Solar Variation

As I have posted before. for the past 10,000 years or so, the Earth has experienced the climate regime known as the Holocene. The Northern hemisphere is warm and is experiencing an apparent variation range of perhaps one degree. The range may be in fact slightly larger, but I do not count on that. The reason for that, is what we have seen in the Arctic. A few short summers at the heat transfer levels experienced for the past two decades will clear the Arctic of sea ice and generally improve conditions. No further increases are actually needed.

I have to reasonably assume that a similar phenomena will emerge at the other end of the scale and give us the possibility of the cold climate of the little ice age that occurred four hundred years ago.

This also gives us a deeper appreciation of just how inhospitable that the temperate zone would have been during the Pleistocene when apparent temperatures were driven back and forth over several degrees. A hunter gathering lifestyle was the only viable option in such a regime.

Which leaves us to discuss the natural drivers of this one degree or so range of global temperature. And let us make one thing a little clearer. That one degree is not necessarily that precise since most of the solar energy is absorbed in the tropics where a much smaller range will generate the observed impact in the higher latitudes. In other words a rather modest variation in solar output can do all the heavy lifting quite handily.

It is also telling that global variation lags solar activity which presumably follows the sunspot activity levels. And it has also been very telling that a long apparent minimum in sunspot activity came with the little ice age. This is why climate science has long recognized solar variation as a prime driver of global climate variation.

The mechanism there may be a simple cyclical release mechanism in which a surface heat build up causes a slight expansion of the radiating diameter of the sun and thus providing slightly more energy to the Earth. The sunspot activity thus represents the discharge part of the cycle. It is possible then that periods of low sunspot activity occur when a large mass impacts the sun, cooling off the surface slightly for some time.

I have already explained in the Pleistocene Nonconformity (July 2007) why the ice age so totally ended and why we are in the Holocene. Te remaining question is what real effect does man's activities have on the global climate?

I ask this for another reason. We are now capable of knowingly impacting the globe with our efforts. The advent of agricultural man has transformed a major percentage of the land surface. It has eliminated a huge biomass of both land and sea life without much organized forethought. We have dumped a huge amount of slowly absorbed CO2 into the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels. And we have released a range of biologically resistant chemical pollutants into the environment. All of it could have been done much better.

Then there is the contention that global warming is also been at least aided by the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. The first problem that I have with that, is that it is an unnecessary hypothesis. Why look for a problem when you have a solution in the room that is more than satisfactory. As I have said before climate variation has not removed itself outside of signal noise.

We are certainly obligated to use removal strategies to divert our CO2 waste back into the natural cycle. Perhaps for the first time in human history we will globally do something. And shipping our acid rain to China was not a solution. It was a regulatory dodge. In twenty years these steel mills will be built in Africa. And the actual solution to that problem is simple and cheap, just inconvenient to implement.

Without a global submission to a rule of law, any strategy will simply encourage the best minds to find new and exciting ways to dodge .

Sorokhtin Comments on Climate Change

Here is a solid article by Sorokhtin on the factors affecting our climate. I have seen previous intimations that the viewpoint of the Russian science community was radically different from ours and with more justice since their data has been kept much longer than ours.

Without question the earth has been hit with a sustained warming effect for the past forty years that has been eroding the Arctic Sea Ice, as well as causing glacier retreat. I have also pointed out that if this established trend is sustained for just another five years that the sea ice will be cleared fully each summer.

Now over the past eighteen months we have experienced a major whipsaw in northern climate that has been poorly explained. We had a very warm winter and summer that impacted heavily in the Arctic and should have left a large reservoir of residual heat there. That was followed abruptly by a very cold winter season, putting the lie to any ideas that all that heat would slow down the winter chill.

Again, we will be watching this next season with great interest to see if the conditions attained last year repeat at all. Obviously if we are commencing another cooling cycle, then the sea ice will expand quite rapidly over the next few seasons. I will be a little disappointed as I could have used a few more years of hot air in the Arctic.

However, it may turn out that 2007 was the true solar cycle peak for a couple of centuries. It was neat to be there and it would be even neater to see all the ice disappear for at least a while. In the meantime, it strikes me that the polar heat loss system may not be closed at all as we would expect and that heat will be found to escape upward more readily than expected. That seems to be the dominant effect in the Antarctic.

A cold spell soon to replace global warming

13:54 | 03/ 01/ 2008

MOSCOW. (Oleg Sorokhtin for RIA Novosti) - Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason--solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.

It determines decisions and instruments of major international organizations--in particular, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signed by 150 countries, it exemplifies the impact of scientific delusion on big politics and economics. The authors and enthusiasts of the Kyoto Protocol based their assumptions on an erroneous idea. As a result, developed countries waste huge amounts of money to fight industrial pollution of the atmosphere. What if it is a Don Quixote's duel with the windmill?

Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt. The classic hothouse effect scenario is too simple to be true. As things really are, much more sophisticated processes are on in the atmosphere, especially in its dense layer. For instance, heat is not so much radiated in space as carried by air currents--an entirely different mechanism, which cannot cause global warming.

The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions--a point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.

Temperature fluctuations always run somewhat ahead of carbon dioxide concentration changes. This means that warming is primary. The ocean is the greatest carbon dioxide depository, with concentrations 60-90 times larger than in the atmosphere. When the ocean's surface warms up, it produces the "champagne effect." Compare a foamy spurt out of a warm bottle with wine pouring smoothly when served properly cold.

Likewise, warm ocean water exudes greater amounts of carbonic acid, which evaporates to add to industrial pollution--a factor we cannot deny. However, man-caused pollution is negligible here. If industrial pollution with carbon dioxide keeps at its present-day 5-7 billion metric tons a year, it will not change global temperatures up to the year 2100. The change will be too small for humans to feel even if the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions doubles.

Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolution--the phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.

Carbon dioxide has quite a different pernicious influence--not on the climate but on synoptic activity. It absorbs infrared radiation. When tropospheric air is warm enough for complete absorption, radiation energy passes into gas fluctuations. Gas expands and dissolves to send warm air up to the stratosphere, where it clashes with cold currents coming down. With no noticeable temperature changes, synoptic activity skyrockets to whip up cyclones and anticyclones. Hence we get hurricanes, storms, tornados and other natural disasters, whose intensity largely depends on carbon dioxide concentration. In this sense, reducing its concentration in the air will have a positive effect.

Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man's influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.

Earth is unlikely to ever face a temperature disaster. Of all the planets in the solar system, only Earth has an atmosphere beneficial to life. There are many factors that account for development of life on Earth: Sun is a calm star, Earth is located an optimum distance from it, it has the Moon as a massive satellite, and many others. Earth owes its friendly climate also to dynamic feedback between biotic and atmospheric evolution.

The principal among those diverse links is Earth's reflective power, which regulates its temperature. A warm period, as the present, increases oceanic evaporation to produce a great amount of clouds, which filter solar radiation and so bring heat down. Things take the contrary turn in a cold period.

What can't be cured must be endured. It is wise to accept the natural course of things. We have no reason to panic about allegations that ice in the Arctic Ocean is thawing rapidly and will soon vanish altogether. As it really is, scientists say the Arctic and Antarctic ice shields are growing. Physical and mathematical calculations predict a new Ice Age. It will come in 100,000 years, at the earliest, and will be much worse than the previous. Europe will be ice-bound, with glaciers reaching south of Moscow.

Meanwhile, Europeans can rest assured. The Gulf Stream will change its course only if some evil magic robs it of power to reach the north--but Mother Nature is unlikely to do that.

Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, is staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute.

Solar Output

The one theory that has dogged all debates on global climate has been the idea that solar output variation is possibly greater than it is at different times in our history. The fact is that the sunspot cycle is clearly associated with a 1.5 watt per square meter variation of energy arriving at the upper atmosphere out of a total of 1366 watts per square meter. To dismiss its effect as slight is appropriate and also reassuring. There can be no surprises there. And unless some nuclear mechanism exists for which we have no evidence, the sun will continue to burn hydrogen at the same rate - i.e. - full out, for a few billion years more.

In fact, the only way to reduce solar output is to remove yourself to very high latitudes were it is possible to grow a polar ice cap for two thirds of the year.

Of this incoming energy, some is reflected away, a lot is absorbed by the atmosphere and the rest is absorbed by land and sea. And yes ladies, I know that if it were not for the biosphere it would be a big ice ball.

What I want everyone to observe, is that the only part of this that can truly vary and respond in the short term is the atmosphere. Massive reforestation of the Sahara will change dynamics but will also require a century as would similar land based modifications, however desirable. The sea is a sponge for energy that shifts at the rate of perhaps 1500 miles per year. It must take several years for heat in the equator to be exchanged for polar cold.

Now the heat content of the atmosphere in the tropics is already maxed out, or should be. That means that if the atmosphere is to absorb more heat, it must naturally shift that heat towards the poles, as it may be doing.

We now enter the realm of the ongoing debate, driven only by the fact that the our apparent climate has warmed up slightly. These current variations are still within what we know of long term historical cycles. The debate is over humanity's contribution.

And here is where I draw the line. The use of the atmosphere as a CO2 dump and a particulate dump is wrong irrespective of any linkages to climate change. We have already discovered that we can resolve both problems completely and economically. We can even provide self sustaining livelihoods for a billion families using what we have discovered.

We need a global regulatory mandate to eliminate stack gas emissions, exclusive of CO2 and to convert agriculture over to Terra Preta practices for soil enhancement and carbon sequestration. And there needs to be no break for anyone. The biggest beneficiaries will be the developing world.