Breaking News: The Sun Causes The Earth To Warm

Duh…. Why do we have to keep explaining this?

Solar Cycle 24 Still Setting Records

The ice age is looking a lot more likely than any warming at all. As always Watts Up With That? Has all the details.

Spotless

Out of the numbered solar cycles, #24 is now in 7th place. Only 5, 6, and 7 of the Dalton Minimum and cycles 12, 14, and 15 of the Baby Grand Minimum had more spotless days.  Since we’ve now beaten cycle #13, we are clearly now competitive with the Baby Grand minimum.

Here’s a table of how the NOAA panel’s new SC#24 prediction is doing:

November 2008:  predicted = 1.80, actual = 1.67 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 83.7)
December 2008:  predicted = 1.80, actual = 1.69 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 84.7)
January 2009:  predicted = 2.10, actual = 1.71 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 73.2)
February 2009: predicted = 2.70, actual = 1.67 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 55.6)
March 2009: predicted = 3.30, actual = 1.97 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 53.8)

April would require the October data which is still very incomplete.  If this analysis intrigues you, I’d be happy to keep you updated on it.  Please also find a couple of  interesting graphs attached as images.

The Graphs are HERE.

Solar Cycle 24 May Be Starting

Well dang, it’s about time. Watt’s Up With That? has the details.

Leif Svalgaard has been saying for sometime now that Solar Cycle 24 seems to be getting underway. Seeing sunspot group 1024 today, I’m tending to agree.

The magnetic polarity (seen on the SOHO magnetogram)  of the spot group combined with the middle latitude indicates it is a cycle 24 spot.

From Spaceweather.com

The most active sunspot of the year so far is emerging in the sun’s southern hemisphere: movie. Sunspot 1024 has at least a dozen individual dark cores and it is crackling with B-class solar flares. This morning, amateur astronomer David Tyler caught one of the flares in action from his backyard solar observatory in England:

Read the whole thing here.

NASA: Solar Cycles Responsible For Warming/Cooling

NASA has almost come to it’s senses. They come to the conclusion that the sun actually causes the warming and cooling of the earth, not man. Except this time. It seems they have to pay homage to the Cult by saying all other warming and cooling since the industrial revolution was caused by the solar cycles, except the most recent one, which of course was caused by evil, greedy capitalists.

Report indicates solar cycle has been impacting Earth since the Industrial Revolution

Some researchers believe that the solar cycle influences global climate changes.  They attribute recent warming trends to cyclic variation.  Skeptics, though, argue that there’s little hard evidence of a solar hand in recent climate changes.

Now, a new research report from a surprising source may help to lay this skepticism to rest.  A study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland looking at climate data over the past century has concluded that solar variation has made a significant impact on the Earth’s climate.  The report concludes that evidence for climate changes based on solar radiation can be traced back as far as the Industrial Revolution.

Past research has shown that the sun goes through eleven year cycles.  At the cycle’s peak, solar activity occurring near sunspots is particularly intense, basking the Earth in solar heat.  According to Robert Cahalan, a climatologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, “Right now, we are in between major ice ages, in a period that has been called the Holocene.”

Past studies have shown that sunspot numbers correspond to warming or cooling trends. The twentieth century has featured heightened activity, indicating a warming trend. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Solar activity has shown a major spike in the twentieth century, corresponding to global warming. This cyclic variation was acknowledged by a recent NASA study, which reviewed a great deal of past climate data. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Thomas Woods, solar scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder concludes, “The fluctuations in the solar cycle impacts Earth’s global temperature by about 0.1 degree Celsius, slightly hotter during solar maximum and cooler during solar minimum.  The sun is currently at its minimum, and the next solar maximum is expected in 2012.”

According to the study, during periods of solar quiet, 1,361 watts per square meter of solar energy reaches Earth’s outermost atmosphere.  Periods of more intense activity brought 1.4 watts per square meter (0.1 percent) more energy.

While the NASA study acknowledged the sun’s influence on warming and cooling patterns, it then went badly off the tracks.  Ignoring its own evidence, it returned to an argument that man had replaced the sun as the cause current warming patterns.  Like many studies, this conclusion was based less on hard data and more on questionable correlations and inaccurate modeling techniques.

The inconvertible fact, here is that even NASA’s own study acknowledges that solar variation has caused climate change in the past.  And even the study’s members, mostly ardent supports of AGW theory, acknowledge that the sun may play a significant role in future climate changes. Source

Do Not Fear Global Warming

Warmer weather is better for humans, animals and vegetation. It is the cold that has wiped out civilizations.

American Thinker has this article about the coming ice age. The Global Warming Cult would benefit by listening to some facts.

Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk.  In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt.  But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years.  So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously.  On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides.  In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds.

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth’s climate has been an ice age.  Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago.  It began instantaneously.  For a hundred-thousand years, temperatures fell and sheets of ice a mile thick grew to envelop much of North America, Europe and Asia.  The ice age ended nearly as abruptly as it began.  Between about 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the temperature in Greenland rose more than 50 °F.

We don’t know what causes ice ages to begin or end.  In 1875, a janitor turned geologist, James Croll, proposed that small variations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun were responsible for climate change.  This idea enjoyed its greatest heyday during the 1970s, when ocean sediment cores appeared to confirm the theory.  But in 1992, Ike Winograd and his colleagues at the US Geological Survey falsified the theory by demonstrating that its predictions were inconsistent with new, high-quality data.

The climate of the ice ages is documented in the ice layers of Greenland and Antarctica.  We have cored these layers, extracted them, and studied them in the laboratory.  Not only were ice ages colder than today, but the climates were considerably more variable.  Compared to the norm of the last million years, our climate is remarkably warm, stable and benign.  During the last ice age in Greenland abrupt climatic swings of 30 °F were common.  Since the ice age ended, variations of 3 °F are uncommon.

For thousands of years, people have learned from experience that cold temperatures are detrimental for human welfare and warm temperatures are beneficial.  From about 1300 to 1800 AD, the climate cooled slightly during a period known as the Little Ice Age.  In Greenland, the temperature fell by about 4 °F.  Although trivial, compared to an ice age cooling of 50 °F, this was nevertheless sufficient to wipe out the Viking colony there.

In northern Europe, the Little Ice Age kicked off with the Great Famine of 1315.  Crops failed due to cold temperatures and incessant rain.  Desperate and starving, parents ate their children, and people dug up corpses from graves for food.  In jails, inmates instantly set upon new prisoners and ate them alive.

The Great Famine was followed by the Black Death, the greatest disaster ever to hit the human race.  One-third of the human race died; terror and anarchy prevailed. Human civilization as we know it is only possible in a warm interglacial climate.  Short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the greatest threat to the human race is the onset of another ice age.

The oscillation between ice ages and interglacial periods is the dominant feature of Earth’s climate for the last million years.  But the computer models that predict significant global warming from carbon dioxide cannot reproduce these temperature changes.  This failure to reproduce the most significant aspect of terrestrial climate reveals an incomplete understanding of the climate system, if not a nearly complete ignorance.

Global warming predictions by meteorologists are based on speculative, untested, and poorly constrained computer models.  But our knowledge of ice ages is based on a wide variety of reliable data, including cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.  In this case, it would be perspicacious to listen to the geologists, not the meteorologists.  By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we risk hastening the advent of the next ice age.  Even more foolhardy and dangerous is the Obama administration’s announcement that they may try to cool the planet through geoengineering.  Such a move in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age.  It is not hyperbole to state that such a climatic change would mean the end of human civilization as we know it.

Earth’s climate is controlled by the Sun.  In comparison, every other factor is trivial.  The coldest part of the Little Ice Age during the latter half of the seventeenth century was marked by the nearly complete absence of sunspots.  And the Sun now appears to be entering a new period of quiescence.  August of 2008 was the first month since the year 1913 that no sunspots were observed.  As I write, the sun remains quiet.  We are in a cooling trend.  The areal extent of global sea ice is above the twenty-year mean.

We have heard much of the dangers of global warming due to carbon dioxide.  But the potential danger of any potential anthropogenic warming is trivial compared to the risk of entering a new ice age.  Public policy decisions should be based on a realistic appraisal that takes both climate scenarios into consideration.

American Thinker

Lies, Damned Lies and Al Gore on Climate

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, aka Lord Christopher Monckton, refutes some of Al Gore’s lies.

Gore: The Arctic is warming at an unprecedented rate. New research, which draws upon recently declassified data collected by U.S. nuclear submarines traveling under the Arctic ice cap for the last 50 years, has given us, for the first time, a three-dimensional view of the ice cap, and researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School have told us that the entire Arctic ice cap may totally disappear in summer in as little as five years if nothing is done to curb emissions of greenhouse gas pollution. For most of the last 3 million years, it has covered an area the size of the lower 48 states. Almost half of the ice has already melted during the last 20 years. The dark ocean, once uncovered, absorbs 90 percent of the solar heat that used to bounce off the highly reflective ice. As a direct consequence, some of the vast amounts of frozen carbon in the permafrost surrounding the Arctic Ocean are beginning to be released as methane as the frozen tundra thaws, threatening a doubling of global warming pollution in the atmosphere.

Answer: For most of the last 3 million years, the Earth endured ice ages, with brief interglacial periods of 5000 years occurring roughly every 125,000 years. Naturally, therefore, Washington and much of the contiguous US was under miles of ice most of the time. We are in an unusually-prolonged interglacial period at present – 11,000 years. For most of that period – and notably during the Minoan, Roman, and medieval warm periods – it was warmer than today in the Arctic and worldwide. Indeed, in the 1930s and early 1940s it was up to 4 Fahrenheit degrees warmer than today in the Arctic.

It is not true that “almost half” of the Arctic sea ice has melted – its winter extent has barely declined at all, though there has been some decline in summer, particularly in 2007, for largely natural reasons (we know the reason cannot have been “global warming”, because the planet had been cooling for six years at the time – a cooling that has continued and is now seven and a half years long).

At present, both Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice extents are at or near record high levels for the time of year – the Arctic has set a nine-year record according to IARC/JAXA, and the Antarctic is approaching the record-high sea-ice extent set in late 2007, according to the University of Illinois. There is no likelihood of a total disappearance of Arctic sea ice any time soon.

That is only a teaser. Be sure to read it all at Science & Public Policy Institute.

H/T JunkScience

Quick Bites

Obama Lying or Incompetent.

President Obama, who was meeting with FBI Director Robert Mueller and other senior officials at the FBI on Tuesday, called the photo-op “a mistake.”

“It was something we found out about along with all of you. And it will not happen again,” he said.

Bullshit! Air Force 1 and 2 don’t move without the full knowledge of the president and secret service, at the very least.

I’ll tell you what torture really is

You say Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times? Cry me a river.

How about if we had tossed this cold-hearted butcher into a room on a platform some 1,300 feet up, fired it up to a toasty 2000^oF, pumped in the acrid smoke of combusting fuel, and given KSM a better choice than his blameless victims got: Talk, jump or feel your flesh sizzle off?

Arlen Specter leaving GOP

Don’t let the door hit ya on the way out.

You just had to see this one coming

Weather experts are studying swine flu to see if climate could influence its spread and severity.

Determining the impact of cold, heat, dryness and humidity on the H1N1 strain — which has killed up to 149 people in Mexico and had milder effects elsewhere — could illuminate the countries and regions most vulnerable to infection.

Quote of the week starring Henry Waxman ….

“We’re seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point. Because if it evaporates to a certain point – they have lanes now where ships can go that couldn’t ever sail through before. And if it gets to a point where it evaporates too much, there’s a lot of tundra that’s being held down by that ice cap..”

Yeah Henry, that North Pole sure is a meltin…

The missing sunspots: Is This The Big Chill?

Could the Sun play a greater role in recent climate change than has been believed? Climatologists had dismissed the idea and some solar scientists have been reticent about it because of its connections with those who those who deny climate change. But now the speculation has grown louder because of what is happening to our Sun. No living scientist has seen it behave this way. There are no sunspots.

….

More Global Warming Lies From The Obama Crowd

Despite all evidence to the contrary, the left just will not quit with their lies. There has been no warming since 1998, temperatures are falling everywhere and the solar cycles say we are heading into another ice age. Why do these people keep beating this dead horse? Money and power. It’s a perfect way to control the citizens and people like Al Gore, who has at least two carbon credit selling businesses, can continue to commit fraud for profit. Look at what the “Energy Secretary” had to say the other day about global warming and it’s tragic results. He’s either lying, which seems to be encouraged in the Obama administration, or he’s ignorant of the facts. Either way, he needs to go.

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago — Caribbean nations face “very, very scary” rises in sea level and intensifying hurricanes, and Florida, Louisiana and even northern California could be overrun with rising water levels due to global warming triggered by carbon-based greenhouse gases, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Saturday.

Chu’s comments followed meetings with environmental ministers attending the fifth Summit of the Americas. He did not shy away from the most perilous predictions about the potential effects of global warming.

He said global temperatures have already risen by 0.8 degree Centigrade, that another 1 degree increase was certain to occur and “there’s a reasonable probability we can go above 4 degrees Centigrade to 5 and 6 more.”

Chu painted a dire picture of the implications.

“So imagine a world 6 degrees warmer. It’s not going to recognize geographical boundaries. It’s not going to recognize anything. So agriculture regions today will be wiped out,” Chu said.

“I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent — I remember this number — one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will — some of them will disappear,” he added.

Chu said the United States would not be spared, either.

“Let me state what the official IPCC (the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) prediction is: It (sea levels) could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that,” Chu said.

He said a rise in levels of one meter, coastal areas around Florida around Louisiana would move much farther inland.

“Lots of area in Florida will go under. New Orleans at three-meter height is in great peril. If you look at, you know, the Bay Area, where I came from, all three airports would be under water. So this is — this is serious stuff. The impacts could be enormous,” he said.

At least he’s being challenged.

Conservative climate change skeptics immediately denounced Chu’s assessment of the threat and potential consequences of global warming.

“Secretary Chu still seems to believe that computer model predictions decades or 100 years from now are some sort of ‘evidence’ of a looming climate catastrophe, said Marc Morano, executive editor of ClimateDepot.com and former top aide to global warming critic Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

“Secretary Chu’s assertions on sea level rise and hurricanes are quite simply being proven wrong by the latest climate data. As the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute reported in December 12, 2008: There is ‘no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise.’”

Morano said hurricane activity levels in both hemispheres of the globe are at 30 years lows and hurricane experts like MIT’s Kerry Emanuel and Kerry Knutson “are now backing off their previous dire predictions.”

He said Chu is out of date on the science and is promoting unverified and alarming predictions that have already been proven contrary. SOURCE

Monday Quick Bites

What, me worry?

Some Solar Cycle Information. Two pieces from Watts Up With That?

The Double Quiet Sun
Usually, and that means in the past year, when you look at the false color MDI image from SOHO, you can look at the corresponding magnetogram and see some sort of disturbance going on, even it it is not visible as a sunspot, sunspeck, or plage area.
Not today.
Is That a Sunspot?
Yesterday I lamented that the sun was blank, not only on the SOHO MDI, but also the magnetogram. Within a couple of hours, one sunspeck appeared. I cited Murphy’s Law. As one commenter put it: ” I think if you check back for the last six months or so whenever you mention the lack of sunspots on here, one shows up.”.

And a couple from Green Hell Blog

New planetary burden: Meat-eating pets
Paul Greenberg opines today in the New York Times that dogs and cats should go vegan. Writing about his cat, Greenberg says,

California (of course) to limit car color choices More evidence of California Communism
Carbon Control News reported today that California regulators have proposed that car makers use so-called “cool” paints to reduce the interior temperature of cars, thereby reducing air conditioning use and, consequently, improving gas mileage.

And some picks from around the blogasphere.

Skeptics Global Warming
We’ve got an update on the Companies Lobbying to Raise Your Energy Taxes.

HE’S MY PRESIDENT, BUT I DON’T HAVE TO LIKE IT
If I hear one more person point out that Obama is the president and that it’s our duty to support him, I just might run amok. For one thing, I resent being reminded that he actually won the election and that it’s not all a bad dream from which I’ll awaken as soon as the alarm clock rings. For another, there was a very good reason that I voted for John McCain, and it certainly had nothing to do with my having great expectations of the man, and everything to do with my conviction that Obama was a left-wing ideologue.

The Challenge Ahead: More than a Third of Senate Now “Swing” Vote on Climate – A high hurdle: of the 36 Senators identified as swing votes, all but seven must be convinced to vote “Yes” in order to secure passage of any climate policy in the U.S. Senate. (Breakthrough Institute)
Think we should encourage Senators to hold the line? Have your say and register your vote here.

Sunspots Still Scarce, The World Gets Colder

Ice and snow reach from coast to coast and more is on the way. The rest of the world is setting new records for cold, snow and ice too. But I live up here in Anthony Watts’ neck of the woods, actually I’m about 100 miles to the north of him and have about 20″ of snow on the ground, so I’ll stick with the U.S. for now. Here’s a picture from a few days ago on the way out of my town.

Winter in Northern California

Okay, that’s not all that unusual around here, but back to the sunspots. Check out this piece by Joseph D’Aleo at ICECAP. We’ve reached #2 for most recorded sunspotless days. Drop by the site and give a little love if you can, they do a helluva job fighting the Global Warming Cult.

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, Fellow AMS

With the number of sunspotless days reaching 16 so far this month, we have now exceeded 1912 as the 2nd quietest sun year since 1900. Only 1913 ranked higher with 311 days. With 12 more days this month as of this writing, we could reach as high as 266 days. Note that 2007 also ranked in the top 10.

See larger graph here.

This is the month by month comparisons of sunspotless days this solar minimum (red) through November and the last minimum in the mid 1990s (blue).

See larger graph here.

The geomagnetic activity has also been extremely low. This is the Ap Index. This plot displays monthly average Ap values and 13-month running smoothed Ap values. The most recent data are always USAF estimates; official values are included as they become available.

See larger graph here.

And longer term here:

See larger graph here.

See this Anthony Watts post on the massive breach of the earth’s magnetic field discovered by NASA and the possible solar role in the lowering of the earth’s Ionosphere to an all-time low altitude. See full post pdf here. See more on the ways the sun may affect our climate here.

You’ll also find great stories like these at THE GLOBAL WARMING HOAX.