AGW Today: Damn, Another Skeptic
Posted on February 11, 2009
Where do they keep finding these people with PhD’s? Global warming is not our fault … it’s nature By Jenny Haworth
DR JIM Buckee says he feels like a heretic, persecuted for his views and treated like an outcast. His crime? Being a climate change sceptic.
Next week the former chief executive of the oil and gas firm Talisman, who has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Oxford, will try to convince others that climate change has nothing to do with human activity.
During a lecture at the University of Aberdeen he will argue that, far from warming, the Earth is set to enter a 20-year cooling period. (click the photo for full size. I cleaned the language up for STACLU)
What I would like to know, when I read about a coming cooling period, are we talking about times like the 70’s, when all the media was worried about a coming ice age, or, like during the Little Ice Age?
Dr Buckee believes human behaviour has no effect on the climate and the vast sums spent by governments trying to promote renewable energy to cut greenhouse gas emissions are being wasted.
I’ve written before that I believe Man has some small effect, particularly from agriculture and landfills, not to mention changes in the micro-climate, such as the Urban Island Affect and the clearcutting around Mt. Kilamanjaro. And, to repeat a constant refrain, if the people who believe Man is primarily or solely responsible actually believed that, they would change their own behavior.
Instead of human activities being responsible for the warming climate over the past 100 years, Dr Buckee insists there is a natural explanation, based on the activity of the Sun.
Solar activity can affect the cosmic rays that reach the Earth’s atmosphere, and this in turn affects the climate, he says.
There is probably a bit more then just the Sun, but, it is the primary force for climate. Then you add things like gravity, the moon, volcano’s, and living things.
But, then we get such scaremongering reports such as
- “Birds seem to be heading farther north because of climate change“
- Climate change suspected in loss of salamanders
- Audubon study ties bird migration shift to climate change
- Birds move north; global warming cited
And what they all mean is AGW, not the primarily natural global warming, with the lower case g and w.
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It is fascinating to watch the lack of sunspots at Space Weather.com. Also to watch NOAA and NASA try to explain away why their “models” missed on predicting this extended minimum.
Sunspots are a marker for solar activity and solar winds. Decreased solar activity might lower the incident energy to earth, thus cooling. Decreased solar winds will allow increased cosmic radiation, increasing ionizing radiation, increasing the cloud cover, thus albedo, thus lowering net solar energy to the surface.
Look back at the Maunder and Dalton minimums to see the climate impact of decreased solar activity.
Investment in renewable energy is never a waste, and you’d be quite dumb to say it was.
For more on the Sun’s effect on the climate try- http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/its-sun-stupid.php
Keeping in mind that windmills are hazardous to birds, be wary of the unintended consequences of believing and contributing to the all-knowing environmental lobby groups.
Climate and economy are being linked. Yes there has been warming since the Pleistocene. Climate is a multiple input, multiple loop, multiple output, complex system. The facts and the hypotheses do not support CO2 as a serious ‘pollutant’. In fact it is plant fertilizer and seriously important to all life on the planet. It is the red herring used by the left to unwind our economy. That issue makes the science relevant.
Water vapour (0.4% overall by volume in air, but 1 – 4 % near the surface) is the most effective green house gas followed by methane (0.0001745%). The third ranking greenhouse gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves in cold water and bubbles out of warm water. The equilibrium in seawater is very high; making seawater a great ’sink’; CO2 is 34 times more soluble in water than air is soluble in water.
CO2 has been rising and Earth has been warming. However, the correlation trails. Correlation, moreover, is not causation. The causation is being studied, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome.
“Using a box of air in a Copenhagen lab, physicists traced the growth of clusters of molecules of the kind that build cloud condensation nuclei. These are specks of sulphuric acid on which cloud droplets form. High-energy particles driven through the laboratory ceiling by exploded stars far away in the Galaxy – the cosmic rays – liberate electrons in the air, which help the molecular clusters to form much faster than climate scientists have modeled in the atmosphere. That may explain the link between cosmic rays, cloudiness and climate change.”
As I understand it, the hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center goes as follows:
Quiet sun ? reduced magnetic and thermal flux = reduced solar wind ? geomagnetic shield drops ? galactic cosmic ray flux ? more low-level clouds and more snow ? more albedo effect (more heat reflected) ? colder climate
Active sun ? enhanced magnetic and thermal flux = solar wind ? geomagnetic shield response ? less low-level clouds ? less albedo (less heat reflected) ? warmer climate
That is how the bulk of climate change might work, coupled with (modulated by) sunspot peak frequency there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, the planets cool.
The ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that.
Although the post 60s warming period appears to be over, it has allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with more humidity, clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years. Ancient sedimentary rocks and paleontological evidence indicate the planet has had abundant liquid water over the entire span. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat.
Check the web site of the Danish National Space Center.
http://www.space.dtu.dk/English/Research/Research_divisions/Sun_Climate/Experiments_SC/SKY.aspx
Another one for the worshippers of gaia to sacrifice on the alter of deep ecology proving that the green movment is a new kind of sinister evil infesting our land