Re: [Phys-l] Climate skeptic convinced by data. Was: Re: Mike Mann _The hockey

[Hugh Haskell <haskellh@verizon.net>]

At 3:59 PM -0500 2/18/12, Anthony Lapinski wrote:
> But
> since the main cause of global warming is the Sun, then these laws are
> really meaningless.

The problem here is that the total effect of the 
sun on the earth's overall temperature is being 
conflated with the marginal effect of other 
influences.

The sun is responsible for the fact that the 
earth is not a ball of ice (also, due in part to 
the residual heat from the earth's formation and 
the heat released by the radioactivity within the 
earth). But once that equilibrium is reached (or 
approximately reached), other, smaller effects 
can certainly have effects of the magnitude that 
we see today. Climatologists and geophysicists 
have repeatedly made calculations of the effect 
of the routinely observed changes int he 
radiation from the sun and have concluded that 
these very small fluctuations in solar output 
(and the earth's orbit and its axial inclination) 
have effects that are a small fraction of the 
effects that are found in the changes to the 
greenhouse that water vapor in our atmosphere 
causes (that keeps the earth's temperature 
generally above freezing). After all, we are 
talking about and earth that, in the absence of 
our atmosphere would have a temperature of about 
260 K. The greenhouse effect of the water vapor 
in our atmosphere raises the temperature to about 
285 K, and the increasing level of CO2 and other 
GHGs in the atmosphere have, over the past 
century and a half caused the average temperature 
of the earth to rise by about 1.5 K. Other 
changes in the earth's temperature, caused by 
other effects have typically occurred over 
millennia or longer. Our current situation is 
changing on a decadal basis by small, but 
measureable amounts.

It is also worth mentioning that the changes 
often mentioned by climate change deniers, the 
medieval warm period and the "little ice age" 
were phenomena of the North Atlantic Littoral, 
not global effects, and could have been caused by 
changes in the North Atlantic Circulator. We also 
know that the recent leveling off of the 
temperature curve is at least partly due to the 
strong El Niño event in 1998, which, when used as 
the start of the recent epoch, allows a levelling 
effect of the temperatures. Remove the effect of 
the El Niño and the temperature curve is much 
closer to the average slope for the past 50 
years. Examination of the curve over time does 
show that there are occasional plateaus in the 
curve, but they are temporary, lasting only 10-15 
years at most. We cannot guarantee that the 
current plateau (including the 1998 El Niño) will 
end (making forecasts in difficult, especially 
about the future), but past history indicates 
that it will. In the meantime, there is evidence 
that the effects are not slowing down. Arctic 
summer ice is at historic lows (both surface area 
and volume), melting of the Greenland glaciers 
continues apace, and satellite pictures of the 
earth continue to show overall glaciation to be 
reducing at alarming rates.

To say that the sun drives our climate is to 
state the obvious, but to claim that its tiny 
variations are responsible for the current 
situation is hyperbole at best, disingenuous at 
worst.

Hugh

--
Hugh Haskell
mailto:hugh@ieer.org
mailto:haskellh@verizon.net

I have been wondering for a long time why some of 
our own defense officials do not
put more emphasis on finding a good substitute 
for oil and worry less about where
more oil is to come from.  Our people are 
ingenious. New discoveries are all around
us, and when we have to make them, we nearly always do.

						Eleanor Roosevelt
						February 13, 1948