How can people still say that global warming is mostly the Sun, when data proves that theory is false?

Question

The scientific theories that global warming is mostly due to the Sun simply don't work. The numbers they come up with are wrong.

Here are good readable introductions to the facts:

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11650
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/FAQ2.html

All the planets are not warming, just a few, for various reasons. For example, on Mars the warming is due to giant dust storms:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/2007/marswarming.html

Data used by solar theory proponents has been shown to be wrong:

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/DamonLaut2004.pdf

And this recent study looked at the Sun from every angle, finding it's clearly not the main cause (media article and original paper):

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL101501320070710?pageNumber=1
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf

Science is about numbers and data. Numbers from the solar theories don't work. Which is why (the key word is QUANTITATIVE):

"There's a better scientific consensus on this [climate change] than on any issue I know... Global warming is almost a no-brainer at this point. You really can't find intelligent, quantitative arguments to make it go away."

Dr. Jerry Mahlman, NOAA

And this is the bottom line (from FoxNews, no less):

"While evidence suggests fluctuations in solar activity can affect climate on Earth, and that it has done so in the past, the majority of climate scientists and astrophysicists agree that the sun is not to blame for the current and historically sudden uptick in global temperatures on Earth, which seems to be mostly a mess created by our own species."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,258342,00.html

eric c - The recent study cited above considered the theory you cite, in detail:

"Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanisms is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified."

Lockwood and Frohlich, Proceedings of the Royal Society, "Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature", 2007

mariposa - quoting from the website you listed - "At the 1974 Vladivistok summit, US and Soviet leaders concluded a secret agreement to promote global warming." That's not credible to me, anyway. At the height of the Cold War, Nixon and Brezhnev got together on this? Chuckling about it over a drink, no doubt?

5_for_fighting - Abdussamatov is clearly cited in the article as the odd man out, a guy who promotes an idea that most all scientists think is nonsense. "As for Abdussamatov's claim that solar fluctuations are causing Earth's current global warming, Charles Long, a climate physicist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in Washington, says the idea is nonsense.

"That's nuts," Long said in a telephone interview. "It doesn't make physical sense that that's the case."

"Scientists" haven't thought the world was flat since any time when it has been reasonable to say there are "scientists." Thousands of years ago Eratosthenes measured the radius of the Earth, and scientists were convinced. The people who believed in a flat Earth were just as unscientific as those who deny man made global warming.

Marc G -

These websites and the article pretty much take Svensmark apart:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/cosmoclimatology-tired-old-arguments-in-new-clothes/
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11651
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/DamonLaut2004.pdf

The "audacity" of which you speak is pretty simple science. The solar indicators are _going the opposite way_ of temperature. No "uncertainty" can change that.

Answer 1

Bob, if someone said the cause of global warming was little green men from a distant galaxy you could be sure it would be repeated over and over again on here as proof that we are not contributing to global warming.

Same with solar variation, you know it's not a contributory factor, all the evidence and scientific reports are on your side but that counts for nothing in the minds of some skeptics.

Answer 2

Well of course they don't. In the whole history of the earth since life evolved the sun has never done anything like what is going on now. Neither has any other natural force. There's a hidden hand behind the opposition, a strong lobby, and I'm sure many paid lobbyists.

Here's the situation. We are not going to save the earth. It's too late. We are not going to same life on the earth either. It's too late for that too. In the remaining time, an effort on a planetary scale MIGHT be able to preserve our species (in terms of a viable gene pool of a few hundred or thousand individuals), and the related species required for our survival. That's the essence of the permaculture movement, but as I said, it's too late to do it here.

With a planetary scale effort a colony that size could conceivably be established on the moon in the time we have left. Maybe(you will notice the powers that be are quietly working on that option).

On the other hand, the powers that be are rich and getting richer. They don't give a damn about your survival, or your grandchildren's. If they can, they'll save the people they want to save, and if they can't they don't care because they'll be dead. They have no belief system beyond themselves.

So it's basically a squabble over resources. If a president had the character to issue a general wakeup call, JFK style (or if people just woke up on their own), immediately all available resources would be devoted to the effort to save our species. The fat cats would no longer be getting fat, or at least the RATE at which they are getting fat would be slowed.

Frankly, I'm about ready to just accept the end. I'm focusing on learning sustainable technology. Things will get real ugly, real soon. The opposition is strong. Gore is not an ally, he's there to detract from the credibility of the science. You have many paid individualy like him. You have those sad folks who think that if you're born with greater natural gifts or had the benefit of a good education that makes you better than other people. They attack any new idea untill they are told it is OK. And you have the thundering herd of the relatively ungifted and uneducated who go along with them. Those people don't have many ideas, and tend to look up to people with a loud voice, or those who speak with the tone of immediate authority (both the sellouts and the elitests).

It's like the Mel Brooks move. The guy says "Does it look bad?" The other guy says "It doesn't look good".

Answer 3

While I think you're right that the Earth goes through natural cycles, I would not dismiss the entire "Global Warming" as complete fallacy either. I would hazard a guess that our current weather patterns are result of a combination of a natural warming cycle *and* a build up of green house gases in the atmosphere. I think it's naive to believe that all the pollutants we pump into the air have 0 effect on the environment ...

Answer 4

I have read this paper. Several times now.

I am looking at figure 4 (d and e specifically) and I see a declining Be level and an increasing temperature anomaly. If I am correct in my understanding that Be isotopes would decrease as cosmic ray flux decreases.

As cosmic rays decrease, cloudiness decreases (by the theory of Svensmark and others) thereby causing warming. It looks like one could just as easily interpret their data as saying cosmic rays are important and have a role, even post 1985.

It also comes back to the models used. The anthropogenic factors (GHG's especially) though well understood may suffer from initial value problems. I can think of a number of factors that may have an affect on the RF equation for well mixed GHG's as given in table 3 of the paper by Myhre (1). These equationa are the radiative forcing equations used by the IPCC as far as I can tell.

1. Not all the GHG molecules will absorb the IR radiation, even if it is the correct wavelength. Absortion efficiency is somewhere less than 100%. There is no accounting for this in the Myhre equation.

2. GHG molecules absorb in specific portions of the IR spectrum, not at all wavelenghts in the spectrum. There does not appear to be any accounting for this in the Myhre equation either.

Both of these factors would tend to reduce IR absorption by the GHG's, there by reducing the RF number for each GHG. This would, in turn, decrease the importance of GHG's in warming.

I find the concluding paragraph in Lockwood and Frohlich to be stunning in its audacity. To say that unknown mechanisms have NO RELEVANCE to the current debate is bold, almost as if they want to see debate closed within some particluar set of boundaries.

Answer 5

You will never be able to educate those who refuse knowledge. Their "minds" are black-holes that destroy any knowledge the gets close.

There has been no scientific debate over global warming and its being the result of human activity for more than 20 years except by those paid to trump up arguments out of whole cloth.

Remember you are dealing with a politically influential group of spoilers who among other things tried to explain away their illegal attacks on black and Native American voters by saying they were forced into it by liberal voter fraud.

You can blame the "liberal" media in large part because they will not air information that might result in advertising revenue losses. Truth has been devalued greatly with the last four poor excuses for federal executives setting the tone.

Answer 6

Funny how you ignore the following statement in the FoxNews article you cite:

"Man-made greenhouse warming has [made a] small contribution [to] the warming on Earth in recent years, but [it] cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance," Abdussamatov told LiveScience in an email interview last week. "The considerable heating and cooling on the Earth and on Mars always will be practically parallel."

Wow, doesn't sound like there is a consensus to me. I thought the debate was over. As you said, science is about facts and proof. And I am not talking about consensus. At one time there was a much larger consensus among scientists. They believed the Earth was flat. I'm sure they had scroll sites that anyone could use to prove their incorrect consensus. Consensus <> fact.

Answer 7

Global warming is "from the sun" as it always has been. The difference is that the atmosphere has become more insulating(not letting the heat escape back into space, due to all the particulate matter(pollution) up there which reflect the heat back to the planet. (like wearing a sweater) The sweater has no heat value, the body (live human)does.
CO2 is one of those gases that works like a sweater.....

Answer 8

They can say it because they have no respect for science. Global warming deniers will go to great lengths to convince themselves that humans are not causing global warming. They'll accept obviously wrong information as fact and they'll dismiss good scientific research as a conspiracy or "junk science".

It's puzzling because you're a rational person, and global warming deniers are irrational.

Answer 9

Global warming is at best a guess. Unless the Eco- Terrorists find a way to really put any kind of Global warming into hyper-drive, I think in 20 years we'll be remembering how wacky those environmentalist really where. It's all about the control and money. I heard that here in the U.S. we have had a cooler than normal summer so far this year because the cool air from the north dipped farther down, And some Scientists said that's because of global warming.

Answer 10

Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, of Carlton University in Ottawa converted from believer in C02 driving the climate change to a skeptic. “I taught my students that CO2 was the prime driver of climate change,” Patterson wrote on April 30, 2007. Patterson said his “conversion” happened following his research on “the nature of paleo-commercial fish populations in the NE Pacific.” “[My conversion from believer to climate skeptic] came about approximately 5-6 years ago when results began to come in from a major NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Strategic Project Grant where I was PI (principle investigator),” Patterson explained. “Over the course of about a year, I switched allegiances,” he wrote. “As the proxy results began to come in, we were astounded to find that paleoclimatic and paleoproductivity records were full of cycles that corresponded to various sun-spot cycles. About that time, [geochemist] Jan Veizer and others began to publish reasonable hypotheses as to how solar signals could be amplified and control climate,”

Notice it is the amplification. The theory as to how is not yet determined, but the empirical evidence is too overwhelming.

When Jan Veizer checked the statistics he found that the earth's oceans had warmed up considerably during the 90's, which would account for the earth warming up, despite solar activity being constant for the last 20 years.

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Edit:
Wow Bob, you mean there is disagreement in the scientific community? Shocking!!

I also noticed that you conveniently ignored the possibility that the earth's warming during the 90's is due to the earth's oceans heating up, in you rebutal.