel lobbyists complaining about relativistic jets in distant
galaxies, cold dark matter or dark energy. I find the latter much harder
to accept since it was discovered long after my involvement. YMMV

Regards,
Martin Brown
 
J

josephkk

It's not dogma - what I'm saying is based on the available scientific
evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma

Dogma "is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged
from, by the practitioners or believers."

Scientific evidence is fairly authoritative, but it is regularly
doubted, and disputed, and can be diverged from if you have better
counter-evidence, so it isn't dogma.

John Larkin's problem is that he treats denialist propaganda, which
purports to doubt and dispute the scientific evidence, as if it was
dogma.


"Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization[1]."
AGW is the established belief for your particular religious group, so much so that you ignore all evidence which conflicts with it and try to pretend you are the only scientific ones. There is no science but your science.
Here is an even better definition:
a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds (Merriam-Webster)
You could learn something from King Canute. People have to be incredibly egotistical and semi-hysterical to believe they can determine the climate.

Target approved, bomb away.

?-)
 
R

Raveninghorde

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