Is Global Warming Unstoppable?

EXACTLY! Our good fortune. As I've stated before in another thread, until man can control the Earth's deep ocean currents and cyclical solar activity he cannot control the Earth's natural warming and cooling.

Al Gore is from the government and here to help. The Big Gov. attitude is: If it moves, tax it, if it keeps moving regulate it. And if it stops moving subsidize it.

Follow the money. Al Gore is a professional politician (PP). He saw an opportunity to make $$ and took it. So.. became a defacto Capitalist. Be afraid if these anthropocentric global warmers led by PPs start printing $$ in the True Belief they can set the earth's
thermostat; at what temp.?

Plant more green stuff to reduce CO2. How about sugar cane for my Prius.

 

EXACTLY! Our good fortune. As I've stated before in another thread, until man can control the Earth's deep ocean currents and cyclical solar activity he cannot control the Earth's natural warming and cooling.

Al Gore is from the government and here to help. The Big Gov. attitude is: If it moves, tax it, if it keeps moving regulate it. And if it stops moving subsidize it.

Follow the money. Al Gore is a professional politician (PP). He saw an opportunity to make $$ and took it. So.. became a defacto Capitalist. Be afraid if these anthropocentric global warmers led by PPs start printing $$ in the True Belief they can set the earth's
thermostat; at what temp.?

Plant more green stuff to reduce CO2. How about sugar cane for my Prius.

 

What else is there to say? Ok I'll say it. There is no cooling. There is no lack of warming. The world is going to agree to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

That's it. End of story. All the stuff you post does nothing to change any of that.

I don't need to say anything else now do I? Unlike you, I don't have to convince anyone of something completely outrageous.

You might as well be trying to say the earth is flat or the moon is made of cheese.

The only reason you pretend to argue climate science is not because you really understand and/or doubt the science, it's because you see this issue as an ideological attack on your political world view.

There can be no small government in a world that needs to and will combat climate change. And that drives you nuts. Admit it.

 

Solar irradiance due to sun spot activity is a much smaller force than that attributed to greenhouse gases and other natural forces. I still say that sunspots are a contributor to both cooling and warming but the effect is generally minor compared to other stronger forcings. Science has never stated that CO2 is the only factor in warming or cooling of the planet. One must look at the "fingerprints" of the force they are using to explain wamring or cooling though. We know we are taking in more energy than is outgoing so where is this heat going? If we try to attribute heating in the atmosphere on oceanic thermal output (as opposed to greenhouse gases) then we would see ocean temperature cooling but we don't see that fingerprint. If we want to attribute the warming to solar irradiance that is fine but since we have data for incoming and outgoing radiation we find that the calculations lead to a result that rules out solar variability. Am I making sense here? My point is you need to show some type of evidence for the warming or cooling by looking at the physical mechanisms and the fingerprints.

I don't think you can make that statement based on scientific evidence. If you feel otherwise then I suggest you bolster the statement by showing us exactly how CO2 is a minimal contributor to global climate change.

 

I believe it is when the trend is still upwards in the long term while CO2 continues to climb and the other natural forcings do not explain the warming.

I agree with you. I don't like seeing that either.

Do you want to graph this for me? I'm stuck at work writing reports. lol




Sensationalist nonsense.[/QUOTE]

 

If the co2 theory is correct and we are near a tipping point, what has been proposed in copenhagen that will have any effect whatsoever. What good did Kyoto do? Not one country made their committment and nothing was done.
To curb Carbon emissions to the degree that Al Gore, Jim Hansen and co say is needed, fossil fuel burning would have to end tomorrow, population controls would have to be instituted, and a combination of wind power, solar and nuclear energy would have to slowly take over for the the lack of fossil fuels. Everything being proposed in Copenhagen would have almost 0 effect and just make government larger and more powerful.

 

This chart which includes the MWP, the LIA and current warming trends has been posted many, many times:

 

Here's another article that I won't comment on except to say I agree with this statement:

The Truth Behind the Leaked Climate-Change E-Mails - TIME

 

I guess only time will tell, but Copenhagen will end with no meaningful agreements just a lot of back-patting.

Climate Change legislation is dead in the US for Obama unless he can stand his ground in the 2010 mid-term elections which will be no small feat. The Senate will not do anything on climate Change right now and if the house vote was today on climate change it would be easily defeated also.

Public opinion has changed drasticlly on this over the last month, if yo uwant proof, just look at the verbage Tom Freidman uses in the NYT today, even he has doubts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=1

 

Public opinion up till now has reflected price at the pump. I didn't say it makes sense, I'm only saying that in this case US stupidity can align again with reason.

Rejecting any Copenhagen agreements because they are too little does not make sense. Every cut will lessen climate change over time. Is this to be the new repub argument -- we delayed too long, so lets do nothing now ? I can't say I haven't been expecting it.

 

Yep, and it has the false hockey stick in it. The hockey stick does not reflect reality and it really is deceiving to keep posting it.

If you erase the hockey stick the entire chart is no more alarming than a snowy day in the winter.

If the current absence of sunspots is enough to contribute to the 8-9 years of cooling/reduced temperatures, then the presence of them is sure enough to warm the earth.

Consider the graphic below.



I see a medieval maximum of sunspots that seem to coincide with the medieval warm period. And a minimum of sunspots that coincide with the LIA. For a big ball of gas that rely on for, well, pretty much everything, I think we may be giving it too little credit for input into our climate.

In fact, and I'm sure I'll be flamed to hell for doing this, but I took the sunspot graph, flipped it horizontally to make the x axis go from older to newer, and then pasted it on top of the hockey stick that Alric posted. The image is below.



The average temperature of the earth pretty well reflects the solar output. I know my photoshop skills are not science and this proves nothing, but it sure is a pretty good match up.

What fingerprints do we have that say CO2 is causing our current warming more-so than solar irradiance and other natural factors? Not arguing, genuinely asking.

I believe Alric's graph, minus the bogus hockey stick, will suffice. I can not find a website that has data that far back that will allow me to plot a trend line. The woodforthetrees.org only has instrument data.

To be honest, the more I read and learn about this stuff, I am really interested in what was going on in the MWP and the LIA. Great changes in temperature with virtually no input from man. As they say, history repeats itself.

 

What exactly is wrong about the instrumentally measured hockey stick except that you don't like it.

 

Yep, that is one of the many fallback positions. Over the past two decades the original arguments have been systematically disproven. So now they will go from saying CO2 has no measurable impact on global temperatures to saying we can't reduce CO2 emissions enough to prevent dire consequences.

I'm reminded of Dubya/Cheney's "Energy Policy" statement that "efficiency is not the answer." Actually, it is. It begins and ends there, particularly with population growth.

 

Because solar irradiance has a lower RF value I do not feel that it is a main driver that will determine current trends. In the past solar irradiance forcing could have played a larger role in global climate due to lower CO2 levels. Imagine yourself pushing a car. If you push hard you can move the car. If the driver in the car starts to press on the gas pedal the car will start moving a bit faster. As he continues to press down on the pedal there will reacha point where your input becomes relatively insignificant. Assuming you could run as fast as you want then you could contrinue pushing the car but your input would not really have a large effect on the car's speed. Besides, the calulations based on incoming solar radation and outgoing longwave radiation tells us that we have not experienced enough added incoming shortwave radiation to explain the heating of the planet. I added citations for that in my post I linked to below.

The graph is really difficult to read and we cannot really take it seriously but I give you an A for effort man. The consensus is that solar irradiance stopped having a "significant" impact on global climate in the 1970s (Usoskin et al. 2005).

Partial Abstract from another paper (Foukal et al. 2006):

Variations in the Sun's total energy output (Luminosity) are caused by changing dark (sunspot) and bright sturcuturs on the solar disk during the 11 year sunspot cycle. The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years.

See my post #80 on page 8. I know you're not arguing mate. The short answer is that solar irradiance has a much smaller RF .12 W m-2 (radiative forcing value) than CO2 at 1.66 W m-2. I made the irrandiance agurment just to illustrate that it is a factor but I believe it is generally less of an effect than CO2 at high levels.

 

Alric only has a capital A, and there are no full stops between each letter.
Always happy to help.

 

I haven't looked at what you asked me to look at yet. But I find it hard to buy - that a maximum of solar irradiance could cause the MWP, and a minimum of it could cause the LIA, but we can't attribute it for the warming we are experiencing as we come out of a LIA, despite that we have a (in a trend) maximum of solar irradiation again.

Edit: Or, to say that *natural forces* could cause the MWP and the LIA, but now we exclude them from the picture. We are coming out of the LIA, warming will occur.

 

Update:

Ah, I see the point you were trying to make. According to that paper, the warming and cooling basically were in step with the solar output, except in the last 30 years, when warming outpaced the solar irradiance.

Very interesting!!!

Thank you for showing this to me, F8L. You are a true gentleman.

Edit: I do wonder about the validity of the paper, if they had an agenda when writing it, and if the warming is really outpacing the solar irradiance, etc. I have so many questions but my fiance is telling me to come to bed. Have sex or learn more?? ARghh

 

*EDIT* I posted before I saw your Update response radioprius

Remember that I stated that CO2 levels were much lower then and smaller radiative forcings could be more noticeable. I propose that if CO2 levels had stayed the same then we would be able to track solar irradiance and temperature graphs that show solar irradiance does have an effect but since we are adding a much stronger force in the way of CO2 then that signal is now lost. Many of the papers I link actually show this to be true up until 1975 or the mid 1980s.

Since the 11-year cycle amplitude has increased from the Maunder Minimum to the present, the total irradiance increase to the present-day cycle mean is 0.08%. From 1750 to the present there was a net 0.05% increase in total solar irradiance, according to the 11-year smoothed total solar irradiance time series of Y. Wang et al. (2005). IPCC AR4 section: 2.7.1.2.2

 

You're welcome man. As for your dilemma.... I know what I would do.

 

If it helps any, there are many papers on the subject from different and multiple authors. I can link more if you would like. The section to the IPCC report I linked to has the citations listed in the body as well.

Despite all the media hype and the poor etiquette displayed by Mann and Jones et al. I do not think all climate scientists act with hidden agendas. I know and work with too many biologists, botanists and geologists that are strict with their scientific work to think otherwise. Not saying their are no crooked scientists but I do give them the respect until they prove otherwise.