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The sun is quiet ... very quiet.
In February, for the first time since August 2008, the sun went an entire month without any sunspots.
Sunspots are cooler regions of the sun. How many appear on the sun's surface depends on what cycle the sun is in. Every 11 years our star goes through a maximum, followed by a minimum (the entire magnetic cycle of the sun, when the poles flip, is 22 years).
Over the past three decades, the sun has been consistently dropping in activity. Maximum has been quieter than is typical; minimum has been particularly quiet. And this has caused some to make the false assumption that, as a result, Earth is going to cool.
It all stems from an incident that took place between 1645 and 1715, called the Maunder Minimum, where sunspots all but disappeared. This coincided with the "Little Ice Age" that stretched from 1500 to 1850 in the northern hemisphere. In England, the Thames River froze over; Viking settlers abandoned Greenland.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/solar-activity-1.5049337
(Score: 2, Interesting) by bradley13 on Wednesday March 13 2019, @02:36PM (13 children)
There is lots of historical evidence that fluctuations in the solar cycles have a major impact on the Earth's temperature. The Medieval Warm Period coincides with a high level of activity. The Little Ice Age with a low level of activity.
And today: global warming since 1940? "The level of solar activity beginning in the 1940s is exceptional – the last period of similar magnitude occurred around 9,000 years ago."
Not that CO2 emissions are harmless - I'm all for avoiding uncontrolled experiments on the planetary atmosphere. But CO2 is an insignificant greenhouse gas, and claims of positive feedback loops have always struck me as absurd.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:25PM (7 children)
What is your basis for claiming that it is an insignificant greenhouse gas? This contradicts every other source I've encountered, back to high school, so I won't accept the claim without definite proof.
That said, water is, indeed, a more significant greenhouse gas, and so what. It's relatively temporary, and is largely influenced by the temperature of the sea surface, which has been rising due to other feedback systems. Methane would be more important, but it's got a short half-life, there isn't much, and it degrades into CO2. Etc.
It *is* plausible that the wavelengths to which CO2 is opaque are already so blocked by the existing CO2 that more isn't significant, but I'd need to see evidence that *that* was true, though I'd be open to being convinced, unlike to the assertion that CO2 isn't significant, which would need real proof.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday March 13 2019, @06:06PM (1 child)
All of the AGW estimates of warming are built on the assumption that a slight temperature increase due due CO2 will increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere - and that will drive warming. One of zillions of references [soylentnews.org].
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday March 13 2019, @10:17PM
And this is wrong because?
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @06:09PM (4 children)
Earth's atmosphere contains ~0.04% CO2, while Venus has ~96% CO2. Let's see the effect of CO2 there.
Distance of Earth from Sun ~ 1.00 AU
Distance of Venus from Sun ~ 0.72 AU
Sunlight drops off according to an inverse square law, so Venus will receive (1/.72)^2 times more sunlight than earth. Temperature is proportional to the 4th root of the sunlight received[3], so Venus should be ((1/.72)^2)^.25 = (1/.72)^.5 times hotter than earth.
Temperature on Earth at 1 atm pressure[1] ~ 288 K
Temperature on Venus at 1 atm pressure[2] ~ 348 K
So raising CO2 2400x can only raise temperature ~10 K. And really there are wide error bars on these temperatures so I would say 339 K ~ 348 K for our purpose. The Venus value especially is actually from 1.066 atm pressure so will be a bit high, and it isn't clear what latitude the measurement came from, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth [wikipedia.org]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus [wikipedia.org]
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @06:55PM
Same AC. 2400 is about 2^11. If 11 doubling of CO2 would raise the temperature 10 K, then one doubling would raise it 0.9 K. That is probably on the high end, we should use better numbers for the temperatures. Like compare average earth temperature at the same latitude as was measured on Venus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @10:50PM (2 children)
What exactly is "troll" about this post? I would love to know how applying basic physics is "trolling" now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:11PM (1 child)
It's a clueless attempt by a nobody to refute the vast body of science by thousands of actual scientists...
If you're serious publish it under your own name and put your money where your mouth is. No? Thought as much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:37PM
What is clueless about it?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday March 13 2019, @06:46PM
And now the sun is quiet and the globe is still warming. But you did neatly explain why it's not warming as much as the CO2 based models suggested. I wonder what it'll be like as solar activity regresses to the mean?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday March 13 2019, @10:29PM (3 children)
That is complete BS. [spaceweatherlive.com] Where'd you pull that "quote" from?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @10:48PM (2 children)
Bradley13 was probably referring to what he heard before they corrected it in 2015.
See here: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=30544&commentsort=0&mode=threadtos&threshold=0&highlightthresh=-1&page=1&cid=813682#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
The global warming borg has assimilate that data and homogenized it to suit their needs.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:19AM (1 child)
I mean, sure, they're a bit divorced from reality.
But are we really going to let completely fabricated quotes slide on a debate site?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:15AM
There is nothing fabricated about it. Before the 2015 "correction" the sunspot data showed increased activity exactly as described by Bradly13. It is more a problem of being out of date a few years and all the historical data has changed.