Its the sun, stupid...

[The Natural Philosopher]

another climate change theory crawls into the sunlight..literally.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , The Natural Philosopher escribió:

Rather mangled English, but the author seems to be saying that climate change is the result of cyclic variations in solar activity, which seems plausible enough.

Your use of "crawls into" suggests you're not convinced?

[Martin Brown]

Some of it obviously is about the sun. Roughly half of the change since about 1880 is due to changes in total solar irradiation, but the fact remains that you cannot balance the books after about 1970 without including GHG forcing. The other half of the warming occurred in the last three decades of the previous century. Even climate sceptics admit that - at least the ones with any scientific credibility do.

Without commenting on the author you might find this article on sunspot number and the quirks of its observational determination interesting:

The discontinuity in Zurich sunspot number where the observer changes is problematic. It also shows all the other proxies and their range(s).

[Nightjar]

The Russians have been pushing sunspot activity as the driver of climate change for at least a decade. They were the only ones to predict that global temperature would not continue to rise. Of course, if they are right, we are heading for a serious cooling instead.

Colin Bignell

[dennis]

8<

That is just plain wrong. You can balance the books by using GHG forcing but there is little to prove that it is the forcing balancing the books.

You can't even be sure there is any balancing needed as the solar measurements from early on aren't very precise. It may account for all the variation but as there are plenty of other unknown or not well known mechanisms I wouldn't claim it does.

[dennis]

Its been known about for well over a decade. Its just dismissed by those that want CO2 to be the problem. After all they can't get any cash to fix the sun like they can to "fix" CO2.

It must be fairly obvious that virtually all the research is into things where the fix makes money for someone and very little into mechanisms where we can't do anything.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well its got more going for it than carbon dioxide..but yep. I stay skeptical about *all* these ideas.

[Brian Gaff]

as the solar system travels around the galaxy it encounters areas where there is more matter than elsewhere, but as far as I've been able to discover, the fluctuations due to this and the suns natural cycles are not big enough to have created the many ice ages and hot periods from history. The best guess so far is the precession effect, ie wobbling top effect of the tilt of the Earths axis and the drag of the tides moving the moon furrther away and lengthening the days However there is a lot of stored co2 and one has to recall that at the beginning when oxygen was being increased by plant life things reached a stage where fires started by natural causes could not be put out and this destroyed a lot of the oxygen creation, then co2 started to increas as animals appeared. a lot of the co2 is locked up under permafrost but as the earth warms each time this melts and more co2 gets released etc. The whole thing is very unstable.

Brian

[whisky-dave]

They are long term wether conditions still going on today, the last one ending about 12,000 years ago.

The days are still lebghening and teh moons still moving away but to such a small degree it's mostley irrelivant to anything.

Where did that CO2 come from ?

It depends on many things and is reasonabley stable and has been since the last iceage.

>

[Nightjar]

That rather depends upon whether you choose to use the NASA data, which, after numerous adjustments, shows that temperatures are climbing, or the RSS, which shows a slight decline or the UAH data, which shows no change since 1998.

The fact that the period 1950-1980 was unusually cold (and, coincidentally that is the period that NASA has chosen to compare modern temperatures to) is relevant to that.

Does this sound familiar?

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

That was a US Weather Bureau report from 1922

Colin Bignell

[Bill Wright]

I think you're making it out to be far more complicated than it really is. Surely it's just that sometimes the sun goes in, or goes behind a tree.

Bill

[whisky-dave]

Ah that's why there's so few trees in the artic/antartic, no where for the sun to hide :)

[polygonum]

Odd phraseology. If they are growing...

[Andy Champ]

Standard for the time and the country. Not the same as modern English. Read that as "becoming".

Andy

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Nightjar escribió:

"Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters"

in 1922?

[polygonum]

[Nightjar]

The US Fisheries Commission vessel Albatross set a record for a survey depth of 4,137 fathoms (c 7,500m) in during its 1899-1900 expedition.

Colin Bignell

[Steve Firth]

"The first instrument used for deep-sea investigation was the sounding weight, used by British explorer Sir James Clark Ross.[2] With this instrument, he reached a depth of 3,700 m (12,140 ft) in 1840."

Wikipedia, but accords with my memory of similar statements made about deep sea exploration in an Encyclopedia dated 1929 that Mr Trickett, a friend of my grandmother, gave to me because he knew I liked reading.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Of course. Lead on a rope A LONG rope.

[soup]

The fires? Started by lightening strikes or sun focused through rain drops or...