Is Global Warming Man Made?

Jay,

There's nothing wrong with links, but they should not be used as a substitute for discussion. And I am not suggesting that people should simply voice their own opinions independent of any supporting evidence. Of course, no one here is an expert, but that doesn't mean that no one here is competent to form an opinion. There is already a broad consensus of opinion by people who are clearly not experts. Ask most educated people if they think the greenhouse gas CO2 is responsible for global warming and you'll get an unqualified yes.

Do you think Al Gore and his minions are experts on this issue? Of course, they are not, but they are nonetheless militant supporters of the Obama Administration's agenda to cut carbon emissions significantly, which would hamper the economy far worse than the current recession, which our beloved commander-in-chief claims to be so concerned about. This issue is eminently worth our attention, if we value human life. The proper response is not simply to throw up our hands and declare ourselves agnostics.

- Bill

Post 21

Monday, July 6, 2009 - 5:04pm

Jordan,

The correlation of solar activity with the Arctic air temperature that Soon presented in his talk in September of 2008 was based on sunspot cycle amplitude, sunspot cycle length, solar equatorial rotation rate, fraction of penumbral spots, and decay rate of the 11-year sunspot cycle. His conclusion was that solar irradiance correlates well with Arctic temperature, while hydrocarbon use does not correlate.

Unfortunately, I can't reproduce the charts that he used in his talk, because Safari doesn't permit the inclusion of graphics in the Netscape text box. He did include the chart correlating solar activity with Arctic air temperature in a paper, entitled "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide" published in 2007, which you might be able to find on the internet.

- Bill

Post 22

Monday, July 6, 2009 - 5:13pm

http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm

is it among here?

http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/22434/Environmental_Effects_of_Increased_Atmospheric_Carbon_Dioxide_updated.html
(Edited by robert malcom on 7/06, 5:15pm)

Post 23

Monday, July 6, 2009 - 6:12pm

These are some of the implied arguments behind the Greens' agenda to take over industrial policy and ration carbon. If even one of these is wrong, their house of cards falls apart:

1) The earth is warming rapidly and catastrophically and irreversibly.

2) This alleged warming is primarily due to human influences, not the natural temperature cycles caused by solar variations that have caused huge swings in the climate as shown in the historic (and pre-historic) record.

3) The primary cause of this alleged human influence is carbon dioxide emissions, not methane (think: cows) or water vapor or any of the other more powerful greenhouse gases.

4) We must act now, in a state of near-panic, to fend off this alleged catastrophy. We can't afford to wait another decade or two to firm up the science.

5) Politicians are the only ones capable of making these allegedly necessary sharp adjustments that would ravage the U.S. economy.

6) These political solutions would be workable.

7) The U.S. can make these changes unilaterally, and not have China and India and other developing countries negate our efforts by ramping up their industial base in response to the market share we would be ceding. (Short version: this time, human nature will act differently).

8) Private, free market solutions would not produce better results than the authoritarian political solutions.

9) The massive, crushing costs of these proposed changes would not be greater than the costs of accepting warming and making other adjustments.

10) There is no better possible use of the resources that would go into this political solution that would better improve the lives of humans, such as providing mosquito netting in malarial areas, getting vitamins and immunizations to poor people ravaged by malnutrition and disease, and so on.

11) The recent cooling trend in global temperatures is an anomaly, and the recent change in terminology from "global warming" to "global climate change" isn't a case of GW alarmists hedging their bets because of these inconvenient facts.

12) Global warming would be a bad thing for everyone, including people in really cold miserable places like Scotland or Manitoba. Hawaii, which is much warmer than the rest of the United States, has an undesirable climate that few tourists want to brave.

And so on.
(Edited by Jim Henshaw on 7/06, 6:20pm)

Post 24

Monday, July 6, 2009 - 7:43pm

Good post, Jim. But I'm not sure that #7 makes sense. It sounds like zero sum game theory. How can we say that China or India will pollute more in response to our polluting less? Shouldn't we say that they will invest in the best return no matter what, which may be influenced by our actions, but that we would be cutting the amount of globally available capital by our own irrational actions? If I choose not to drive so much because of the higher cost of gas, how do the Chinese take advantage of that? It seems strange to argue that the Chinese would get rich because we choose not to our would pollute because we choose not to.

Post 25

Monday, July 6, 2009 - 9:20pm

Jay,

Researchers get a lot of unearned mileage out of the cunning way that they frame issues and talk about findings. Mortimer Adler alerted me to the fact that scientists, when they report on their work, are being philosophers. Sometimes not good ones, either.

:-)

It's because they have a relative deficiency in rationality (though they are often otherwise highly intelligent). Here are some snippets of scientific investigations into solar forcing, with comments from yours truly -- i.e., a Bachelor of Science in Biology with a Ph.D. in 'rationality':

:-)

Here's one showing that the sun was shining -- really shining -- during the last two-thirds of the 20th Century (i.e., the time when we "got warm"):

According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.

[abstract] Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years. Nature. 2004 Oct 28;431(7012):1084-7.

Here's one showing how old glaciers probably grew or melted according to how hot the sun got:

We attribute the robust 1,470-year response time to the superposition of the two shorter cycles, together with strongly nonlinear dynamics and the long characteristic timescale of the thermohaline circulation. For Holocene conditions, similar events do not occur. We conclude that the glacial 1,470-year climate cycles could have been triggered by solar forcing despite the absence of a 1,470-year solar cycle.

[abstract] Possible solar origin of the 1,470-year glacial climate cycle demonstrated in a coupled model. Nature. 2005 Nov 10;438(7065):208-11.

Here's one showing that tropical region (Andes mountains) glaciers are like cockroaches -- they really come out, or advance, when you turn down the lights:

Four glacial advances occurred between anno Domini (A.D.) 1250 and 1810, coincident with solar-activity minima. Temperature declines of -3.2 +/- 1.4 degrees C and precipitation increases of approximately 20% are required to produce the observed glacial responses. These results highlight the sensitivity of high-altitude tropical regions to relatively small changes in radiative forcing ...

[abstract] Solar modulation of Little Ice Age climate in the tropical Andes. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 Jun 13;103(24):8937-42.

Here's one that's skeptical of the overall brightness of the sun (its luminosity) as a major climate forcing agent -- though it mentions UV output and "magetized plasmas" individually, as being possible, independent (of luminosity), sun-associated culprits:

... brightening of the Sun is unlikely to have had a significant influence on global warming since the seventeenth century. Additional climate forcing by changes in the Sun's output of ultraviolet light, and of magnetized plasmas, cannot be ruled out. The suggested mechanisms are, however, too complex to evaluate meaningfully at present.

[abstract] Variations in solar luminosity and their effect on the Earth's climate. Nature. 2006 Sep 14;443(7108):161-6.

Here's one that admits that the sun used to really run the show -- i.e., from 850AD to the mid-1900s, the sun and the volcanoes were the main climate forcing agents (and greenhouse gas wasn't a main forcing agent). As these scientists go on to claim that GHGs are now more important than the sun is (in explaining recent trends), this article would be a good one to get the full text on, so I've include a link below. After going to the link, click one of the two full text options at the top-right of the screen:

Despite the direct response of the model to solar forcing, even large solar irradiance change combined with realistic volcanic forcing over past centuries could not explain the late 20th century warming without inclusion of greenhouse gas forcing. Although solar and volcanic effects appear to dominate most of the slow climate variations within the past thousand years, the impacts of greenhouse gases have dominated since the second half of the last century.

[abstract] Solar influence on climate during the past millennium: results from transient simulations with the NCAR Climate System Model. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Mar 6;104(10):3713-8.

Link:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17360418

Important Caveat: Keep in mind that a literal interpretation of "dominate" would not only include accounting for merely 51% of the earth's temperature variations but also might just mean only influencing a third or even only quarter of the variation (if all other factors were each much less than a third or quarter of the picture).

Ed

p.s. If any of the "science" confounds you and makes you want to pull your hair out, then trying asking me or Ted to explain -- we both have a fair amount of experience with science, its methods, and its jargon.

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 7/07, 5:50am)

Post 26

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 10:21am

In Post 23, Jim wrote,

7) The U.S. can make these changes unilaterally, and not have China and India and other developing countries negate our efforts by ramping up their industial base in response to the market share we would be ceding. (Short version: this time, human nature will act differently).

In Post 24, Ted replied,

Good post, Jim. But I'm not sure that #7 makes sense. It sounds like zero sum game theory. How can we say that China or India will pollute more in response to our polluting less? Shouldn't we say that they will invest in the best return no matter what, which may be influenced by our actions, but that we would be cutting the amount of globally available capital by our own irrational actions? If I choose not to drive so much because of the higher cost of gas, how do the Chinese take advantage of that? It seems strange to argue that the Chinese would get rich because we choose not to or would pollute because we choose not to.

The point to focus on in #7 is "ramping up their industrial base in response to the market share we would be ceding." If the new carbon emissions standards forced U.S. producers to curtail production, prices would rise in response to reduced supply. China and other countries could then take up the slack by exporting to the U.S. at cheaper prices, in which case, the U.S. government would probably impose trade barriers to protect U.S. producers, thereby raising consumer prices. China and India would then turn to other foreign markets to which they could export more cheaply than the U.S. could. In doing so, they could then capture the U.S. export market and further impoverish the U.S. economy. Not a pretty picture.

- Bill

Post 27

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 10:23am

Thanks, Bill,

I'm tempted to share the evidence that I've found persuasive for anthropogenic climate change, but the bricks-n-mortar world has been rather demanding of my time as of late. So I'd like to, at least for now, contain our discussion just to the solar-climate-change connection, if that's okay with you and others. I appreciate the brief account of Soon's position. It's interesting stuff, some of which is new to me. Not sure how to address it, not knowing his reasoning or reviewing his evidence (after all, I might find it persuasive!), but I'll see what I can do.

Jordan

EDIT: Ed, many of your links aren't working for me.

(Edited by Jordan on 7/07, 10:48am)

Post 28

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 12:38pm

Jordan,

You must be talking about the blue-highlighted journal titles. I'll post good links to those soon.

Ed

Post 29

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 3:05pm

Right. Like the Nature links.

Post 30

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 4:59pm

Hi Bill,

I think I found the Soon paper off of which he must've based his 08 talk. There's one critique that really sinks its teeth into the paper. I know, I know -- more links. At the moment, it's not so much a time crunch that's the problem as it is that I'm at a loss as to where to start, again, past doing a "he said she said." The critique claims Soon and his co-authors are ignoring pertinent data, cherry-picking the stuff they use, and flat-out getting the data wrong. Comment 98 in the critique goes through the the paper's claims paragraph by paragraph. The critics also set up a wiki on the paper, but that is only marginally helpful. Suggestions on how to tackle this topic?

Jordan

Post 31

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 5:59pm

Good post, Jim. But I'm not sure that #7 makes sense. It sounds like zero sum game theory. How can we say that China or India will pollute more in response to our polluting less?

Bill answered most of your questions in post 23. Re: your comment about zero sum game theory, I wasn't implying that there is invariably a fixed amount of manufacturing jobs, or goods to be produced, though on a micro level that can be the case. Rather, my point was that there is a demand for goods currently manufactured in the U.S., and U.S. companies respond to that demand by producing those goods, but if government regulations make some of those goods uncompetitive to produce here, someone else will likely seize the opportunity.

For example, I recently bought my younger daughter a bicycle for her birthday. There wasn't any question about whether she was going to get that bike, because she had outgrown her old bike, and it would have been a huge faux pas with my wife if I had refused to get that gift. I wound up buying my daughter a Chinese made bike at WalMart for about $100. Now, if the Chinese government had done something stupid to prevent that particular bike model from being produced, I would simply have gone to the Plan B bike. So, in this very specific microeconomic instance, bike manufacturing WAS a zero sum game, in that I was going to buy one and only one bike for my daughter, and a roughly equivalent amount of power would need to be generated to manufacture it regardless of which company in which country made the bike.

Post 32

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 - 8:59pm

Jordan,

I've copied my remarks below and pasted links that should work now.

Here's one showing that the sun was shining -- really shining -- during the last two-thirds of the 20th Century (i.e., the time when we "got warm"):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7012/abs/nature02995.html

Here's one showing how old glaciers probably grew or melted according to how hot the sun got:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7065/abs/nature04121.html

Here's one showing that tropical region (Andes mountains) glaciers are like cockroaches -- they really come out, or advance, when you turn down the lights:
http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/polissar2006a.pdf

Here's one that's skeptical of the overall brightness of the sun (its luminosity) as a major climate forcing agent -- though it mentions UV output and "magetized plasmas" individually, as being possible, independent (of luminosity), sun-associated culprits:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7108/abs/nature05072.html

Here's one that admits that the sun used to really run the show -- i.e., from 850AD to the mid-1900s, the sun and the volcanoes were the main climate forcing agents (and greenhouse gas wasn't a main forcing agent):
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1810336

There you have it. The sun is a really big deal (when it comes to heating up the earth).

:-)

Ed

Post 33

Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - 5:56am

From page 8938 of the 2006 Polissar study:

Comparison of the [Little Ice Age] history of glacier activity with reconstructions of solar and volcanic forcing suggest that solar variability is the primary underlying cause of glacier fluctuations. ... (Fig. 2).

Although the shielding effect of volcanic aerosols likely contributed to glacier growth, it is difficult to differentiate the effects of solar and volcanic forcing because they are correlated during the past 1,000 yr (4). However, solar and volcanic forcing are uncorrelated between A.D. 1520 and 1650, and the [magnetic susceptibility] record follows the solar-irradiance reconstruction during this interval (Fig. 2F). This observation suggests that solar forcing is an important underlying cause of variations in glacier activity during the [Little Ice Age].

Recap:
In the last 800 years, the variable activity of the sun was "the primary underlying cause of glacier fluctuations." That makes it possible, if not plausible, that the sun has been the primary cause of global mean temperature fluctuations (i.e., global warming).

Ed

Post 34

Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - 9:27am

"[T]he global warming crusade has become a hallucinatory cult. Until I see stronger evidence, I will continue to believe that climate change is primarily driven by solar phenomena and that it is normal for the earth to pass through major cooling and warming phases." ....from Camille Paglia on Salon

The quote is part of an answer Camille made to Jim Carrol, who asked,

"Have you noticed how much the call for combating global warming crusade has in common with how we got into the Iraq war?

In both cases, there are "experts" who tell us that evidence justifying action is undeniable. They say, "The risk of doing nothing is too great for us to do nothing." And as a fallback position they say, "Even if we're wrong, we'll still be doing some good in the world."

Kind of makes me think man-made CO2 emissions will turn out to be the biggest case of nonexistent WMD since Saddam Hussein's nukes. (Or maybe even bigger!) What do you think?"

(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 7/08, 9:28am)

Post 35

Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - 10:22am

LOL! Evidently Camille Paglia is not a fan of Al "Buffoon" Gore: "Global Warming, Winston Churchill, Nazi's".

A laugh a minute, good old Al.

Post 36

Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - 10:29am

Jordan wrote,

I think I found the Soon paper off of which he must've based his 08 talk.

As far as I can tell, he didn't actually base his 08 talk on that paper, although he did use the one graph from it that I cited.

There's one critique that really sinks its teeth into the paper. I know, I know -- more links.

The title of the critique is "The Oregon Institute of Science and Malarky." Does that sound like fair and unbiased evaluation? The title itself is enough to call it into question.

Dr. Soon, it should be remembered, is not some pseudoscientific hack. Once again, he is an astrophysicist and a geoscientist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is the receiving editor in the area of solar and stellar physics for New Astronomy and is also the chief science adviser of the Science and Public Policy Institute (based in Washington DC). He writes and lectures both professionally and publicly on important issues related to the Sun, other stars, the Earth as well as general science topics in astronomy and physics. Does he sound like someone likely to be engaged science malarky? On the other hand, what are Al Gore's scientific credentials -- you know, the political pied piper who is leading everyone down the carbon-paved global-warming path?

At the moment, it's not so much a time crunch that's the problem as it is that I'm at a loss as to where to start, again, past doing a "he said she said." The critique claims Soon and his co-authors are ignoring pertinent data, cherry-picking the stuff they use, and flat-out getting the data wrong. Comment 98 in the critique goes through the the paper's claims paragraph by paragraph. The critics also set up a wiki on the paper, but that is only marginally helpful. Suggestions on how to tackle this topic?

Well, you could address the points that I made in my initial post, viz.

Now it is true that IPCC scientists have noted a close correlation between an increase in CO2 and an increase in the arctic surface air temperature during the last 40 years. The correlation suggests that CO2 is causing the increase in temperature. But if you extend the record further back to include the 130 years of recorded history, a different picture emerges. There is a dramatic spike in warming from the 1920s to the 1940s, but no spike in CO2; there is also a drop in temperature -- a cooling trend from the 1940s to the 1970s -- even as CO2 is rising; all of which tells us, contrary to the IPCC report, that CO2 is not causing the rise in arctic temperatures. What then is?

Well, if you look at the solar irradiant history itself over the last 130 years, you find that it correlates much better with the temperature record than CO2 does. Solar radiation can explain not only the warming trend over the most recent 40 years, but also the cooling from the 1940s to the 1970s as well as the very large warming of the arctic from the 1920s to the 1940s. Solar radiation appears to be a far better predictor of arctic temperature change than are CO2 concentrations.

Bill
(Edited by William Dwyer on 7/08, 10:36am)

Post 37

Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - 1:01pm

Bill,

Solar radiation appears to be a far better predictor of arctic temperature change than are CO2 concentrations.

In Post 19 I linked to Paul Damon's paper explaining how this claim is based on arithmetic error. When the errors are fixed, the solar-warming correlation goes away.

I haven't questioned Soon's credentials, but his affiliation with and funding from several organizations does suggest possibility of bias. As for Al Gore's credentials...well, let's just say you won't see me relying on him for science claims. :-) And the "Malarky" article authors, all of whom are working climate scientists, is needlessly ad hominem, as are most of their other articles. Without doubt the authors are intransigent in their conclusion regarding anthropenic factors significantly affecting climate change. But they do seem to know what they're talking about.

Ed,

Thanks for the links. No one denies that the sun is a really big deal for heating up the Earth. The dispute is whether the sun explains the recent changes in climate indices. At least your first link says it doesn't. Also, I found a wiki discussing solar variability and whether it links to global warming. This is one of those volatile wiki pages that we ought to be wary of, but it provides links to recent primary studies indicating that there isn't a link between solar variability and recent global warming activity.

Jordan

Post 38

Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - 2:46pm

Jordan,

The dispute is whether the sun explains the recent changes in climate indices. At least your first link says it doesn't.

I imagine that you're referring to this quote:

Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades.

However, this is an issue regarding rival forcing agents -- separate but inter-related factors. In order to stay accurate, the issue has got to be framed that way. The right way to frame this issue then, is to account for all the factors as contributors to climate change. An ideal picture will include tracking the variation in at least 3 things (at the same time):

(1) aerosols (man-made and volcanic)
(2) greenhouse gases (man-made and natural)
(3) the Sun

So it's not really informative for someone to say that the Sun is unlikely to have been the dominant cause. For instance, if each of the 3 factors above were exactly 33% of the picture, then the Sun would not be a dominant cause -- but it would still be a major cause or factor! Anything responsible for a third of the variability in global temperature shouldn't be dismissed.

Jordan, can you look at me with a straight face and tell me that the Sun's part in global temperature change is less than 33% of the picture? That's the important question.

Ed

Post 39

Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - 3:15pm