Svensmark's Cosmic Clouds

I have commented on the work of Svensmark last year and this is an update of sorts. His core conjecture was that variation in the sun’s magnetic field induced a variation in the cosmic ray flux and an associated mechanism caused variation in cloud cover. As it turns out, the variation is robust enough because sun flares produce short term effects on global cloud cover as reported in this quotation:

“Giant solar flares can have the cosmic radiation on earth to dive suddenly over a few days. In the days after the eruption cloud cover falls by about 4 per cent. And the content of liquid water in clouds (droplets) is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Indeed, [you could say] that the clouds on Earth originated in space.”

So suddenly we have a robust climate change mechanism that can observed in action.

The past decade has seen the solar magnetic field slacken and the global temperature also drop slightly. I suspect that the lag time between such variations to be quite large and that suggests that the present cooling trend will last a while past any recovery in the solar magnetic field.

However, we know at least that a major magnetic change will immediately change the cosmic ray flux. And that will just as immediately adjust cloud behavior. The percentages quoted here, should they stand up to averaging over a number of events, are actually huge and represent a major multiplier of the sun’s activity and must be accounted for.

Up to now we have been trying to justify activity changes in solar radiation that was well below a percentage point with no multiplier to help. Our only past proxy for activity was the sunspot count which happens to also better reflect magnetic activity. Linking that activity to solar radiation was a red herring.

And we now know that cloud production is generated by incoming cosmic rays. My conjecture at this point is that it is the principle mechanism of cloud formation. It is just too convenient.

Svensmark: “global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning” – “enjoy global warming while it lasts”

10 09 2009

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/10/svensmark-global-warming-stopped-and-a-cooling-is-beginning-enjoy-global-warming-while-it-lasts/

This opinion piece from Professor Henrik Svensmark was published September 9th in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Translation is from

Google translation with some post translation cleanup of jumbled words or phrases by myself. In cases were the words were badly jumbled or didn’t quite make sense I inserted [my interpretation in brackets]. Hat tip to Carsten Arnholm of Norway for bringing this to my attention. – Anthony

While the sun sleeps

HENRIK SVENSMARK, Professor, DTU, Copenhagen

Indeed, global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth, on the contrary. This means that projections of future climate is unpredictable, writes Henrik Svensmark.

The star which keeps us alive, has over the last few years almost no sunspots, which are the usual signs of the sun’s magnetic activity.

Last week, reported the scientific team behind Sohosatellitten (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) that the number of sunspot-free days suggest that solar activity is heading towards its lowest level in about 100 years’. Everything indicates that the Sun is moving into a hibernation-like state, and the obvious question is whether it has any significance for us on Earth.

If you ask the International Panel on Climate Change IPCC, representing the current consensus on climate change, so the answer is a reassuring ‘nothing’. But history and recent research suggests that it is probably completely wrong. Let us take a closer look at why.

Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the medieval warmth. It was a period when frosts in May was an almost unknown phenomenon and of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. For example, China’s population doubled over this period. But after about 1300, the earth began to get colder and it was the beginning of the period we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold period all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Swedes [were surprised to see Denmark to freeze over in ice], and the Thames in London froze repeatedly. But more serious was the long periods of crop failure, which resulted in a poorly nourished population, because of disease and hunger [population was reduced] by about 30 per cent in Europe.

It is important to note that the Little Ice Age was a global event. It ended in the late 19th century and was followed by an increase in solar activity. Over the past 50 years solar activity has been the highest since the medieval warmth for 1,000 years ago. And now it appears that the sun returns and is heading towards what is called ‘a grand minimum’ as we saw in the Little Ice Age.

The coincidence between solar activity and climate through the ages have tried explained away as coincidence. But it turns out that almost no matter what time studying, not just the last 1000 years, so there is a line. Solar activity has repeatedly over the past 10,000 years has fluctuated between high and low. Actually, the sun over the past 10,000 years spent in a sleep mode, approx. 17 pct of the time, with a cooling of the Earth to follow.

One can wonder that the international climate panel IPCC does not believe that the sun changed activity has no effect on the climate, but the reason is that they only include changes in solar radiation.

Just radiation would be the simplest way by which the sun could change the climate. A bit like turning up and down the brightness of a light bulb.

Satellite measurements of solar radiation has been shown that the variations are too small to cause climate change, but so has closed his eyes for a second much more powerful way the sun is able to affect Earth’s climate. In 1996 we discovered a surprising influence of the sun – its impact on Earth’s cloud cover. High energy accelerated particles of exploded stars, the cosmic radiation, are helping to form clouds.

When the Sun is active its magnetic field shields better against the cosmic rays from outer space before they reach our planet, and by regulating the Earth’s cloud cover the sun can turn up and down the temperature. High solar activity obtained fewer clouds and the earth is getting warmer. Low solar activity inferior shields against cosmic radiation, and it results in increased cloud cover and hence a cooling. As the sun’s magnetism has doubled its strength during the 20th century, this natural mechanism may be responsible for a large part of global warming during this period.

This also explains why most climate scientists are trying to ignore this possibility. It does in fact favor the idea that the 20th century temperature rise is mainly due to human emissions of CO2. If the sun as has influenced a significant part of warming in the 20 century, it means that CO2’s contribution must necessarily be smaller.

Ever since our theory was put forward in 1996, it has been through a very sharp criticism, which is normal in science.

First it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006 after many years of work we managed to conduct experiments at DTU Space, where we demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. The cosmic radiation helps to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.

Then came the criticism that the mechanism we have found in the laboratory was unable to survive in the real atmosphere and therefore had no practical significance. But the criticism we have just emphatically rejected. It turns out that the sun itself is doing, what we might call natural experiments. Giant solar flares can have the cosmic radiation on earth to dive suddenly over a few days. In the days after the eruption cloud cover falls by about 4 per cent. And the content of liquid water in clouds (droplets) is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Indeed, [you could say] that the clouds on Earth originated in space.

Therefore we have looked at the sun’s magnetic activity with increasing concern, since it began to wane in the mid-1990s.

That the sun could fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by [solar scientists] at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. As Nigel Calder and I updated our book “The Chilling Stars” therefore, we wrote a little provocative [passage] “we recommend our friends to enjoy global warming while it lasts.”

Indeed, global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning. Last week, it was argued by Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel at the UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years.

His explanation was natural changes in North Atlantic circulation and not in solar activity. But no matter how it is interpreted, the natural variations in climate then penetrates more and more.

One consequence may be that the sun itself will show its importance for climate and thus to test the theories of global warming. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth, on the contrary.

This means that projections of future climate is unpredictable. A forecast [that] says it may be warmer or colder for 50 years, is not very useful, for science is not able to predict solar activity.

So in many ways, we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting and I think it is important to recognize that nature is completely independent of what we humans think about it. Will Greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different than greenhouse theory’s predictions, and perhaps it becomes again popular to investigate the sun’s impact on climate.

Professor Henrik Svensmark is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at DTU Space. His book “The Chilling Stars” has also been published in Danish as “Climate and the Cosmos” (Gads Forlag, DK ISBN 9788712043508)

Deep Solar Minimum

Right on time the sunspot cycle is establishing minima. This time it appears to be as deep as last seen in 1913. Otherwise it is essentially good news as business as usual. A number of commentators have made contrarian predictions, but I see no reason to do that. Present evidence supports a rapid rise starting this year culminating in a peak three years hence on schedule. There is no reason to read anything whatsoever into present evidence.

We have seen the first few cycle 24 sunspots, and we can expect that come Christmas we will be seeing plenty more.

A number of commentators have pushed hard to police up the link between this cycle and global temperatures. My sense is that the link is real enough but been one of those factors whose effect is almost within the error range, it is devilishly difficult to separate. The fact that we seem to have decadal cycles in global climatic conditions is very suggestive but a little like trying to measure variable input heat flux in a pot by observing the boiling porridge. And yes, we are the boiling porridge.

The new news is simply that this minima is deeper than any recorded since the minima recorded in 1913. This means that we can compare the weather of the 1913 to 1924 with the weather of the next eleven years and properly determine comparability to perhaps winkle out specific variables not possible or convincing otherwise.

It is a decadal program but it should allow us to propose testable variables and outputs to test against all other sunspot cycles.

Deep Solar Minimum

04.01.2009

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm?list1109684

April 1, 2009: The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower.

2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days: plot. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008.

Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87%).
It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.

"This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif


Above: The sunspot cycle from 1995 to the present. The jagged curve traces actual sunspot counts. Smooth curves are fits to the data and one forecaster's predictions of future activity. Credit: David Hathaway, NASA/MSFC.

Quiet suns come along every 11 years or so. It's a natural part of the sunspot cycle, discovered by German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe in the mid-1800s. Sunspots are planet-sized islands of magnetism on the surface of the sun; they are sources of solar flares, coronal mass ejections and intense UV radiation. Plotting sunspot counts, Schwabe saw that peaks of solar activity were always followed by valleys of relative calm—a clockwork pattern that has held true for more than 200 years: plot.

The current solar minimum is part of that pattern. In fact, it's right on time. "We're due for a bit of quiet—and here it is," says Pesnell.

But is it supposed to be this quiet? In 2008, the sun set the following records:

A 50-year low in solar wind pressure: Measurements by the Ulysses spacecraft reveal a 20% drop in solar wind pressure since the mid-1990s—the lowest point since such measurements began in the 1960s. The solar wind helps keep galactic cosmic rays out of the inner solar system. With the solar wind flagging, more cosmic rays are permitted to enter, resulting in increased health hazards for astronauts. Weaker solar wind also means fewer geomagnetic storms and auroras on Earth.

A 12-year low in solar "irradiance": Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun's brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and a whopping 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. These changes are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other, noticeable side-effects: Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. That's the good news. Unfortunately, space junk also remains longer in Earth orbit, increasing hazards to spacecraft and satellites.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/images/deepsolarminimum/irradiance.jpg



Above: Space-age measurements of the total solar irradiance (brightness summed across all wavelengths). This plot, which comes from researcher C. Fröhlich, was shown by Dean Pesnell at the Fall 2008 AGU meeting during a lecture entitled "What is Solar Minimum and Why Should We Care?"

A 55-year low in solar radio emissions: After World War II, astronomers began keeping records of the sun's brightness at radio wavelengths. Records of 10.7 cm flux extend back all the way to the early 1950s. Radio telescopes are now recording the dimmest "radio sun" since 1955: plot. Some researchers believe that the lessening of radio emissions is an indication of weakness in the sun's global magnetic field. No one is certain, however, because the source of these long-monitored radio emissions is not fully understood.

All these lows have sparked a debate about whether the ongoing minimum is "weird", "extreme" or just an overdue "market correction" following a string of unusually intense solar maxima.

"Since the Space Age began in the 1950s, solar activity has been generally high," notes Hathaway. "Five of the ten most intense solar cycles on record have occurred in the last 50 years. We're just not used to this kind of deep calm."

Deep calm was fairly common a hundred years ago. The solar minima of 1901 and 1913, for instance, were even longer than the one we're experiencing now. To match those minima in terms of depth and longevity, the current minimum will have to last at least another year.

In a way, the calm is exciting, says Pesnell. "For the first time in history, we're getting to see what a deep solar minimum is really like." A fleet of spacecraft including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the twin STEREO probes, the five THEMIS probes, ACE, Wind, TRACE, AIM, TIMED, Geotail and others are studying the sun and its effects on Earth 24/7 using technology that didn't exist 100 years ago. Their measurements of solar wind, cosmic rays, irradiance and magnetic fields show that solar minimum is much more interesting and profound than anyone expected.

Modern technology cannot, however, predict what comes next. Competing models by dozens of top solar physicists disagree, sometimes sharply, on when this solar minimum will end and how big the next solar maximum will be. Pesnell has surveyed the scientific literature and prepared a "piano plot" showing the range of predictions. The great uncertainty stems from one simple fact: No one fully understands the underlying physics of the sunspot cycle.

Pesnell believes sunspot counts will pick up again soon, "possibly by the end of the year," to be followed by a solar maximum of below-average intensity in 2012 or 2013.

But like other forecasters, he knows he could be wrong. Bull or bear? Stay tuned for updates.

Summer Sea Ice Gone in 2013

This is one report that we must listen to. He is saying this directly in the face of what has been a very cold winter that has certainly chilled my enthusiasm for an ice free 2012 or 2013. Recall that I said exactly the same thing as the 2007 accelerated melt unfolded. My argument was a response to the expected acceleration of the ice loss and the recognition that the decades long linear model then championed was wrong headed.

The real test will be this year’s melt. Again we will be watching closely and my expectations are very low. We will now see.

The losses he is recognizing is attributable to the last of the melt phase of 2007. The reversal that took place right after should have jump started fresh sea ice accumulation this winter in particular. We are getting our assess kicked and it should be apparent by a rise in the long term ice this summer. A few summers of that and we will be right back to where we started.

Of course, sunspot cycle 24 may well kick in with a vengeance in 2010 and the global response may be quick enough to put it all back on track.

Arctic Summer Ice Could Vanish By 2013: Expert

http://www.independent-bangladesh.com/environment-news/arctic-summer-ice-could-vanish-by-2013-expert.html


Sunday, 08 March 2009

The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on Thursday.

Warwick Vincent, director of the Center for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", which call for an ice free summer in 2013.

The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong -- each year we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected," he told Reuters.

The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and the sea ice cover shrank to a record low in 2007 before growing slightly in 2008.

In 2004 a major international panel forecast the cover could vanish by 2100. Last December, some experts said the summer ice could go in the next 10 or 20 years.

If the ice cover disappears, it could have major consequences. Shipping companies are already musing about short cuts through the Arctic, which also contains enormous reserves of oil and natural gas.

Vincent's scientific team has spent the last 10 summers on Ward Hunt Island, a remote spot some 2,500 miles northwest of Ottawa.

"I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The extent of open water is something that we haven't experienced in the 10 years that I've been working up there," he said after making a presentation in the Canadian Parliament.

"We're losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much closer to reality."

In 2008 the maximum summer temperature on Ward Hunt hit 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to the usual 5 degrees. Last summer alone the five ice shelves along Ellesmere Island in Canada's Far North, which are more than 4,000 years old, shrunk by 23 percent.

Vincent told Reuters last September that it was clear some of the damage would be permanent and that the warming in the Arctic was a sign of what the rest of the world could expect. He struck a similarly gloomy note in his presentation.

"Some of this is unstoppable. We're in a train of events at the moment where there are changes taking place that we are unable to reverse, the loss of these ice shelves, for example," he said.

"But what we can do is slow down this process and we have to slow down this process because we need to buy more time. We simply don't have the technologies as a civilization to deal with this level of instability that is ahead of us."

K7RA Solar Update

I thought it might be of interest to see a report on sunspot activity prepared for the Ham radio crowd who has a vested interest in knowing. The present low level of activity is sure to attract increasing press coverage that will be poorly informed as most of us must be when visiting such data for the first time.

We appear to be having a longer than average minimum but I somehow expect that to be over toward the fall. This is just an uninformed guess at the moment based on good old intuition. The interesting question will be how strong and if the climate recovers from the present cool spell in the next year.

It would be fun to get back to having a warming climate for everyone to get excited about, and to reenter the debate on the influence of sunspots. If what I just suggested actually happens, it will be just too good to be true.
The important thing here is that we have a continuing low flux of sunspots presently happening.

I also like to remind folks that during the Maunder minimum, such sunspots described here would have simply been invisible. Watching the cycles for the past decades, it becomes apparent that the driving system never shuts off and that the sunspots are a secondary effect of that driving system that is subject to minor fluctuation reflected in sunspot behavior.

The K7RA Solar Update

http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2009/03/06/10688/?nc=1

There have been no new sunspots since the recent brief three-day appearance of quickly fading sunspot 1013 on February 24-26. It was another Solar Cycle 24 sunspot, but this is not too encouraging, considering how brief and weak it appeared. There are no predictions for new sunspots, but these events tend to occur suddenly. Sunspot numbers for February 26-March 4 were 12, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 and 0 with a mean of 1.7. The 10.7 cm flux was 69.9, 68.9, 70.6, 69.4, 69.2, 69.1 and 69.7 with a mean of 69.5.The estimated planetary A indices were 2, 8, 5, 3, 2, 5 and 7 with a mean of 4.6. The estimated mid-latitude A indices were 2, 7, 4, 2, 0, 5 and 5 with a mean of 3.6.

This weekend is the ARRL International DX SSB Contest. We can assume conditions will include no sunspots and very stable geomagnetic conditions. NOAA and USAF predict planetary A index at 5 for March 6-12, and Geophysical Institute Prague predicts quiet conditions, March 6-12.

In this bulletin we have been tracking our own flavor of smoothed sunspot number, one based on a shorter period of data (three months instead of one year that the official smoothed sunspot graphs are based upon), and perhaps revealing trends earlier. But the trend goes down again. Now that February has passed, we can take sunspot data from December 1-February 28 to calculate a three month average, centered on January. The total daily sunspot numbers for that period was 208 -- divide that by 90 days and the result is 2.3.

Here are the numbers for the recent past, updated through last month:

Jan 07 22.7 Feb 07 18.5 Mar 07 11.2 Apr 07 12.2 May 07 15.8 Jun 07 18.7 Jul 07 15.4 Aug 07 10.2 Sep 07 5.4 Oct 07 3.0 Nov 07 6.9 Dec 07 8.1 Jan 08 8.5 Feb 08 8.4 Mar 08 8.4 Apr 08 8.9 May 08 5.0 Jun 08 3.7 Jul 08 2.0 Aug 08 1.1 Sep 08 2.5 Oct 08 4.5 Nov 08 4.4 Dec 08 3.7 Jan 09 2.3

Just as Solar Cycle 23 had a double-peak, we are perhaps observing a double bottom, centered on August 2008 and early 2009, or with the second minimum perhaps some time in the near future. We won't know it until it has passed, but it sure feels like a minimum at the moment.

The lack of sunspots has been gaining attention outside of the usual scientific amateur astronomer and Amateur Radio circles, and with so many people commenting on it who have no familiarity whatsoever with solar cycles and sunspots, we are bound to see poor judgment passed on as settled fact. For years, non-scientists (I am one, too) have occasionally attempted to correlate sunspot trends with everything from social unrest, cardboard box production and stock market averages, to climate and hem lengths, with no success -- or at least the conclusions were not reproducible.

About a year ago, some of us witnessed up close the resulting flap when a daily financial news organ grossly misquoted an astrophysicist, claiming he had predicted decades of few, if any, sunspots, accompanied by endless winter. Even though the scientist denied ever saying those things, the story seemed to develop a life of its own, a sort of social virus that spread widely very quickly, nearly impossible to correct.

As a long time fan of contemporary folklore, I thought it might be interesting to track this particular meme, so I used a popular search engine feature in which I registered a particular string (the word sunspot, in this case), and every day it sent me a summary of every new use of this word found on Web sites, in blogs, Usenet newsgroups and newspapers, along with links to these articles. One of the common mistakes I found involved the difference between number of sunspots and sunspot numbers. For instance, the sunspot number is 11 if there is a single sunspot, and 23 if there are three sunspots in two groups. So someone looking at old sunspot records, and seeing a sunspot number of 150 for a certain day, assumes that the appearance of 150 simultaneous sunspots in a single day is a common occurrence.

Or they might take a look at a graph of smoothed sunspot numbers, such as the one here, and complain because the graph had recently changed without notice, or that the graph at the current date was incorrect because it showed the cycle turning up, when that has not happened. What they don't know is that every point on the graph is based on the average of a year of sunspot data and is placed in the middle of that year. So for any points within the past six months, up to half are based on predicted data. If NOAA, for instance, predicts sunspot numbers to rise in the future, it is normal to see the graph rising when in fact the sunspot numbers have not yet increased. Some of the erroneous accounts have pushed some sort of conspiracy theory, claiming that "the government" doesn't want us to know how rare recent sunspots have become.

Sometimes a letter to the editor of a newspaper, or a blog remark, will state -- without attribution to any source -- that the sunspot number for a certain month was only 3. They probably heard somewhere that there were only three sunspots making an appearance one month, when the actual average daily sunspot number for the month was several times that.

Global Warming Trends

When I commenced this blog two years ago, global warming had been with us for at least a decade and perhaps realistically for twenty years. It was indisputably warmer but is had also stabilized near the top end of the natural range as demonstrated in the historical record.

Also it was a matter of creditable measurement that the CO2 content of the atmosphere was very slowly increasing over the past century or two and this was clearly linked to our combustion of the fossil fuel inventory. No one could reasonably dispute the direct correlation and no one has. Very clearly, Mother Nature is slow at sponging up the surplus and it may also be true that higher levels are welcome. Theory has suggested that absorption will increase more rapidly as the percentage increases, so it is not linear.

Theorists then connected the dots and proclaimed the hypothesis that CO2 increase was forcing the climate change. The press was sold on the veracity of the theory and it became part of popular scientific belief. This belief system has since struggled to hold its own in the face of an unfortunate and sharp reversal in apparent climate ending the very nice twenty year trend line.

We have had two classic cold winters in a row and there is little reason to expect a reversal. In fact the present trend is negative and could possibly stay on the cold side of the historic range. Quite simply, facts in the field have demolished the trend line that supported the received fact of ongoing global warming. It simply ceased to be a fact.

In the meantime the sunspot theorists have been largely on the right side of the global warming curve and recent comments suggest that cycle 23 may have bottomed late last fall and we are about to enter an upswing there with concomitant rise in the global temperature. Again, we must wait and see.

Were I have taken issue is that the best projected impact of any CO2 forcing is totally within the real temperature range of the Holocene climate norm and we cannot properly predict and account for all the variables that contribute to that. This means that accepting any conclusion regarding CO2 forcing is both premature and most probably wrong to boot, while we cannot prove otherwise. This is true for both the pro and con position, but the balance of probabilities weigh against the pro position, now so popularized.

Importantly, CO2 forcing is not linear and is increasingly resisted by Mother Nature. All that means though is that the proper public policy is to ignore the weather and concentrate on the step by step removal of fossil fuels from the energy regime.

And that returns me to my original objective. The removal of CO2 must be done in conjunction with an ongoing reform and redesign of the operation of global agriculture. We have come a long way in understanding how that might be done.

Thirty Year Timeout for Global Warming

Let me get this right. We have a cooling event without cause and we must be prepared to discount it as significant for thirty years. I am trying to imagine any other field of human endeavor that would accept such a specious argument. It in fact boggles the mind. The heart of good science is to acknowledge the data and ask where it takes you.

In this case, the data is flowing strongly against the proposed theory and its expected data structure. The data is not waffling anymore as it did the previous several years. It has completely undone all the previous warming and is still trending downward.

Attempting to preserve a pet theory by giving it a thirty year time out is unbelievable. It might have been better to do what most other scientists have done by either becoming silent or beating a hasty retreat.

In 2007, the sea ice melt had entered terminal breakup if the seven year temperature regime was maintained. The temperature reversal was almost immediate and is continuing. We have made some progress to understanding what drives this reversal and I can assure you it has zip to do with human meddling.

My response was to recognize the new data and explain its meaning. It really is that easy. My continuing concern is that the community has a long lead time in getting data interpretations out into the hands of the public. It took a minimal understanding of theory to recognize that present trends meant an ice free 2012. NASA and others were already into temperature reversal data before their related stories came out. This means that I am generally reading out of date news stories on climate subjects.

Today we are continuing to suffer through a cold miserable winter comparable to the low end on the averages for the past fifty years. I also have no reason to anticipate anything else for the next few years.

The only variable able to show significance is solar sunspot activity and it continues to be very quiet. If it got active tomorrow, the lag time will still be a couple of years.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/02/global-warming-pause-print.html

Global Warming: On Hold?

Michael Reilly, Discovery News

March 2, 2009 -- For those who have endured this winter's frigid temperatures and today's heavy snowstorm in the Northeast, the concept of global warming may seem, well, almost wishful.

But climate is known to be variable -- a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn't mean the planet is cooling. Still, according to a new study, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.

Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.

"This is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. "Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn't have one."

Instead, Swanson and colleague Anastasios Tsonis think a series of climate processes have aligned, conspiring to chill the climate. In 1997 and 1998, the tropical Pacific Ocean warmed rapidly in what Swanson called a "super El Nino event." It sent a shock wave through the oceans and atmosphere, jarring their circulation patterns into unison.

How does this square with temperature records from 2005-2007, by some measurements among the warmest years on record? When added up with the other four years since 2001, Swanson said the overall trend is flat, even though temperatures should have gone up by 0.2 degrees Centigrade (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time.

The discrepancy gets to the heart of one of the toughest problems in climate science -- identifying the difference between natural variability (like the occasional March snowstorm) from human-induced change.

But just what's causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths. Or an overabundance of tropical clouds may be reflecting more of the sun's energy than usual back out into space.

"It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970s was due to a free variation in climate," Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. "Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again."

Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. But he warned that it's just a hiccup, and that humans' penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us.

"When the climate kicks back out of this state, we'll have explosive warming," Swanson said. "Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive."