Is GW caused primarily by the Sun?

Question

This is an extensive read, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
What do you think?

http://home.earthlink.net/~ponderthemaundercf/id12.html

This was written by a 15 year old girl, but I have seen the basic science in other publications.

gcnp58, If you wish to correct her, she has stated that she will consider comments and make adjustments to her essay where appropriate.

http://home.earthlink.net/~ponderthemaunder/id24.html

Answer 1

The premise for AGW is that a 0.001% increase in CO2 has a drastic effect on the climate that will doom us all. That's the equalivant of saying that a person who earns $100,000/yr is going to have a life changing event if they earn another $1.yr. Or that football will be totally different if you lengthen the field the width of a nickel.

It's a good read, looks complete and well researched. I agree with the premis that the Sun is the source of all warming on Earth.

We shouldn't ignore the posibility of SGW.

Answer 2

Couple of initial comments - I haven't read it all, as you said it is a lengthy piece of work. For a 15 year old this is a remarkably well researched and put together piece of work, I don't agree with it but all the same would give her an A+.

The impression I get is that the young lady who prodced the article doesn't herself have a detailed understanding of the workings of the climatic system and had effectively put together a patchwork by taking pieces from many different sources - a very good one all the same.

For example, at the begining she correlates temp changes with El Nino and La Nina. It's true that there is some correlation but it's not a particularly good one. When you look at the recent Multivariate Enso Index there are peaks and troughs that do not correlate to global temperatures. The mean rise in ENSO activity begins in 1984, 10 years out of synch with the about turn in temp trends.

The correlation, such as it is, only really works for 20 years out of a 127 year data set, which isn't very good.

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Turning instead to your specific question - Is GW caused primarily by the Sun?

The answer is both yes and no.

Yes - because the Sun is the only source of heat this planet has (direct heating that we have caused is so small to be of no concern - 0.003%) and as such all heat can be considered to originate from the Sun.

No - because the mechanism by which heat is retained has been affected by human activities and it's this additional heat retention that is termed global warming.

When we look at Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) we can see that there has been a slight decline in recent decades and if the sun were the sole factor then global temperatures should have fallen. In fact, they've risen faster during this period than at any other time. That in itself is enough to rule out the sun.

However, we can go further and extend our studies into space. If the Sun were the cause of global warming then there must be a solar constant, but there isn't. Again the Sun can be ruled out.

We can also look at the historical record. Here there is a good correlation between solar activity and global temperatures but only in so far as long term trends spanning several centuries are concened. When solar activity peaks or troughs for hundreds of years there is a corresponding rise or fall in temps on Earth. The last time such an event occured was 400 years ago when the solar Maunder Mimimum period of almost no solar acivity was a contributory factor to the Little Ice Age when temps in some parts of the world declined slowly (the correlation isn't all that great as the LIA wasn't exactly global and there were other exacerbating factors involved).

Returning to the present, if the sun was the primary cause of GW we would expect to see a uniform heating but we don't. We would also expect to see predictable seasonal variation with the summer seasons experiencing the most warming, but in actuality it's the exact opposite. So again the Sun can be ruled out.

I won't go further, suffice to say that when it was first noted that the world was warming faster than it should be the sun was obviously seen as the likely cause. It was ruled out very quickly, this was 100 years ago; the same notion has been revisited on many subsequent occasions (it's often set as a paper for climatology students) and nothing to implicate the sun as the primary cause has come to light.

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I know you're an intelligent person so I'd respectfully suggest reading some papers on the role played by greenhouse gases. This shoud provide an understanding of the chemical and physical properties they possess, this will explain just how essential their role is in global warming - both natural and manmade.

Answer 3

Just as a note, the Ponder the Maunder website was written by a high school student as an honors project. It is impressive in that regard but hopelessly naive scientifically.

It makes a lot of sense to those that have only a basic education in the sciences.

Answer 4

No, it's not.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/images/content/93617main_sun4m.jpg
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/600px-Temp-sunspot-co2.svg.png
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6290228.stm

The gal has lots of information, but she doesn't have a very good grasp of much of it. He rehashes the same old '800 year lag' and 'can't explain the '40s-70s cooling' arguments which we've clarified here many times. If you can't understand the basics, how can you develop a theory better than the experts can?

Additionally, if global warming is caused primarily by the Sun, then can you answer this question?

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Ahj_9Ts6XCPlEPR8x0ZiSSPsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20070920110335AAQQ5O0

Answer 5

They have done a study, not speculation on theories based on others data.. but an actual study and can say with some certainty that the sun accounts for 0.2 degrees Celsius of the warming.. no more than that.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070801174450.htm

Answer 6

The idea that it's changes in the Sun that cause global warming seems to be convincingly refuted here (and elsewhere):

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11650
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/FAQ2.html
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=171

A recent article shows that, for the last 20 or so years, solar radiation (which is carefully measured by many people) is going down while temperature is going up. Pretty much demolishes the idea.

"Recent oppositely directed trends in solar
climate forcings and the global mean surface
air temperature"

Lockwood, Frohlich (2007), Proc. R. Soc. A
doi:10.1098/rspa.2007.1880

Most of what's in the article cited in the question is addressed here (and elsewhere, but this is the most direct):

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462

Bottom line: Here's what scientists think. Not from the "liberal" media.

"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

Answer 7

It makes sense to me, unless your believe the drivel from the IPCC report about solar variability, and it's cherry picking of the lowest possible TSI forcing ranges from the 8 reconstructed TSI papers observed. If you look at page 191 of the IPCC below, and look at the ridiculous conclusion from the Solanki and Fligge (1999) paper alone, of 0.68 W/M^2, I think you will understand why so many people of the IPCC religious sect are convinced that it cannot be the sun.

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_Ch02.pdf

If you look at just that one paper there is easily 2 - 6 W/M^2 of TSI variability from the end of the LIA, (figure 2).

http://www.astro.phys.ethz.ch/papers/fligge/solfli_rev.pdf

The IPCC glosses over the GCR connection but clearly acknowledges a correlation with cloud cover and increased GCR flux, so the report does not rule out solar variability as major influence.

The IPCC report makes a complete false statement about UV energy not reaching the surface without any data to support such an outlandish claim.

Answer 8

This guy can come read my blog anytime too. If there was anything to this idea it would have somehow found it's way into the scientific literature. I'll just wait until it does.

Answer 9

But what about global dimming!?

Answer 10

It doesn't matter what's causing it. Libs are just happy that they now can lay out for 40 minutes instead of 1 hour to get a good tan.