More CO2, for the love of God, we need more CO2!

[Seth]

Is ‘global cooling’ the new scientific consensus?
3:39 PM 11/01/2013

Michael Bastasch

Is there a new scientific consensus forming around global cooling? That’s what environmentalist Lawrence Solomon writes in the Financial Post, citing the fact that solar activity is decreasing at the fastest rate as anytime in the last 10,000 years.

“Now an increasing number of scientists are swinging back to the thinking of the 1960s and 1970s,” Solomon writes. “The global cooling hypothesis may have been right after all, they say. Earth may be entering a new Little Ice Age.”

Solomon adds that Columbia University’s George Kukla — who warned the U.S. government about the dangers of global cooling in 1972 — postulated that “[g]lobal warming always precedes an ice age… The warming we saw in the 1980s and 1990s, in other words, was expected all along, much as the calm before the storm.”

Recently, scientists have been looking to solar activity as a predictor of world climate. Low solar activity has been connected with cold periods in human history, while high levels of solar activity have been connected with warming periods, like the recent one from the 1950s to 1998.

The United Nation’s climate authority has tried to downplay the influence of solar activity on the Earth’s climate, but climate scientists have been more assertive that the sun plays a role in affecting global temperatures.

Continues

[Blind groper]

The problem with that comforting idea is that real world measurements show temperature still increasing.

[macdoc]

what a fucking load of codswallop.....sun influence is a MAGNITUDE below C02 - fucking idjits the lot of them including the denidiots that swallow the fossil fools koolaid

[cronus]

Seth may be right if it keeps my electricity bill down with cheap imported coal.

[mistermack]

what a fucking load of codswallop.....sun influence is a MAGNITUDE below C02 - fucking idjits the lot of them including the denidiots that swallow the fossil fools koolaid

I'm sure the Earth would be nice and warm, without a Sun, if we just upped the CO2 levels a little bit.
In real life, it gets quite cold when it gets dark. Never notice that?

CO2 levels are 43 percent more than pre-industrial levels. Temperatures are up one degree.
So, according to your 'logic', if the Sun was 43 percent brighter, temperatures would only rise an order of magnitude less than one degree. What's that? A tenth, or a hundredth of a degree?

[Seth]

The problem with that comforting idea is that real world measurements show temperature still increasing.

Except that it doesn't.

[Seth]

what a fucking load of codswallop.....sun influence is a MAGNITUDE below C02 - fucking idjits the lot of them including the denidiots that swallow the fossil fools koolaid

Funny, I thought one watt per square meter of surface is a pretty hefty load, and that minor changes to that energy distribution, on a global scale, is an enormous factor in driving the climate cycle.

How else do you explain pre-industrial glacial and inter-glacial periods pray tell?

[Tero]

The problem with that comforting idea is that real world measurements show temperature still increasing.

Except that it doesn't.

It does. You are just looking at numbers from this century, decade, whatever. Noise. No new trend.

[Seth]

The problem with that comforting idea is that real world measurements show temperature still increasing.

Except that it doesn't.

It does. You are just looking at numbers from this century, decade, whatever. Noise. No new trend.

Up. Down. Up. Down. That's how the climate goes...for millions of years. Nothing we've seen in industrial times has yet fallen outside of the known maximums and minimums of "natural" climate swings.

Adapt or die.

[mistermack]

what a fucking load of codswallop.....sun influence is a MAGNITUDE below C02 - fucking idjits the lot of them including the denidiots that swallow the fossil fools koolaid

Funny, I thought one watt per square meter of surface is a pretty hefty load, and that minor changes to that energy distribution, on a global scale, is an enormous factor in driving the climate cycle.

How else do you explain pre-industrial glacial and inter-glacial periods pray tell?

Make that 1120–1000 watts/m2.
And macdoc wants it both ways. According to him, it's the Milankovitch cycles, which cause an incredibly slow and imperceptible change in the strength of the sunlight hitting the Earth, which causes the Earth to suddenly plunge into a full-on ice age. Or drive it OUT of a severe ice-age. And yet, Sun influence is a MAGNITUDE below CO2 influence.
Going by that reasoning, we should have been fried years ago, by the increase in CO2.

Like I've said before, any old shit will do, so long as it's alarmist.

[Blind groper]

In the short term, less than a million years, solar variation is and always has been, minimal. A slight increase or drop here and there, and average Earth temperatures increase or drop in response by a very small amount. Over that perod, Milankovitch cycles have a much greater impact. As do volcanoes. The Little Ice Age is now thought to have been triggered by a massive volcano in Indonesia.

However, over the past 100 years, apart from some minimal and short term volcano influence, the dominant factor changing temperatures has been greenhouse gases. Close on 1 degree Celsius rise as global average, which is actually rather a lot. Sadly, the greenhouse gas increase is such that this increase is continuing and will continue. Even if we stop all greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures will rise for the next century.

For the non scientific Seth, let me mention a little research, which has been done so many times, the results are no longer open to question. Take a tube, and fill it with a gas or gas mixture. Shine infra red, of the same wavelength that the Earth emits, and observe temperature rise of that gas. Increasing CO2, or methane, or CFC's, or nitrous oxide, in that gas mixture, will substantantially increase the rise in temperature. This effect is called the greenhouse effect, and applies equally to the entire atmosphere of the Earth. The effect has been quantified, so that it can be used in calculations. Those calculations clearly show the effect of CO2 (or methane etc) rise on the Earth's atmosphere, and the rise in temperature observed is fully consistent with those calculations.

[Tero]

The article contained no data. The solar component is already sorted out and is part of the model.

[subversive science]

In the short term, less than a million years, solar variation is and always has been, minimal. A slight increase or drop here and there, and average Earth temperatures increase or drop in response by a very small amount. Over that perod, Milankovitch cycles have a much greater impact. As do volcanoes. The Little Ice Age is now thought to have been triggered by a massive volcano in Indonesia.

However, over the past 100 years, apart from some minimal and short term volcano influence, the dominant factor changing temperatures has been greenhouse gases. Close on 1 degree Celsius rise as global average, which is actually rather a lot. Sadly, the greenhouse gas increase is such that this increase is continuing and will continue. Even if we stop all greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures will rise for the next century.

For the non scientific Seth, let me mention a little research, which has been done so many times, the results are no longer open to question. Take a tube, and fill it with a gas or gas mixture. Shine infra red, of the same wavelength that the Earth emits, and observe temperature rise of that gas. Increasing CO2, or methane, or CFC's, or nitrous oxide, in that gas mixture, will substantantially increase the rise in temperature. This effect is called the greenhouse effect, and applies equally to the entire atmosphere of the Earth. The effect has been quantified, so that it can be used in calculations. Those calculations clearly show the effect of CO2 (or methane etc) rise on the Earth's atmosphere, and the rise in temperature observed is fully consistent with those calculations.

Don't forget water vapor, the atmospheric concentrations of which increase as temperature increases.

[Seth]

In the short term, less than a million years, solar variation is and always has been, minimal. A slight increase or drop here and there, and average Earth temperatures increase or drop in response by a very small amount. Over that perod, Milankovitch cycles have a much greater impact. As do volcanoes. The Little Ice Age is now thought to have been triggered by a massive volcano in Indonesia.

However, over the past 100 years, apart from some minimal and short term volcano influence, the dominant factor changing temperatures has been greenhouse gases. Close on 1 degree Celsius rise as global average, which is actually rather a lot. Sadly, the greenhouse gas increase is such that this increase is continuing and will continue. Even if we stop all greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures will rise for the next century.

For the non scientific Seth, let me mention a little research, which has been done so many times, the results are no longer open to question. Take a tube, and fill it with a gas or gas mixture. Shine infra red, of the same wavelength that the Earth emits, and observe temperature rise of that gas. Increasing CO2, or methane, or CFC's, or nitrous oxide, in that gas mixture, will substantantially increase the rise in temperature. This effect is called the greenhouse effect, and applies equally to the entire atmosphere of the Earth. The effect has been quantified, so that it can be used in calculations. Those calculations clearly show the effect of CO2 (or methane etc) rise on the Earth's atmosphere, and the rise in temperature observed is fully consistent with those calculations.

Don't forget water vapor, the atmospheric concentrations of which increase as temperature increases.

Don't forget that water vapor becomes clouds, which increase planetary albedo, which reduces the amount of heat generated by insolation.

Also don't forget that higher CO2 levels and more moisture in the air cause faster and denser plant growth, which increases the production of oxygen and the binding of carbon.

Funny how it all balances out over time.

[Blind groper]

Except, Seth, it does not.

Increased CO2 and water does to a degree increase plant growth. But the fact that CO2 and temperature keep climbing shows that this increase is insufficient to compensate for the dumping of CO2 by humans into the air.