First, let's look at the recent past...
If you're older than forty, you'll remember this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2004Dec22.html
"Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age." The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance," "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool." Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age." The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."
And each generation of scientists declares, "We were wrong then, but we're most certainly correct now!"
It makes one wonder...just what are we being taught about anything...by the schools, churches and the media...
Global Warming isn't what we've been told. That said, we should take good care of the environment. That's just common sense. "Global Warming", however, isn't caused by anything that man has ever done...maybe we haven't helped things a damned bit, but we aren't the causative agent. That's not a political statement. It's just a fact.
Now it's time for the show...
Full Version: Global Warming? ...or political hype?
a.. Carbon dioxide changes over millions of years do not correlate with temperature increases, even though CO2 has been 20 times higher than today in the past. "On the time-scale of hundreds of millions of years, carbon dioxide has sharply declined; its concentration was as much as 20 times the present value at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, 600 million years ago [Berner, 1997]. Yet the climate has not varied all that much and glaciations have occurred throughout geologic time even when CO2 concentrations were high." S. Fred Singer, "Human Contribution to Climate Change Remains Questionable," EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Society, Vol 80, page 183-187, April 20, 1999. Only recently has it been possible to obtain sufficient resolution to demonstrate that the increase in CO2 lags by about 600 years behind the rapid warming that signals deglaciation, the end of an ice age and the beginning of an interglacial warm period [Fischer et al., 1999]. Id. Citing Fischer's study, CO2 Magazine noted: "Over this immense time span, the three most dramatic warming events experienced on earth were those associated with the terminations of the last three ice ages; and for each and every one of these tremendous global warmings, earth's air temperature rose well before there was any increase in atmospheric CO2. In fact, the air's CO2 content did not begin to rise until 400 to 1,000 years after the planet began to warm." http://www.co2science.org/edit/v2_edit/v2n7edit.htm (1999). In summary, "major past climate changes were either uncorrelated with changes in CO2 or were characterized by temperature changes that preceded changes in CO2 by hundreds to thousands of years." Testimony of Richard S. Lindzen, MIT, former chairman of NAS Climate Change Panel, before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on May 2. 2001.References: "[C]hanges in CO2 concentration cannot be claimed to be the cause of changes in air temperature, for the appropriate sequence of events (temperature change following CO2 change) is not only never present, it is actually violated in [at least] half of the record." (Idso, S.B. 1998. Carbon dioxide and climate in the Vostok ice core, Atmospheric Environment 22: 2341-2342.) Petit et al. reconstructed histories of surface air temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration from data obtained from a Vostok ice core that covered the prior 420,000 years, determining that during glacial inception "the CO2 decrease lags the temperature decrease by several thousand years" and that "the same sequence of climate forcing operated during each termination."
Petit, J.R., Jouzel, J., Raynaud, D.,
Barkov, N.I., Barnola, J.-M., Basile, I., Bender, M., Chappellaz, J., Davis,
M., Delaygue, G., Delmotte, M., Kotlyakov, V.M., Legrand, M., Lipenkov,
V.Y., Lorius, C., Pepin, L., Ritz, C., Saltzman, E., and Stievenard, M.
1999.
Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature 399: 429-436. Fischer et al. (1999) found that "the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years during all three glacial-interglacial transitions." Fischer, H., Wahlen, M., Smith, J., Mastroianni, D. and Deck B. 1999. Ice core records of atmospheric CO2 around the last three glacial terminations. Science 283: 1712-1714. The latest
study concluded: "the CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ± 200 years." Caillon, N., Severinghaus, J.P., Jouzel, J., Barnola, J.-M., Kang, J. and Lipenkov, V.Y. 2003. Timing of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature changes across Termination III. Science 299: 1728-1731. The CO2 history over 500 million years in one study "exhibits no systematic correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at tectonic time scales." Rothman, D.H. 2002. "Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 99: 4167-4171. The "comparison with the geologic record of climatic variations reveals no obvious correspondence." Rothman (2002). Data from other sources - besides ice cores - supports the same conclusion: the rapid rise in sea level caused by the melting of land-based ice that began approximately 19,000 years ago preceded the post-glacial rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration by about 3,000 years. Clark, P.U. and Mix, A.C. 2000. Ice sheets by volume. Nature 406: 689-690.
A new study of ice core samples from above the Arctic circle in Norway shows that - while the Twentieth Century was the warmest in 600 years - the warmest decade of the century was the 1930s, before the buildup of GHGs. Isaksson, E., Hermanson, M., Hicks, S., Igarashi, M., Kamiyama, K., Moore, J., Motoyama, H., Muir, D., Pohjola, V., Vaikmae, R., van de Wal, R.S.W. and Watanabe, O. 2003. Ice cores from Svalbard - useful archives of past climate and pollution history. Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 28: 1217-1228 ["as on Svalbard, the 1930s were the warmest decade in the Trondheim record"].
Another new, very thorough analysis of historical data throws a lot of cold water on the GHG hypothesis. Sixteen authors from six different countries looked at fifty globally distributed paleoclimate records to ascertain probable causes of what they dsecribed as rapid climate change (RCC) over the Holocene. Mayewski, P.A., Rohling, E.E., Stager, J.C., Karlen, W., Maasch, K.A., Meeker, L.D., Meyerson, E.A., Gasse, F., van Kreveld, S., Holmgren, K., Lee-Thorp, J., Rosqvist, G. Rack, F., Staubwasser, M., Schneider, R.R. and Steig, E.J. 2004. Holocene climate variability. Quaternary Research 62: 243-255. With respect to the causes of Holocene RCCs, the international team of scientists says that "of all the potential climate forcing mechanisms, solar variability superimposed on long-term changes in insolation (Bond et al., 2001; Denton and Karlen, 1973; Mayewski et al., 1997; O'Brien et al., 1995) seems to be the most likely important forcing mechanism." In addition, they note that "negligible forcing roles are played by CH4 and CO2," and that "changes in the concentrations of CO2 and CH4 appear to have been more the result than the
cause of the RCCs."
b.. Warmer temperatures do not form any pattern related to industrial activity. The slight warming in the Twentieth Century largely "takes place... long before we see the biggest buildup of the greenhouse gases." [Dr. Robert Balling, National Center for Public Analysis, "Global Warming - Program Agenda," June 13, 1997, press conference]. In fact, during the last two decades when "greenhouse gases" have increased significantly, surface temperature measurements have been flat and both atmospheric types of measurement (satellite and weather balloon) have shown cooling. Id. "Since approximately 80% of the rise in levels of carbon dioxide during the
twentieth century occurred after the initial major rise in temperature, the increase in carbon dioxide cannot have caused the bulk of the past century's
rise in temperature. Most of the warming must have been natural...." Dr. Sallie Baliunas, astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and Deputy Director at the Mount Wilson Observatory, E/Wire, November 1, 2001. "Getting the vertical distribution of temperature wrong means that everything dependent upon that -- precipitation and cloudiness, as examples -- must be wrong. Patrick J. Michaels, S. Fred Singer and David H. Douglass,"Settling Global Warming Science," Washington Times, Aug 16, 2004 [referring to the weather baloon and satellite data that show no warming]. Their recent technical report indicates that the atmosphere is not acting like it is assumed to act in the global warming models. http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0407/0407075.pdf. The study looked at satellite and weather balloon data compared to surface temperatures: " the models generally predict an increased warming rate with height (outside of local polar regions). Neither the satellite nor the balloon records can find it." "Meltdown for Global Warming Science," by Patrick J. Michaels, S. Fred Singer and David H. Douglass, August 19, 2004, Cato Institute, online. These results are not unusual to anyone who has studied the global warming "greenhouse gas" theory. See also Dr. John Christy & Dr. Roy Spencer, Earth
System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, "Global Temperature Report: 1978 - 2003" (December 8, 2003):
http://www.uah.edu/News/climate/25years.pdf.
c.. Carbon dioxide levels have been rising for many years unrelated to human activity. "CO2 in our atmosphere has been increasing steadily for the last 18,000 years-long before humans invented smokestacks." Monte Hieb and Harrison Hieb, "Global Warming: A Chilling
Perspective," [http://www. geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html]. Nor are recent temperatures really the 'hottest on record" as often claimed by the popular press. "And a recent Harvard-Smithsonian study of more than 240 paleoclimate research papers published in the past four decades concluded that the 20th century was neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather of the past 1,000 years for specific regions," Christy and Spencer (2003) citing Soon, W. and S. Baliunas, "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years." Climate Research, 2003, 23: 89-110. In fact, ".a graph of mean value of atmospheric carbon dioxide measured in Europe, North America and Peru shows that in the period 1820 to 1880 levels between 350ppmv and 550 ppmv were relatively common place." http://mclean.ch/climate/Disputing_Kyoto.pdf, citing "Climate Change: Incorrect information on pre-industrial CO2 " at http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/
"Each year the natural emissions of carbon dioxide are far greater than the anthropogenic emissions and many researchers accept that anthropogenic emissions are only about 3% of the total. Given that current levels of carbon dioxide might contribute about 3% of the total warming (see reference 9.1 and 9.2), the anthropogenic carbon dioxide contribution to total warming is, at most, about 0.1%, or in other words, one one-thousandth." Id., citing http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils...house_data.html.
".earth's temperature and CO2 levels today have reached levels similar to a previous interglacial cycle of 120,000 - 140,000 years ago. From beginning to end this cycle lasted about 20,000 years. This is known as the Eemian Interglacial Period and the earth returned to a full-fledged ice age immediately afterward." GLOBAL WARMING: A CHILLING PERSPECTIVE:
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils...l#anchor2108263.
d.. The Southern polar region is actually getting colder. "The latest measurements of Antarctic climate show that the main part of the continent is cooling, and has been for some time (Doran et al, 2002). Changes in Antarctic ice that we do observe are part of the normal post-Wisconsin interglacial process, not a recent artifact of human influence on climate (Conway et al, 1999)." Lee C. Gerhard, Principal Geologist, Kansas Geological Survey, Letter to The Professional Geologist August 2002. " Our
14-year continuous weather station record from the shore of Lake Hoare reveals that seasonally averaged surface air temperature has decreased by 0.7 degrees Celsius per decade....The temperature decrease is most pronounced in summer and autumn. Continental cooling, especially the seasonality of cooling, poses challenges to models of climate and ecosystem change." National Science Foundation Study, cited at Nature.com
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf...ture710_fs.html ].
The newest study is more conclusive: "overall, the total Antarctic sea ice extent (the cumulative area of grid boxes covering at least 15% ice concentrations) has shown an increasing trend (~4,801 km2/yr)." In addition, they find that "the total Antarctic sea ice area (the cumulative area of the ocean actually covered by at least 15% ice concentrations) has increased significantly by ~13,295 km2/yr, exceeding the 95% confidence level," noting that "the upward trends in the total ice extent and area are robust for different cutoffs of 15, 20, and 30% ice concentrations (used to define the ice extent and area)." Liu, J., Curry, J.A. and Martinson, D.G. 2004. Interpretation of recent Antarctic sea ice variability. Geophysical Research Letters 31: 10.1029/2003GL018732.
References: Cavalieri, D.J., Parkinson, C.L. and Vinnikov, K.Y. 2003. 30-Year satellite record reveals contrasting Arctic and Antarctic decadal sea ice variability. Geophysical Research Letters 30: 10.1029/2003GL018031.
e.. Data from the Arctic region is much more equivocal than the popular press accounts. One study shows no changes in Arctic ice thickness in the 1990s. Winsor, P. 2001. "Arctic sea ice thickness remained constant during the 1990s." Geophysical Research Letters 28: 1039-1041."Temperature anomalies also exist in Greenland, the largest ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere, with cooling in the interior concurrent with warming at the coast." [http://www.sepp.org//weekwas/2002/Jan26.html]. "Direct temperature measurements on Greenland ice cores show a cooling trend between 1940 and 1995 [Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998]." Singer, "Human Contribution to Climate
Change Remains Questionable," supra. Finally, "the Northern Hemisphere would appear to be not much warmer now (and the extent of Barents sea-ice cover not much less now) than it was sometime during the 1700s, when the air's CO2 concentration was on the order of 90-100 ppm less than it is now." CO2 Magazine, citing data from Vinje, T. 2001. Anomalies and trends of sea-ice extent and atmospheric circulation in the Nordic Seas during the period 1864-1998. Journal of Climate 14: 255-267. Baffin Bay in Northern Canada has not displayed lower spring sea-ice levels over the last 70 years, but increases similar to ice age conditions. Grumet, N.S., Wake, C.P., Mayewski, P.A., Zielinski, G.A., Whitlow, S.I., Koerner, R.M., Fisher, D.A. and Woollett, J.M. 2001. Variability of sea-ice extent in Baffin Bay over the last millennium. Climatic Change 49: 129-145. "Reports based on submarine sonar data have suggested Arctic sea ice has thinned nearly by half in only recent decades. Such rapid thinning is a concern for detection of global change and for Arctic regional impacts. Re-examining the inferred thinning while including atmospheric timeseries, ocean currents, rivers runoff, and modelled physics of ocean-ice-snow, we find that inferred rapid thinning was unlikely. Varying winds, which rapidly redistribute Arctic ice, create a difficult sampling problem, dominated by a recurring pattern where ice is expelled from the central Arctic while thickening in the Canadian sector." IS ARCTIC SEA ICE RAPIDLY THINNING? Greg Holloway and Tessa Sou, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Sidney BC, Canada,
http://adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca/app/filerepo...226\FD.pdf
"Analysis of records (Figures 2, 3) also shows that long-term ice trends are small and generally not statistically significant." I. Polyakov, G. V. Alekseev, R. V. Bekryaev, U. Bhatt, R. Colony, M. Johnson, V. P. Karklin, D. Walsh, and A. V. Yulin , "Long-term ice variability in arctic marginal seas," International Arctic research
Center (2003)[ http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~igor/res...h/ice/index.php]. They conclude that variability is caused by observed wind circulation changes, not recorded temperature changes: "Previous studies showed that at time scales of up to decades sea-ice conditions are controlled by changes in the atmospheric circulation pattern. Our study extends this result, suggesting that even at interdecadal time scales winds remain the major contributor to ice-extent variation in
the Siberian marginal-ice zone." Id. "Recent studies show sea conditions in the Arctic today are similar to conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while average Arctic temperatures are rising almost to their levels of the 1930s." Christy and Spencer, Global temperature Report (2003) citing Przbylak, R., "Temporal and spatial variation of surface air temperature over the period of instrumental observations in the Arctic."International Journal of Climatology, 2000. 20: 587-614. Some Arctic Ocean conditions are now favoring the development of more ice. Windsor, "Variability of the Cold Halocline Layer of the Arctic Ocean: Implications for the Sea Ice Mass Balance,"
[http://www.agu.org/meetings/cc02eabstracts/winsor.pdf].
6. Glaciers are not melting due to elevated greenhouse gases. "During the 15th through 19th centuries, widespread and major glacier advances occurred during a period of colder global temperature known as the Little Ice Age (Broecker, 2001; Grove, 2001). Following the peak of Little Ice Age coldness, it should come as no surprise that many records indicate widespread glacial retreat, as temperatures began to rise in the mid- to late-1800s and many glaciers returned to positions characteristic of
pre-Little Ice Age times. What people may find surprising, however, is that in many instances the rate of glacier retreat has not increased over the past 70 years; and in some cases glacier mass balance has actually increased, all during a time when the atmosphere experienced the bulk of the increase in its CO2 content." "Reality Check: Are The World's Glaciers Really Melting Away?" CO2 Science Magazine, March 2003, [http://www.co2science.org/subject/ g/summaries/glaciers.htm]. "Within
Europe, for example, he notes that "Alpine glaciers are generally shrinking, Scandinavian glaciers are growing, and glaciers in the Caucasus are close to
equilibrium for 1980-95." And when results for the whole world are combined for this most recent period of time, Braithwaite notes that "there is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years." Id. See Braithwaite. (2002) "Glacier mass balance: the first 50 years of international monitoring." Progress in Physical Geography 26: 76-95. In Mackintosh, A.N., Dugmore, A.J. and Hubbard, A.L. 2002. Holocene climatic changes in Iceland: evidence from modeling glacier length fluctuations at Solheimajokull. Quaternary International 91: 39-52, the authors report what is known about the history of the Solheimajokull outlet glacier of the
Myrdalsjokull ice cap located on the southern coast of Iceland. In 1705, the glacier had a length of approximately 14.8 km; and by 1740, its length had grown to 15.2 km. Thereafter, however, the glacier began to shrink, exhibiting a length of only 13.2 km in 1783. Rebounding rapidly, the glacier returned to its 1705 position by 1794; and by 1820 it equaled its 1740 length. This maximum length was maintained for about the next half-century, after which the glacier began a slow retreat that continued to about 1932, when its length was approximately 14.75 km. The glacier then wasted away more rapidly, reaching a second minimum-length value of approximately 13.8 km at about 1970, whereupon it began to rapidly expand once again, growing to about 14.3 km in length by 1995. The current position of the outlet glacier terminus is by no means unusual. In fact, it is about midway between its maximum and minimum positions of the past three centuries. It is also interesting to note that the glacier has been growing in length since about 1970 and that, in the words of the authors, "the recent advance (1970-1995) resulted from a combination of cooling and enhancement of precipitation."
Another study of 18 Arctic glaciers questions whether the net decrease in their ice volume is related to 20th Century CO2 changes after 1950. Dowdeswell, J.A., Hagen, J.O., Bjornsson, H., Glazovsky, A.F., Harrison, W.D., Holmlund, P. Jania, J., Koerner, R.M., Lefauconnier, B., Ommanney, C.S.L. and Thomas, R.H. 1997. The mass balance of circum-Arctic glaciers and recent climate change. Quaternary Research 48: 1-14. The authors note that "ice-core records from the Canadian High Arctic islands indicate that the generally negative glacier mass balances observed over the past 50 years have probably been typical of Arctic glaciers since the end of the Little
Ice Age," and that "Arctic glaciers may have responded to a step-like warming in the early twentieth century [our italics] associated with the end of the Little Ice Age." In fact, in the words of the authors, "there is no compelling indication of increasingly negative balance conditions which might, a priori, be expected from anthropogenically induced global warming." Quite to the contrary, they report that "almost 80% of the mass balance time series also have a positive trend, toward a less negative mass balance." Note on Kilimanjaro: The melting of the ice on Kilimanjaro is often used in global warming discussions. But the theory is totally devoid of factual support at every level. The temperature data for East Africa support no inference of GHG warming: The National Academy of Sciences published a report* last year that defines the geographic regions of warming and cooling during the last 20 years. Surface measurements of East Africa show no warming trend (Fig. 6.2, p. 34). Weather satellites show a pronounced cooling trend of the atmosphere there (Fig. 7.1, p.43). No one has questioned these data. National Research Council. "Reconciling Observations
of Global Temperature Change," National Academy Press, Washington, DC. January 2000. The implication that the rate of decline at Kilimanjaro is increasing is a lie. "Kilimanjaro's glaciers lost 45 percent of their real extent in that era of non-human warming. If the glaciers had continued on their merry way at the pace established in that period, they would be gone by now." October 26, 2002 "The Snow Jobs of Kilimanjaro," by Patrick J. Michaels, u. of Virginia, Cato Institute,
http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-26-02.html [note: Michaels uses the author of the Kilimanjaro study's own data, Thompson et al, OSU, 2002] Another glaring
gap in Thompson theory on Kilimanjaro is that snow there declined during periods of temperature cooling: "From 1953 through 1976, another 21 percent of the original area was uncovered. This was during a period of global cooling-yes, cooling--of 0.13ºF. Ohio State could have accurately written the following hype at that time: "Kilimanjaro's glaciers will completely disappear by 2015 if this cooling trend continues". Michaels, supra. Kaser et al. demonstrate that all relevant 'observations and facts' clearly indicate that 'climatological processes other than air temperature control the ice recession in a direct manner' on Kilimanjaro, and that 'positive air
temperatures have not contributed to the recession process on the summit...'" Kaser, G. and B. Noggler (1996): Glacier fluctuations in the Rwenzori Range (East Africa) during the 20th century - a preliminary report. Zeitschrift für Gletscherkunde und Glazialgeologie, 32, 109-117. See also Kaser, G., D.R. Hardy, T. Mölg, R.S. Bradley, and T.M. Hyera (2004): Modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro as evidence of climate change: Observations and facts. International Journal of Climatology, 24, 329-339, doi:
10.1002/joc.1008 ["climatological processes other than air temperature control the ice recession in a direct manner"]. Link:
http://geowww.uibk.ac.at/glacio/LITERATUR/...IJC24(2004).pdf
Nor are the oceans rapidly rising. "Although the long-term average GSL rise for the past few millennia has been stable at a level near zero, there is reliable evidence from coastal land records,1 lake and river ice cover,2 and water level measurements3 that GSL abruptly began to rise near the mid-19th century. "No studies, however, have detected any significant acceleration of GSL rise during the 20th century." Bruce C. Douglas and W. Richard Peltier,
"The Puzzle of Global Sea-Level Rise: Measuring the rate of sea level rise over the past century requires modeling the behavior of Earth's crust over the past 20 000 years," Physics Today 2002. 55:35-40.[ http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-55/iss-3/p35.html]. The upper limit of melting ice to sea-level increases is 0.3 mm a year according to new research by Mark Meier of the University of Colorado, out of an estimated 2 mm a year rise. Id.
Question: If the atmosphere was causing major general warming, wouldn't there be more consistency in the glacier studies?
f.. There is no correlation between temperature changes and more sever weather. Nothing in the peer-reviewed research in the field supports this popular myth. The IPCC Report (2001) does not make the claim: "Severe storms are often rare, so the analysis of large areas and long lengths of homo-geneous storm records are required to assess changes. So far this combination of data is not available." [sec.2.7.3]. IPCC notes,or instance, that "the trend in intense tropical cyclones (minimum central pressure below 970 hPa) is not significantly different from zero." Id. "The United States record of landfall frequency and intensity of hurricanes is very reliable . but [show] no significant long-term trends." Id. Free et al (2004) tried the extreme weather hypothesis, expecting to find a correlation. This effort, however, yielded "no significant trend in potential intensity from 1980 to 1995 and no consistent trend from 1975 to 1995." What is more, they report that between 1975 and 1980, "while SSTs [sea surface temperatures] rose, PI [hurricane potential intensity] decreased, illustrating the hazards of predicting changes in hurricane intensity from projected SST changes alone." Balling and Cerveny (2003)could find no associations between timing and duration of the hurricane season and geographic position of storms and either local, hemispheric or global temperature using a database of all tropical storms that occurred within the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the western North Atlantic Ocean over the period 1950-2002. Landsea et al. (1998) report that "Atlantic hurricane activity has actually decreased significantly in both frequency of intense hurricanes and mean intensity of all named storms over the past few decades..." See Balling Jr., R.C. and Cerveny, R.S. 2003. Analysis of the duration, seasonal timing, and location of North Atlantic tropical cyclones: 1950-2002. Geophysical Research Letters 30: 10.1029/2003GL018404; Bister, M. and Emanuel, K. 2002. Low frequency
variability of tropical cyclone potential intensity. 1. Interannual to interdecadal variability. Journal of Geophysical Research 107: 0.1029/2001 JD000776; Boose, E.R., Chamberlin, K.E. and Foster, D.R. 2001. Landscape and regional impacts of hurricanes in New England. Ecological Monographs 71: 27-48; Bove, M.C., Zierden, D.F. and O'Brien, J.J. 1998. Are gulf landfalling hurricanes getting stronger? Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 79: 1327-1328; Easterling, D.R., Evans, J.L.,
Groisman, P.Ya., Karl, T.R., Kunkel, K.E. and Ambenje, P. 2000. Observed variability and trends in extreme climate events: A brief review. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 81: 417-425; Elsner, J.B., Liu, K.-b. and Kocher, B. 2000. Spatial variations in major U.S. hurricane activity: Statistics and a physical mechanism. Journal of Climate 13: 2293-2305; Elsner, J.B., Niu, X. and Jagger, T.H. 2004. Detecting shifts in hurricane rates using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach. Journal of Climate 17: 2652-2666. This issue came to a dramatic moment in early 2005. One of the IPCC scientific team members just quit over the obvious lack of ethics by the
IPCC Panel. In an open letter, Chris Landsea, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said:
"I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound."
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/promethe...sea_leaves.html
Landsea is one of the world's top hurricane experts, who was asked by a lead author of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, to develop a segment on the impact of global warming on the future intensity of hurricanes. Lead Author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, participated in a press conference that proclaimed: "Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity." Landsea had told Trenberth that the science did not support such claims. When he was ignored, he quit.
8. The human impact on global climate change is not universally or even substantially supported by the majority of scientific specialists in the relevant fields. Objective science has motivated thousands of geo-physicists, climatologists and other experts to sign several petitions protesting the Kyoto Protocol. "Since the climate treaty was hatched in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, scientists have shown their dissent with four petitions: the 1992 "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," with
more than 100 signatures; the 1992 "Heidelberg Appeal," with more than 4,000 signatures; the 1996 "Leipzig Declaration," signed by some 130 prominent U.S. climate scientists, including several who participated in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); and, this year, the "Oregon Petition" which has been signed thus far by 17,000 U.S. scientists." Candace Crandall , "The number of scientists refuting global warming is growing," Washington Times, November 20, 1998. "[T]here is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them." Richard Lintzen, Wall Street Journal , June 11, 2001.
9. Full implementation of Kyoto, even with U.S. participation, will achieve nothing. "The Kyoto treaty would not make a measurable difference in the climate by 2050, a temperature reduction of maybe two-hundredths of a degree Celsius, or at most six-hundredths of a degree." Thomas Sieger Derr, "Strange Science : Reflections on Global Warming" (2004)[this conclusion is not controversial or contradicted by Kyoto advocates]. "A fundamental point that needs to be understood is that if any of these proposals (including the Kyoto protocol) are implemented, they will have an effect on the climate so small that it cannot be detected." Dr. John Christy & Dr. Roy Spencer, Earth System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, "Global Temperature Report: 1978 - 2003" (December 8, 2003):
http://www.uah.edu/News/climate/25years.pdf.
NOTE: Most CO2 does not come from human activities:
"At least 96% of the current atmospheric CO2 comes from non-fossil fuel sources; that is, natural marine and juvenile [volcanic] sources. Hence for the atmosphere CO2 budget, marine degassing and juvenile degassing (from volcanic eruptions) are far more important, and the burning of fossil-fuel and biogenic materials much less important, than hitherto assumed." T.V. Segalstad,``Climate and Volcanic Aerosols.'' University of Oslo, paper at 1992 Chapman Conference,
Petit, J.R., Jouzel, J., Raynaud, D.,
Barkov, N.I., Barnola, J.-M., Basile, I., Bender, M., Chappellaz, J., Davis,
M., Delaygue, G., Delmotte, M., Kotlyakov, V.M., Legrand, M., Lipenkov,
V.Y., Lorius, C., Pepin, L., Ritz, C., Saltzman, E., and Stievenard, M.
1999.
Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature 399: 429-436. Fischer et al. (1999) found that "the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years during all three glacial-interglacial transitions." Fischer, H., Wahlen, M., Smith, J., Mastroianni, D. and Deck B. 1999. Ice core records of atmospheric CO2 around the last three glacial terminations. Science 283: 1712-1714. The latest
study concluded: "the CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ± 200 years." Caillon, N., Severinghaus, J.P., Jouzel, J., Barnola, J.-M., Kang, J. and Lipenkov, V.Y. 2003. Timing of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature changes across Termination III. Science 299: 1728-1731. The CO2 history over 500 million years in one study "exhibits no systematic correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at tectonic time scales." Rothman, D.H. 2002. "Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 99: 4167-4171. The "comparison with the geologic record of climatic variations reveals no obvious correspondence." Rothman (2002). Data from other sources - besides ice cores - supports the same conclusion: the rapid rise in sea level caused by the melting of land-based ice that began approximately 19,000 years ago preceded the post-glacial rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration by about 3,000 years. Clark, P.U. and Mix, A.C. 2000. Ice sheets by volume. Nature 406: 689-690.
A new study of ice core samples from above the Arctic circle in Norway shows that - while the Twentieth Century was the warmest in 600 years - the warmest decade of the century was the 1930s, before the buildup of GHGs. Isaksson, E., Hermanson, M., Hicks, S., Igarashi, M., Kamiyama, K., Moore, J., Motoyama, H., Muir, D., Pohjola, V., Vaikmae, R., van de Wal, R.S.W. and Watanabe, O. 2003. Ice cores from Svalbard - useful archives of past climate and pollution history. Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 28: 1217-1228 ["as on Svalbard, the 1930s were the warmest decade in the Trondheim record"].
Another new, very thorough analysis of historical data throws a lot of cold water on the GHG hypothesis. Sixteen authors from six different countries looked at fifty globally distributed paleoclimate records to ascertain probable causes of what they dsecribed as rapid climate change (RCC) over the Holocene. Mayewski, P.A., Rohling, E.E., Stager, J.C., Karlen, W., Maasch, K.A., Meeker, L.D., Meyerson, E.A., Gasse, F., van Kreveld, S., Holmgren, K., Lee-Thorp, J., Rosqvist, G. Rack, F., Staubwasser, M., Schneider, R.R. and Steig, E.J. 2004. Holocene climate variability. Quaternary Research 62: 243-255. With respect to the causes of Holocene RCCs, the international team of scientists says that "of all the potential climate forcing mechanisms, solar variability superimposed on long-term changes in insolation (Bond et al., 2001; Denton and Karlen, 1973; Mayewski et al., 1997; O'Brien et al., 1995) seems to be the most likely important forcing mechanism." In addition, they note that "negligible forcing roles are played by CH4 and CO2," and that "changes in the concentrations of CO2 and CH4 appear to have been more the result than the
cause of the RCCs."
b.. Warmer temperatures do not form any pattern related to industrial activity. The slight warming in the Twentieth Century largely "takes place... long before we see the biggest buildup of the greenhouse gases." [Dr. Robert Balling, National Center for Public Analysis, "Global Warming - Program Agenda," June 13, 1997, press conference]. In fact, during the last two decades when "greenhouse gases" have increased significantly, surface temperature measurements have been flat and both atmospheric types of measurement (satellite and weather balloon) have shown cooling. Id. "Since approximately 80% of the rise in levels of carbon dioxide during the
twentieth century occurred after the initial major rise in temperature, the increase in carbon dioxide cannot have caused the bulk of the past century's
rise in temperature. Most of the warming must have been natural...." Dr. Sallie Baliunas, astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and Deputy Director at the Mount Wilson Observatory, E/Wire, November 1, 2001. "Getting the vertical distribution of temperature wrong means that everything dependent upon that -- precipitation and cloudiness, as examples -- must be wrong. Patrick J. Michaels, S. Fred Singer and David H. Douglass,"Settling Global Warming Science," Washington Times, Aug 16, 2004 [referring to the weather baloon and satellite data that show no warming]. Their recent technical report indicates that the atmosphere is not acting like it is assumed to act in the global warming models. http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0407/0407075.pdf. The study looked at satellite and weather balloon data compared to surface temperatures: " the models generally predict an increased warming rate with height (outside of local polar regions). Neither the satellite nor the balloon records can find it." "Meltdown for Global Warming Science," by Patrick J. Michaels, S. Fred Singer and David H. Douglass, August 19, 2004, Cato Institute, online. These results are not unusual to anyone who has studied the global warming "greenhouse gas" theory. See also Dr. John Christy & Dr. Roy Spencer, Earth
System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, "Global Temperature Report: 1978 - 2003" (December 8, 2003):
http://www.uah.edu/News/climate/25years.pdf.
c.. Carbon dioxide levels have been rising for many years unrelated to human activity. "CO2 in our atmosphere has been increasing steadily for the last 18,000 years-long before humans invented smokestacks." Monte Hieb and Harrison Hieb, "Global Warming: A Chilling
Perspective," [http://www. geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html]. Nor are recent temperatures really the 'hottest on record" as often claimed by the popular press. "And a recent Harvard-Smithsonian study of more than 240 paleoclimate research papers published in the past four decades concluded that the 20th century was neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather of the past 1,000 years for specific regions," Christy and Spencer (2003) citing Soon, W. and S. Baliunas, "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years." Climate Research, 2003, 23: 89-110. In fact, ".a graph of mean value of atmospheric carbon dioxide measured in Europe, North America and Peru shows that in the period 1820 to 1880 levels between 350ppmv and 550 ppmv were relatively common place." http://mclean.ch/climate/Disputing_Kyoto.pdf, citing "Climate Change: Incorrect information on pre-industrial CO2 " at http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/
"Each year the natural emissions of carbon dioxide are far greater than the anthropogenic emissions and many researchers accept that anthropogenic emissions are only about 3% of the total. Given that current levels of carbon dioxide might contribute about 3% of the total warming (see reference 9.1 and 9.2), the anthropogenic carbon dioxide contribution to total warming is, at most, about 0.1%, or in other words, one one-thousandth." Id., citing http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils...house_data.html.
".earth's temperature and CO2 levels today have reached levels similar to a previous interglacial cycle of 120,000 - 140,000 years ago. From beginning to end this cycle lasted about 20,000 years. This is known as the Eemian Interglacial Period and the earth returned to a full-fledged ice age immediately afterward." GLOBAL WARMING: A CHILLING PERSPECTIVE:
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils...l#anchor2108263.
d.. The Southern polar region is actually getting colder. "The latest measurements of Antarctic climate show that the main part of the continent is cooling, and has been for some time (Doran et al, 2002). Changes in Antarctic ice that we do observe are part of the normal post-Wisconsin interglacial process, not a recent artifact of human influence on climate (Conway et al, 1999)." Lee C. Gerhard, Principal Geologist, Kansas Geological Survey, Letter to The Professional Geologist August 2002. " Our
14-year continuous weather station record from the shore of Lake Hoare reveals that seasonally averaged surface air temperature has decreased by 0.7 degrees Celsius per decade....The temperature decrease is most pronounced in summer and autumn. Continental cooling, especially the seasonality of cooling, poses challenges to models of climate and ecosystem change." National Science Foundation Study, cited at Nature.com
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf...ture710_fs.html ].
The newest study is more conclusive: "overall, the total Antarctic sea ice extent (the cumulative area of grid boxes covering at least 15% ice concentrations) has shown an increasing trend (~4,801 km2/yr)." In addition, they find that "the total Antarctic sea ice area (the cumulative area of the ocean actually covered by at least 15% ice concentrations) has increased significantly by ~13,295 km2/yr, exceeding the 95% confidence level," noting that "the upward trends in the total ice extent and area are robust for different cutoffs of 15, 20, and 30% ice concentrations (used to define the ice extent and area)." Liu, J., Curry, J.A. and Martinson, D.G. 2004. Interpretation of recent Antarctic sea ice variability. Geophysical Research Letters 31: 10.1029/2003GL018732.
References: Cavalieri, D.J., Parkinson, C.L. and Vinnikov, K.Y. 2003. 30-Year satellite record reveals contrasting Arctic and Antarctic decadal sea ice variability. Geophysical Research Letters 30: 10.1029/2003GL018031.
e.. Data from the Arctic region is much more equivocal than the popular press accounts. One study shows no changes in Arctic ice thickness in the 1990s. Winsor, P. 2001. "Arctic sea ice thickness remained constant during the 1990s." Geophysical Research Letters 28: 1039-1041."Temperature anomalies also exist in Greenland, the largest ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere, with cooling in the interior concurrent with warming at the coast." [http://www.sepp.org//weekwas/2002/Jan26.html]. "Direct temperature measurements on Greenland ice cores show a cooling trend between 1940 and 1995 [Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998]." Singer, "Human Contribution to Climate
Change Remains Questionable," supra. Finally, "the Northern Hemisphere would appear to be not much warmer now (and the extent of Barents sea-ice cover not much less now) than it was sometime during the 1700s, when the air's CO2 concentration was on the order of 90-100 ppm less than it is now." CO2 Magazine, citing data from Vinje, T. 2001. Anomalies and trends of sea-ice extent and atmospheric circulation in the Nordic Seas during the period 1864-1998. Journal of Climate 14: 255-267. Baffin Bay in Northern Canada has not displayed lower spring sea-ice levels over the last 70 years, but increases similar to ice age conditions. Grumet, N.S., Wake, C.P., Mayewski, P.A., Zielinski, G.A., Whitlow, S.I., Koerner, R.M., Fisher, D.A. and Woollett, J.M. 2001. Variability of sea-ice extent in Baffin Bay over the last millennium. Climatic Change 49: 129-145. "Reports based on submarine sonar data have suggested Arctic sea ice has thinned nearly by half in only recent decades. Such rapid thinning is a concern for detection of global change and for Arctic regional impacts. Re-examining the inferred thinning while including atmospheric timeseries, ocean currents, rivers runoff, and modelled physics of ocean-ice-snow, we find that inferred rapid thinning was unlikely. Varying winds, which rapidly redistribute Arctic ice, create a difficult sampling problem, dominated by a recurring pattern where ice is expelled from the central Arctic while thickening in the Canadian sector." IS ARCTIC SEA ICE RAPIDLY THINNING? Greg Holloway and Tessa Sou, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Sidney BC, Canada,
http://adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca/app/filerepo...226\FD.pdf
"Analysis of records (Figures 2, 3) also shows that long-term ice trends are small and generally not statistically significant." I. Polyakov, G. V. Alekseev, R. V. Bekryaev, U. Bhatt, R. Colony, M. Johnson, V. P. Karklin, D. Walsh, and A. V. Yulin , "Long-term ice variability in arctic marginal seas," International Arctic research
Center (2003)[ http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~igor/res...h/ice/index.php]. They conclude that variability is caused by observed wind circulation changes, not recorded temperature changes: "Previous studies showed that at time scales of up to decades sea-ice conditions are controlled by changes in the atmospheric circulation pattern. Our study extends this result, suggesting that even at interdecadal time scales winds remain the major contributor to ice-extent variation in
the Siberian marginal-ice zone." Id. "Recent studies show sea conditions in the Arctic today are similar to conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while average Arctic temperatures are rising almost to their levels of the 1930s." Christy and Spencer, Global temperature Report (2003) citing Przbylak, R., "Temporal and spatial variation of surface air temperature over the period of instrumental observations in the Arctic."International Journal of Climatology, 2000. 20: 587-614. Some Arctic Ocean conditions are now favoring the development of more ice. Windsor, "Variability of the Cold Halocline Layer of the Arctic Ocean: Implications for the Sea Ice Mass Balance,"
[http://www.agu.org/meetings/cc02eabstracts/winsor.pdf].
6. Glaciers are not melting due to elevated greenhouse gases. "During the 15th through 19th centuries, widespread and major glacier advances occurred during a period of colder global temperature known as the Little Ice Age (Broecker, 2001; Grove, 2001). Following the peak of Little Ice Age coldness, it should come as no surprise that many records indicate widespread glacial retreat, as temperatures began to rise in the mid- to late-1800s and many glaciers returned to positions characteristic of
pre-Little Ice Age times. What people may find surprising, however, is that in many instances the rate of glacier retreat has not increased over the past 70 years; and in some cases glacier mass balance has actually increased, all during a time when the atmosphere experienced the bulk of the increase in its CO2 content." "Reality Check: Are The World's Glaciers Really Melting Away?" CO2 Science Magazine, March 2003, [http://www.co2science.org/subject/ g/summaries/glaciers.htm]. "Within
Europe, for example, he notes that "Alpine glaciers are generally shrinking, Scandinavian glaciers are growing, and glaciers in the Caucasus are close to
equilibrium for 1980-95." And when results for the whole world are combined for this most recent period of time, Braithwaite notes that "there is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years." Id. See Braithwaite. (2002) "Glacier mass balance: the first 50 years of international monitoring." Progress in Physical Geography 26: 76-95. In Mackintosh, A.N., Dugmore, A.J. and Hubbard, A.L. 2002. Holocene climatic changes in Iceland: evidence from modeling glacier length fluctuations at Solheimajokull. Quaternary International 91: 39-52, the authors report what is known about the history of the Solheimajokull outlet glacier of the
Myrdalsjokull ice cap located on the southern coast of Iceland. In 1705, the glacier had a length of approximately 14.8 km; and by 1740, its length had grown to 15.2 km. Thereafter, however, the glacier began to shrink, exhibiting a length of only 13.2 km in 1783. Rebounding rapidly, the glacier returned to its 1705 position by 1794; and by 1820 it equaled its 1740 length. This maximum length was maintained for about the next half-century, after which the glacier began a slow retreat that continued to about 1932, when its length was approximately 14.75 km. The glacier then wasted away more rapidly, reaching a second minimum-length value of approximately 13.8 km at about 1970, whereupon it began to rapidly expand once again, growing to about 14.3 km in length by 1995. The current position of the outlet glacier terminus is by no means unusual. In fact, it is about midway between its maximum and minimum positions of the past three centuries. It is also interesting to note that the glacier has been growing in length since about 1970 and that, in the words of the authors, "the recent advance (1970-1995) resulted from a combination of cooling and enhancement of precipitation."
Another study of 18 Arctic glaciers questions whether the net decrease in their ice volume is related to 20th Century CO2 changes after 1950. Dowdeswell, J.A., Hagen, J.O., Bjornsson, H., Glazovsky, A.F., Harrison, W.D., Holmlund, P. Jania, J., Koerner, R.M., Lefauconnier, B., Ommanney, C.S.L. and Thomas, R.H. 1997. The mass balance of circum-Arctic glaciers and recent climate change. Quaternary Research 48: 1-14. The authors note that "ice-core records from the Canadian High Arctic islands indicate that the generally negative glacier mass balances observed over the past 50 years have probably been typical of Arctic glaciers since the end of the Little
Ice Age," and that "Arctic glaciers may have responded to a step-like warming in the early twentieth century [our italics] associated with the end of the Little Ice Age." In fact, in the words of the authors, "there is no compelling indication of increasingly negative balance conditions which might, a priori, be expected from anthropogenically induced global warming." Quite to the contrary, they report that "almost 80% of the mass balance time series also have a positive trend, toward a less negative mass balance." Note on Kilimanjaro: The melting of the ice on Kilimanjaro is often used in global warming discussions. But the theory is totally devoid of factual support at every level. The temperature data for East Africa support no inference of GHG warming: The National Academy of Sciences published a report* last year that defines the geographic regions of warming and cooling during the last 20 years. Surface measurements of East Africa show no warming trend (Fig. 6.2, p. 34). Weather satellites show a pronounced cooling trend of the atmosphere there (Fig. 7.1, p.43). No one has questioned these data. National Research Council. "Reconciling Observations
of Global Temperature Change," National Academy Press, Washington, DC. January 2000. The implication that the rate of decline at Kilimanjaro is increasing is a lie. "Kilimanjaro's glaciers lost 45 percent of their real extent in that era of non-human warming. If the glaciers had continued on their merry way at the pace established in that period, they would be gone by now." October 26, 2002 "The Snow Jobs of Kilimanjaro," by Patrick J. Michaels, u. of Virginia, Cato Institute,
http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-26-02.html [note: Michaels uses the author of the Kilimanjaro study's own data, Thompson et al, OSU, 2002] Another glaring
gap in Thompson theory on Kilimanjaro is that snow there declined during periods of temperature cooling: "From 1953 through 1976, another 21 percent of the original area was uncovered. This was during a period of global cooling-yes, cooling--of 0.13ºF. Ohio State could have accurately written the following hype at that time: "Kilimanjaro's glaciers will completely disappear by 2015 if this cooling trend continues". Michaels, supra. Kaser et al. demonstrate that all relevant 'observations and facts' clearly indicate that 'climatological processes other than air temperature control the ice recession in a direct manner' on Kilimanjaro, and that 'positive air
temperatures have not contributed to the recession process on the summit...'" Kaser, G. and B. Noggler (1996): Glacier fluctuations in the Rwenzori Range (East Africa) during the 20th century - a preliminary report. Zeitschrift für Gletscherkunde und Glazialgeologie, 32, 109-117. See also Kaser, G., D.R. Hardy, T. Mölg, R.S. Bradley, and T.M. Hyera (2004): Modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro as evidence of climate change: Observations and facts. International Journal of Climatology, 24, 329-339, doi:
10.1002/joc.1008 ["climatological processes other than air temperature control the ice recession in a direct manner"]. Link:
http://geowww.uibk.ac.at/glacio/LITERATUR/...IJC24(2004).pdf
Nor are the oceans rapidly rising. "Although the long-term average GSL rise for the past few millennia has been stable at a level near zero, there is reliable evidence from coastal land records,1 lake and river ice cover,2 and water level measurements3 that GSL abruptly began to rise near the mid-19th century. "No studies, however, have detected any significant acceleration of GSL rise during the 20th century." Bruce C. Douglas and W. Richard Peltier,
"The Puzzle of Global Sea-Level Rise: Measuring the rate of sea level rise over the past century requires modeling the behavior of Earth's crust over the past 20 000 years," Physics Today 2002. 55:35-40.[ http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-55/iss-3/p35.html]. The upper limit of melting ice to sea-level increases is 0.3 mm a year according to new research by Mark Meier of the University of Colorado, out of an estimated 2 mm a year rise. Id.
Question: If the atmosphere was causing major general warming, wouldn't there be more consistency in the glacier studies?
f.. There is no correlation between temperature changes and more sever weather. Nothing in the peer-reviewed research in the field supports this popular myth. The IPCC Report (2001) does not make the claim: "Severe storms are often rare, so the analysis of large areas and long lengths of homo-geneous storm records are required to assess changes. So far this combination of data is not available." [sec.2.7.3]. IPCC notes,or instance, that "the trend in intense tropical cyclones (minimum central pressure below 970 hPa) is not significantly different from zero." Id. "The United States record of landfall frequency and intensity of hurricanes is very reliable . but [show] no significant long-term trends." Id. Free et al (2004) tried the extreme weather hypothesis, expecting to find a correlation. This effort, however, yielded "no significant trend in potential intensity from 1980 to 1995 and no consistent trend from 1975 to 1995." What is more, they report that between 1975 and 1980, "while SSTs [sea surface temperatures] rose, PI [hurricane potential intensity] decreased, illustrating the hazards of predicting changes in hurricane intensity from projected SST changes alone." Balling and Cerveny (2003)could find no associations between timing and duration of the hurricane season and geographic position of storms and either local, hemispheric or global temperature using a database of all tropical storms that occurred within the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the western North Atlantic Ocean over the period 1950-2002. Landsea et al. (1998) report that "Atlantic hurricane activity has actually decreased significantly in both frequency of intense hurricanes and mean intensity of all named storms over the past few decades..." See Balling Jr., R.C. and Cerveny, R.S. 2003. Analysis of the duration, seasonal timing, and location of North Atlantic tropical cyclones: 1950-2002. Geophysical Research Letters 30: 10.1029/2003GL018404; Bister, M. and Emanuel, K. 2002. Low frequency
variability of tropical cyclone potential intensity. 1. Interannual to interdecadal variability. Journal of Geophysical Research 107: 0.1029/2001 JD000776; Boose, E.R., Chamberlin, K.E. and Foster, D.R. 2001. Landscape and regional impacts of hurricanes in New England. Ecological Monographs 71: 27-48; Bove, M.C., Zierden, D.F. and O'Brien, J.J. 1998. Are gulf landfalling hurricanes getting stronger? Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 79: 1327-1328; Easterling, D.R., Evans, J.L.,
Groisman, P.Ya., Karl, T.R., Kunkel, K.E. and Ambenje, P. 2000. Observed variability and trends in extreme climate events: A brief review. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 81: 417-425; Elsner, J.B., Liu, K.-b. and Kocher, B. 2000. Spatial variations in major U.S. hurricane activity: Statistics and a physical mechanism. Journal of Climate 13: 2293-2305; Elsner, J.B., Niu, X. and Jagger, T.H. 2004. Detecting shifts in hurricane rates using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach. Journal of Climate 17: 2652-2666. This issue came to a dramatic moment in early 2005. One of the IPCC scientific team members just quit over the obvious lack of ethics by the
IPCC Panel. In an open letter, Chris Landsea, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said:
"I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound."
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/promethe...sea_leaves.html
Landsea is one of the world's top hurricane experts, who was asked by a lead author of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, to develop a segment on the impact of global warming on the future intensity of hurricanes. Lead Author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, participated in a press conference that proclaimed: "Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity." Landsea had told Trenberth that the science did not support such claims. When he was ignored, he quit.
8. The human impact on global climate change is not universally or even substantially supported by the majority of scientific specialists in the relevant fields. Objective science has motivated thousands of geo-physicists, climatologists and other experts to sign several petitions protesting the Kyoto Protocol. "Since the climate treaty was hatched in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, scientists have shown their dissent with four petitions: the 1992 "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," with
more than 100 signatures; the 1992 "Heidelberg Appeal," with more than 4,000 signatures; the 1996 "Leipzig Declaration," signed by some 130 prominent U.S. climate scientists, including several who participated in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); and, this year, the "Oregon Petition" which has been signed thus far by 17,000 U.S. scientists." Candace Crandall , "The number of scientists refuting global warming is growing," Washington Times, November 20, 1998. "[T]here is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them." Richard Lintzen, Wall Street Journal , June 11, 2001.
9. Full implementation of Kyoto, even with U.S. participation, will achieve nothing. "The Kyoto treaty would not make a measurable difference in the climate by 2050, a temperature reduction of maybe two-hundredths of a degree Celsius, or at most six-hundredths of a degree." Thomas Sieger Derr, "Strange Science : Reflections on Global Warming" (2004)[this conclusion is not controversial or contradicted by Kyoto advocates]. "A fundamental point that needs to be understood is that if any of these proposals (including the Kyoto protocol) are implemented, they will have an effect on the climate so small that it cannot be detected." Dr. John Christy & Dr. Roy Spencer, Earth System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, "Global Temperature Report: 1978 - 2003" (December 8, 2003):
http://www.uah.edu/News/climate/25years.pdf.
NOTE: Most CO2 does not come from human activities:
"At least 96% of the current atmospheric CO2 comes from non-fossil fuel sources; that is, natural marine and juvenile [volcanic] sources. Hence for the atmosphere CO2 budget, marine degassing and juvenile degassing (from volcanic eruptions) are far more important, and the burning of fossil-fuel and biogenic materials much less important, than hitherto assumed." T.V. Segalstad,``Climate and Volcanic Aerosols.'' University of Oslo, paper at 1992 Chapman Conference,
http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/global/planetophysical.html
SOLAR SYSTEM PLANETS EarthChanges Highlights
Sun: More activity since 1940 than in previous 1150 years, combined.
Mercury: Unexpected polar ice discovered, along with a surprisingly strong intrinsic magnetic field … for a supposedly “dead” planet.
Venus: 2500% increase in auroral brightness, and substantive global atmospheric changes in less than 30 years.
Earth: Substantial and obvious world-wide weather and geophysical changes.
Mars: “Global Warming,” huge storms, disappearance of polar icecaps.
Jupiter: Over 200% increase in brightness of surrounding plasma clouds. (Len: slowly becoming another star)
Saturn: Major decrease in equatorial jet stream velocities in only 20 years, accompanied by surprising surge of X-rays from equator.
Uranus: “Really big, big changes” in brightness, increased global cloud activity.
Neptune: 40% increase in atmospheric brightness.
Pluto: 300% increase in atmospheric pressure, even as Pluto recedes farther from the Sun.
http://www.ltpresearch.org/alphonsus1.htm
"Alphonsus is 70 miles in diameter and its walls are very broad and complex. It has a central mountain about the height of Vesuvius, which is part of longitudinal ridge. The floor is full of interesting detail, among which are some dusky spots that are most prominent under a high light. They are said to 'variable'. Three of these spots are on the west part of the floor and are connected by winding cleft. A fourth larger triangular spots abuts on the east wall. There are over 50 craterlets on the interior. On the evening of November 3, 1958, the Russian astronomer N. A. Kozyrev was observing the central mountain of Alphonsus using the 50-inch reflector of the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory and witnessed what appeared to be some kind of volcanic activity there." The Moon Observer's Handbook by Fred W. Price.
The First Clarke Law states, 'If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong."
- Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Physicist.
That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
- Scientific American, Jan. 2, 1909.
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
- Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), ca. 1895
I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.
- Wilbur Wright (1867-1912)
"Physics is not difficult, it is just weird."
- Vincent Icke "The Force of Symmetry" (1994)
SOLAR SYSTEM PLANETS EarthChanges Highlights
Sun: More activity since 1940 than in previous 1150 years, combined.
Mercury: Unexpected polar ice discovered, along with a surprisingly strong intrinsic magnetic field … for a supposedly “dead” planet.
Venus: 2500% increase in auroral brightness, and substantive global atmospheric changes in less than 30 years.
Earth: Substantial and obvious world-wide weather and geophysical changes.
Mars: “Global Warming,” huge storms, disappearance of polar icecaps.
Jupiter: Over 200% increase in brightness of surrounding plasma clouds. (Len: slowly becoming another star)
Saturn: Major decrease in equatorial jet stream velocities in only 20 years, accompanied by surprising surge of X-rays from equator.
Uranus: “Really big, big changes” in brightness, increased global cloud activity.
Neptune: 40% increase in atmospheric brightness.
Pluto: 300% increase in atmospheric pressure, even as Pluto recedes farther from the Sun.
http://www.ltpresearch.org/alphonsus1.htm
"Alphonsus is 70 miles in diameter and its walls are very broad and complex. It has a central mountain about the height of Vesuvius, which is part of longitudinal ridge. The floor is full of interesting detail, among which are some dusky spots that are most prominent under a high light. They are said to 'variable'. Three of these spots are on the west part of the floor and are connected by winding cleft. A fourth larger triangular spots abuts on the east wall. There are over 50 craterlets on the interior. On the evening of November 3, 1958, the Russian astronomer N. A. Kozyrev was observing the central mountain of Alphonsus using the 50-inch reflector of the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory and witnessed what appeared to be some kind of volcanic activity there." The Moon Observer's Handbook by Fred W. Price.
The First Clarke Law states, 'If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong."
- Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Physicist.
That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
- Scientific American, Jan. 2, 1909.
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
- Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), ca. 1895
I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.
- Wilbur Wright (1867-1912)
"Physics is not difficult, it is just weird."
- Vincent Icke "The Force of Symmetry" (1994)
http://www-atm.physics.ox.ac.uk/main/gradu...hbooklet05.html
From the Physics Research Booklet 2005
Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics
Professor D G Andrews
The sub-department's research focuses on the study of physical processes in the atmospheres and oceans of the Earth and other planets, using experimental and theoretical techniques. We have about 70 members, including 9 permanent academic or research staff, about 25 post-doctoral researchers and senior visitors, and about 25 graduate students.
On the experimental side we develop space instruments for infrared remote sensing of the structure and composition of planetary atmospheres, especially the Earth's stratosphere and mesosphere. More than ten of these instruments have been launched, either into Earth orbit or to other planets; several new space experiments are under development, including Earth-orbiting instruments to investigate global change, and missions to Mercury, Venus and Mars. Extensive overseas and domestic collaborations are involved, with industrial and scientific centres in Europe and the USA.
Mars
http://spacenews.dancebeat.info/article.ph..._recent_changes
Recent changes on Mars seen by Mars Global Surveyor
Tuesday, September 20 2005
New gullies that did not exist in mid-2002 have appeared on a Martian sand dune.
That's just one of the surprising discoveries that have resulted from the extended life of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, which this month began its ninth year in orbit around Mars. Boulders tumbling down a Martian slope left tracks that weren't there two years ago. New impact craters formed since the 1970s suggest changes to age-estimating models. And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress.
"Our prime mission ended in early 2001, but many of the most important findings have come since then, and even bigger ones might lie ahead," said Tom Thorpe, project manager for Mars Global Surveyor at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The orbiter is healthy and may be able to continue studying Mars for five to 10 more years, he said.
Mars years are nearly twice as long as Earth years. The orbiter's longevity has enabled monitoring of year-to-year patterns on Mars, such as seasonal dust storms and changes in the polar caps. "Mars is an active planet, and over a range of timescales changes occur, even in the surface," said Dr. Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, principal investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera on Mars Global Surveyor.
http://www.planetary.org/html/news/article...arsclimate.html
December 6, 2001
The planet Mars we know today is a cold, dry, desert world, but suppose the martian climate is changing even now, year to year and decade to decade?
New observations by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are expanding our understanding of the martian climate and may indicate the climate is changing significantly even today. This suggests even larger climate changes have occurred during the planet's recent history and may again in its future. The observations were made during a full martian year, 687 Earth days.
Images from Global Surveyor's camera system show that pits -- often referred to as the "Swiss cheese" terrain -- at the southern polar ice cap of Mars have dramatically increased in diameter, indicating the material has evaporated rapidly compared to last year.
"The amount of change is much larger than any previous change we've seen on Mars, and it is much larger than can be explained by the evaporation of water ice. We have calculated the only material that could have changed this much is carbon dioxide ice, what we know as dry ice," said Malin. "This means the Mars environment we see today may not be what it was a few hundred years ago, and may not be what will exist a few hundred years in the future."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4266474.stm
Mars 'more active than suspected'
New images of Mars suggest the Red Planet's surface is more active than previously thought, the US space agency (Nasa) reports.
Photographs from Nasa's orbiting spacecraft Mars Global Surveyor show recently formed craters and gullies.
The agency's scientists also say that deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near the planet's south pole have shrunk for three summers in a row.
They say this is evidence to suggest climate change is in progress.
http://www.geotimes.org/feb02/NN_MarsCC.html
Planetary Geology
Climate Change on Mars
Data gathered by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft suggest that the martian climate may have changed significantly in the past, and may be changing quickly even now. According to two papers published in the Dec. 7, 2001, issue of Science, these changes may happen over a much shorter time scale than scientists previously thought.
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/climate_cha...ay_on_mars_8957
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2004/pdf/sess51.pdf
Thursday, March 18, 2004
SPECIAL SESSION: MARS CLIMATE CHANGE
8:30 a.m. Salon B
Chairs: R. M. Haberle
J. F. Mustard
8:30 a.m. Head J. W. III* Mustard J. F.
Geological Evidence for Climate Change on Mars [#1889]
This paper highlights some of the geological units and features that may be related to climate change
to encourage climate modelers to assess their potential significance.
8:45 a.m. Laskar J. * Gastineau M. Joutel F. Levrard B. Robutel P. Correia A.
A New Astronomical Solution for the Long Term Evolution of the Insolation Quantities
of Mars [#1600]
Using the most recent data, and a new numerical integration of the Solar System, we provide a solution
for the evolution of Mars spin over 10 to 20 Myr. We have also performed an extensive statistical
analysis of the evolution of Mars over 5 Gyr.
9:00 a.m. Richardson M. I. * Mischna M. A. Basu S. Fenton L. K. Wilson R. J.
Interpreting Martian Paleoclimate with a Mars General Circulation Model [#2100]
We review the capabilities and studies undertaken with the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
(GFDL) Mars GCM.
9:15 a.m. Haberle R. M. *
History and Progress of GCM Simulations on Recent Mars Climate Change [#2010]
General circulation models are now predicting tropical ice accumulations at times of high obliquity.
9:30 a.m. Mitrofanov I. G. * Litvak M. L. Kozyrev A. S. Sanin A. B. Tretyakov V. I. Kuzmin R. O.
Boynton W. V. Hamara D. K. Shinihara C, Saunders R. S.
Northern and Southern Permafrost Regions on Mars with High Content of Water Ice:
Similarities and Differences [#1629]
It is shown that the northern and southern regions of permafrost contain quite similar patterns of
subsurface water ice at high latitudes, about 50–55 wt%. However, in South this water-rich layer must
be in places covered by a dry layer with thickness about 15–30 g/cm2.
9:45 a.m. Kreslavsky M. A. * Head J. W. III
Periods of Active Permafrost Layer Formation in the Recent Geological History of Mars [#1201]
On the basis of a general estimate of the onset insolation level and on J. Laskar’s calculations of
spin/orbit parameters of Mars, we predict times and regions of the active (summer thawing) layer
formation on Mars for the last 10 Ma.
10:00 a.m. BREAK
10:15 a.m. Marchant D. R. * Head J. W. III
Microclimate Zones in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica: Implications for Landscape Evolution and
Climate Change on Mars [#1405]
The detailed morphology of polygons and other periglacial-type landforms on Mars can help delineate
microclimates. Subtle changes in the morphology of these landforms can shed light on the sign and
magnitude of recent climate change on Mars.
Lunar and Planetary Science XXXV (2004) sess51.pdf
10:30 a.m. Kanner L. C. * Allen C. C. Bell M. S.
Geomorphic Evidence for Martian Ground Ice and Climate Change [#1982]
This study compares recent data from Mars Orbital Camera and Mars Odyssey to refine the location of
subsurface ice deposits at a < km scale. Images of small-scale polygons are mapped with respect to
spectroscopy data of subsurface water ice.
10:45 a.m. Mischna M. A. * Richardson M. I. Wilson R. J. Zent A.
Explaining the Mid-Latitude Ice Deposits with a General Circulation Model [#1861]
We look at the formation of the mid- and low-latitude subsurface water deposits using the GFDL Mars
GCM with an active regolith. Results suggest such deposits are a combination of diffusively placed
water and surface ice deposits while at high obliquity.
11:00 a.m. Shean D. E. * Head J. W. III Fastook J. L. Marchant D. R.
Tharsis Montes Cold-based Glaciers: Observations and Constraints for Modeling and
Preliminary Results [#1428]
Observations of the Tharsis Montes fan-shaped deposits provide constraints for glacial activity and
suggest a relationship between their distribution and the local topography. Reconstructed ice sheet
profiles are consistent with these inferences.
11:15 a.m. Fastook J. L. * Head J. W. III Marchant D. Shean D.
Ice Sheet Modeling: Terrestrial Background and Application to Arsia Mons
Lobate Deposit, Mars [#1452]
Input requirements for a dynamic ice sheet model are described with emphasis on availability from
Martian data. The model is applied to Arsia Mons deposits to show its potential in determining how the
climate may have changed in the past on Mars.
11:30 a.m. Elphic R. C. * Feldman W. C. Prettyman T. H. Tokar R. L. Lanza N. Lawrence D. J.
Head J. W. III Mischna M. A. Richardson M. I.
Enhanced Water-Equivalent Hydrogen on the Western Flanks of the Tharsis Montes and Olympus
Mons: Remnant Subsurface Ice or Hydrate Minerals? [#2011]
Enhanced water-equivalent hydrogen (2–8 wt%) is found in and around the Tharsis Montes and
Olympus Mons, especially on the western flanks. This is where glacial landforms are found, and where
GCMs hint at past ice accumulations.
11:45 a.m. McEwen A. S. *
New Age Mars [#1756]
The youngest terrains on Mars could be older than previously believed because impact craters smaller
than ~250 m are largely secondaries and lunar-derived production functions predict far too many small
primary craters.
Lunar and Planetary Science XXXV (2004) sess51.pdf
http://www.marstoday.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=6810
New observations by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are expanding understanding of the martian climate and may indicate the climate is changing significantly even today. This suggests even larger climate changes have occurred during the planet's recent history and may again in its future. The observations were made during a full martian year, 687 Earth days.
If this is so, Mars might someday become warmer and wetter, as some scientists suggest it was during its early history. Papers detailing these observations are published in the Dec. 7, 2001, issue of Science magazine.
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_B...-02/01-006.html
Evidence of icy region and recent climate change observed on Mars
Evidence of water ice has been detected on Mars in a location that indicates the planet’s climate has changed relatively recently – during the last 100,000 years, according to Brown University geologist John Mustard. The data was collected using NASA’s Mars Orbiter Camera.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — New images of the surface of Mars provide the first direct evidence that the climate of Mars changed during the last 100,000 years, much more recently than the hundreds of millions of years scientists had previously thought, according to Brown University geologist John Mustard. The high-resolution images show evidence of water ice closer to the equator than had previously been observed.
From the Physics Research Booklet 2005
Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics
Professor D G Andrews
The sub-department's research focuses on the study of physical processes in the atmospheres and oceans of the Earth and other planets, using experimental and theoretical techniques. We have about 70 members, including 9 permanent academic or research staff, about 25 post-doctoral researchers and senior visitors, and about 25 graduate students.
On the experimental side we develop space instruments for infrared remote sensing of the structure and composition of planetary atmospheres, especially the Earth's stratosphere and mesosphere. More than ten of these instruments have been launched, either into Earth orbit or to other planets; several new space experiments are under development, including Earth-orbiting instruments to investigate global change, and missions to Mercury, Venus and Mars. Extensive overseas and domestic collaborations are involved, with industrial and scientific centres in Europe and the USA.
Mars
http://spacenews.dancebeat.info/article.ph..._recent_changes
Recent changes on Mars seen by Mars Global Surveyor
Tuesday, September 20 2005
New gullies that did not exist in mid-2002 have appeared on a Martian sand dune.
That's just one of the surprising discoveries that have resulted from the extended life of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, which this month began its ninth year in orbit around Mars. Boulders tumbling down a Martian slope left tracks that weren't there two years ago. New impact craters formed since the 1970s suggest changes to age-estimating models. And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress.
"Our prime mission ended in early 2001, but many of the most important findings have come since then, and even bigger ones might lie ahead," said Tom Thorpe, project manager for Mars Global Surveyor at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The orbiter is healthy and may be able to continue studying Mars for five to 10 more years, he said.
Mars years are nearly twice as long as Earth years. The orbiter's longevity has enabled monitoring of year-to-year patterns on Mars, such as seasonal dust storms and changes in the polar caps. "Mars is an active planet, and over a range of timescales changes occur, even in the surface," said Dr. Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, principal investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera on Mars Global Surveyor.
http://www.planetary.org/html/news/article...arsclimate.html
December 6, 2001
The planet Mars we know today is a cold, dry, desert world, but suppose the martian climate is changing even now, year to year and decade to decade?
New observations by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are expanding our understanding of the martian climate and may indicate the climate is changing significantly even today. This suggests even larger climate changes have occurred during the planet's recent history and may again in its future. The observations were made during a full martian year, 687 Earth days.
Images from Global Surveyor's camera system show that pits -- often referred to as the "Swiss cheese" terrain -- at the southern polar ice cap of Mars have dramatically increased in diameter, indicating the material has evaporated rapidly compared to last year.
"The amount of change is much larger than any previous change we've seen on Mars, and it is much larger than can be explained by the evaporation of water ice. We have calculated the only material that could have changed this much is carbon dioxide ice, what we know as dry ice," said Malin. "This means the Mars environment we see today may not be what it was a few hundred years ago, and may not be what will exist a few hundred years in the future."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4266474.stm
Mars 'more active than suspected'
New images of Mars suggest the Red Planet's surface is more active than previously thought, the US space agency (Nasa) reports.
Photographs from Nasa's orbiting spacecraft Mars Global Surveyor show recently formed craters and gullies.
The agency's scientists also say that deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near the planet's south pole have shrunk for three summers in a row.
They say this is evidence to suggest climate change is in progress.
http://www.geotimes.org/feb02/NN_MarsCC.html
Planetary Geology
Climate Change on Mars
Data gathered by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft suggest that the martian climate may have changed significantly in the past, and may be changing quickly even now. According to two papers published in the Dec. 7, 2001, issue of Science, these changes may happen over a much shorter time scale than scientists previously thought.
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/climate_cha...ay_on_mars_8957
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2004/pdf/sess51.pdf
Thursday, March 18, 2004
SPECIAL SESSION: MARS CLIMATE CHANGE
8:30 a.m. Salon B
Chairs: R. M. Haberle
J. F. Mustard
8:30 a.m. Head J. W. III* Mustard J. F.
Geological Evidence for Climate Change on Mars [#1889]
This paper highlights some of the geological units and features that may be related to climate change
to encourage climate modelers to assess their potential significance.
8:45 a.m. Laskar J. * Gastineau M. Joutel F. Levrard B. Robutel P. Correia A.
A New Astronomical Solution for the Long Term Evolution of the Insolation Quantities
of Mars [#1600]
Using the most recent data, and a new numerical integration of the Solar System, we provide a solution
for the evolution of Mars spin over 10 to 20 Myr. We have also performed an extensive statistical
analysis of the evolution of Mars over 5 Gyr.
9:00 a.m. Richardson M. I. * Mischna M. A. Basu S. Fenton L. K. Wilson R. J.
Interpreting Martian Paleoclimate with a Mars General Circulation Model [#2100]
We review the capabilities and studies undertaken with the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
(GFDL) Mars GCM.
9:15 a.m. Haberle R. M. *
History and Progress of GCM Simulations on Recent Mars Climate Change [#2010]
General circulation models are now predicting tropical ice accumulations at times of high obliquity.
9:30 a.m. Mitrofanov I. G. * Litvak M. L. Kozyrev A. S. Sanin A. B. Tretyakov V. I. Kuzmin R. O.
Boynton W. V. Hamara D. K. Shinihara C, Saunders R. S.
Northern and Southern Permafrost Regions on Mars with High Content of Water Ice:
Similarities and Differences [#1629]
It is shown that the northern and southern regions of permafrost contain quite similar patterns of
subsurface water ice at high latitudes, about 50–55 wt%. However, in South this water-rich layer must
be in places covered by a dry layer with thickness about 15–30 g/cm2.
9:45 a.m. Kreslavsky M. A. * Head J. W. III
Periods of Active Permafrost Layer Formation in the Recent Geological History of Mars [#1201]
On the basis of a general estimate of the onset insolation level and on J. Laskar’s calculations of
spin/orbit parameters of Mars, we predict times and regions of the active (summer thawing) layer
formation on Mars for the last 10 Ma.
10:00 a.m. BREAK
10:15 a.m. Marchant D. R. * Head J. W. III
Microclimate Zones in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica: Implications for Landscape Evolution and
Climate Change on Mars [#1405]
The detailed morphology of polygons and other periglacial-type landforms on Mars can help delineate
microclimates. Subtle changes in the morphology of these landforms can shed light on the sign and
magnitude of recent climate change on Mars.
Lunar and Planetary Science XXXV (2004) sess51.pdf
10:30 a.m. Kanner L. C. * Allen C. C. Bell M. S.
Geomorphic Evidence for Martian Ground Ice and Climate Change [#1982]
This study compares recent data from Mars Orbital Camera and Mars Odyssey to refine the location of
subsurface ice deposits at a < km scale. Images of small-scale polygons are mapped with respect to
spectroscopy data of subsurface water ice.
10:45 a.m. Mischna M. A. * Richardson M. I. Wilson R. J. Zent A.
Explaining the Mid-Latitude Ice Deposits with a General Circulation Model [#1861]
We look at the formation of the mid- and low-latitude subsurface water deposits using the GFDL Mars
GCM with an active regolith. Results suggest such deposits are a combination of diffusively placed
water and surface ice deposits while at high obliquity.
11:00 a.m. Shean D. E. * Head J. W. III Fastook J. L. Marchant D. R.
Tharsis Montes Cold-based Glaciers: Observations and Constraints for Modeling and
Preliminary Results [#1428]
Observations of the Tharsis Montes fan-shaped deposits provide constraints for glacial activity and
suggest a relationship between their distribution and the local topography. Reconstructed ice sheet
profiles are consistent with these inferences.
11:15 a.m. Fastook J. L. * Head J. W. III Marchant D. Shean D.
Ice Sheet Modeling: Terrestrial Background and Application to Arsia Mons
Lobate Deposit, Mars [#1452]
Input requirements for a dynamic ice sheet model are described with emphasis on availability from
Martian data. The model is applied to Arsia Mons deposits to show its potential in determining how the
climate may have changed in the past on Mars.
11:30 a.m. Elphic R. C. * Feldman W. C. Prettyman T. H. Tokar R. L. Lanza N. Lawrence D. J.
Head J. W. III Mischna M. A. Richardson M. I.
Enhanced Water-Equivalent Hydrogen on the Western Flanks of the Tharsis Montes and Olympus
Mons: Remnant Subsurface Ice or Hydrate Minerals? [#2011]
Enhanced water-equivalent hydrogen (2–8 wt%) is found in and around the Tharsis Montes and
Olympus Mons, especially on the western flanks. This is where glacial landforms are found, and where
GCMs hint at past ice accumulations.
11:45 a.m. McEwen A. S. *
New Age Mars [#1756]
The youngest terrains on Mars could be older than previously believed because impact craters smaller
than ~250 m are largely secondaries and lunar-derived production functions predict far too many small
primary craters.
Lunar and Planetary Science XXXV (2004) sess51.pdf
http://www.marstoday.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=6810
New observations by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are expanding understanding of the martian climate and may indicate the climate is changing significantly even today. This suggests even larger climate changes have occurred during the planet's recent history and may again in its future. The observations were made during a full martian year, 687 Earth days.
If this is so, Mars might someday become warmer and wetter, as some scientists suggest it was during its early history. Papers detailing these observations are published in the Dec. 7, 2001, issue of Science magazine.
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_B...-02/01-006.html
Evidence of icy region and recent climate change observed on Mars
Evidence of water ice has been detected on Mars in a location that indicates the planet’s climate has changed relatively recently – during the last 100,000 years, according to Brown University geologist John Mustard. The data was collected using NASA’s Mars Orbiter Camera.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — New images of the surface of Mars provide the first direct evidence that the climate of Mars changed during the last 100,000 years, much more recently than the hundreds of millions of years scientists had previously thought, according to Brown University geologist John Mustard. The high-resolution images show evidence of water ice closer to the equator than had previously been observed.
(Note: That changes in Venus's climate doesn't fit the prevailing theories about how the solar system developed, so astronomers came up with unknown and unseen volcanoes in order to try to explain the phenomena.)
Venus
University of Colorado at Boulder
Active volcanoes on Venus?
http://www.ucar.edu/communications/quarter...ciencebits.html
University of Colorado at Boulder
Active volcanoes on Venus?
Recent observations by Larry Esposito (University of Colorado at Boulder) using the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that sulfur dioxide (SO2) values at cloud-top level on Venus have declined by a factor of five since the Pioneer Venus satellite observations ended in the fall of 1992. The decline, which continues a trend observed throughout the 1980s, suggests that a massive volcanic eruption in the early 1970s may have colored researchers' beliefs about the Venerian atmosphere for the last 20 years.
Esposito reported his results at a NASA space astronomy teleconference in February. He calls Venus "the Earth's evil twin." It has a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere and surface temperatures of 400 degrees C (750 degrees F). With a permanent cover of sulfuric acid clouds, it has both a runaway greenhouse effect and acid rain.
In the early 1970s, SO2 levels on Venus were believed to be fairly low--only tens of parts per billion. The gas was first detected in the atmosphere of Venus in 1978 by Earth-based observations, a fact Esposito believes indicates that its abundance had become at least an order of magnitude greater than previously thought. Continuous observations by the Pioneer Venus satellite from 1978 to 1992 showed that the cloud-top levels of SO2 were steadily declining. Scientists understood where the SO2 was going: it leaves the atmosphere when it is broken apart by sunlight and the sulfur is rained out--just as on Earth, SO2 emitted by coal-fired power plants is washed out of the atmosphere in acid rain. But they were not sure how it got there in the first place.
Some scientists, including Esposito, theorized that this situation was created by an immense volcanic eruption right before the arrival of Pioneer Venus. When the Magellan orbiter mapped Venus's surface by radar in 1991, it found many features that could be volcanic in origin, although no clear-cut evidence that any were active.
Using the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph instrument on the Hubble, Esposito obtained the best spectral resolution of Venus ever made from a spacecraft. The observations are in the ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum, where cloud patterns become distinctive. The instrument recorded SO2 values of 10-25 parts per billion, which is consistent with what scientists believed to be the values before the late 1970s. "A natural conclusion [of the new results] is that Venus has again achieved a chemical and dynamic state that was disrupted by injection of SO2 in the 1970s," says Esposito.
Hubble observations of Mars have shown a similar disparity between the climate that researchers inferred from visits by unmanned Viking spacecraft in the mid-1970s and the Martian climate of today, which is cooler and drier. These findings indicate that the atmospheres of Earth, Mars, and Venus have at least one thing in common: they can only be understood through long-term monitoring.
http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v30n3/dps98/122.htm
DPS Meeting, Madison, October 1998
Session 48. Venus
Contributed Oral Parallel Session, Friday, October 16, 1998, 9:00-9:40am, Madison Ballroom C
[48.01] Climate Change on Venus
M.A. Bullock, D.H. Grinspoon (LASP, University of Colorado)
The atmosphere of Venus has almost certainly been perturbed by the injection of volatiles from large scale volcanism in the past 1 billion years. Water and sulfur dioxide are important greenhouse gases in Venus’ atmosphere, but they are also the chemical precursors of Venus’ bright, globally extensive cloud decks. We have modeled the climatic effects of volcanism in Venus’ past by coupling detailed atmospheric radiative transfer calculations with models of volcanic outgassing, cloud formation, exospheric escape of hydrogen and reactions of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide with surface minerals. We find that volcanic injections of radiatively active gases to the atmosphere initially cool the surface due to the build up of massive sulfuric acid/water clouds and an increase in planetary albedo. In the absence of continuing volcanic outgassing, however, atmospheric sulfur dioxide is rapidly lost to reactions with surface carbonate and clouds dissipate in approximately 50 million years. This implies that the clouds of Venus today are being supplied by recently active volcanism. If carbon dioxide can react with minerals at the surface, the response of Venus’ climate is more complex and may exhibit runaways to more stable cooler or hotter regimes. We will present several scenarios from our climate evolution models that may represent the response of the Venus climate system to an epoch of widespread volcanism and subsequent evolution of volatiles
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.htm...511&sid=5080155
Venus
University of Colorado at Boulder
Active volcanoes on Venus?
http://www.ucar.edu/communications/quarter...ciencebits.html
University of Colorado at Boulder
Active volcanoes on Venus?
Recent observations by Larry Esposito (University of Colorado at Boulder) using the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that sulfur dioxide (SO2) values at cloud-top level on Venus have declined by a factor of five since the Pioneer Venus satellite observations ended in the fall of 1992. The decline, which continues a trend observed throughout the 1980s, suggests that a massive volcanic eruption in the early 1970s may have colored researchers' beliefs about the Venerian atmosphere for the last 20 years.
Esposito reported his results at a NASA space astronomy teleconference in February. He calls Venus "the Earth's evil twin." It has a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere and surface temperatures of 400 degrees C (750 degrees F). With a permanent cover of sulfuric acid clouds, it has both a runaway greenhouse effect and acid rain.
In the early 1970s, SO2 levels on Venus were believed to be fairly low--only tens of parts per billion. The gas was first detected in the atmosphere of Venus in 1978 by Earth-based observations, a fact Esposito believes indicates that its abundance had become at least an order of magnitude greater than previously thought. Continuous observations by the Pioneer Venus satellite from 1978 to 1992 showed that the cloud-top levels of SO2 were steadily declining. Scientists understood where the SO2 was going: it leaves the atmosphere when it is broken apart by sunlight and the sulfur is rained out--just as on Earth, SO2 emitted by coal-fired power plants is washed out of the atmosphere in acid rain. But they were not sure how it got there in the first place.
Some scientists, including Esposito, theorized that this situation was created by an immense volcanic eruption right before the arrival of Pioneer Venus. When the Magellan orbiter mapped Venus's surface by radar in 1991, it found many features that could be volcanic in origin, although no clear-cut evidence that any were active.
Using the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph instrument on the Hubble, Esposito obtained the best spectral resolution of Venus ever made from a spacecraft. The observations are in the ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum, where cloud patterns become distinctive. The instrument recorded SO2 values of 10-25 parts per billion, which is consistent with what scientists believed to be the values before the late 1970s. "A natural conclusion [of the new results] is that Venus has again achieved a chemical and dynamic state that was disrupted by injection of SO2 in the 1970s," says Esposito.
Hubble observations of Mars have shown a similar disparity between the climate that researchers inferred from visits by unmanned Viking spacecraft in the mid-1970s and the Martian climate of today, which is cooler and drier. These findings indicate that the atmospheres of Earth, Mars, and Venus have at least one thing in common: they can only be understood through long-term monitoring.
http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v30n3/dps98/122.htm
DPS Meeting, Madison, October 1998
Session 48. Venus
Contributed Oral Parallel Session, Friday, October 16, 1998, 9:00-9:40am, Madison Ballroom C
[48.01] Climate Change on Venus
M.A. Bullock, D.H. Grinspoon (LASP, University of Colorado)
The atmosphere of Venus has almost certainly been perturbed by the injection of volatiles from large scale volcanism in the past 1 billion years. Water and sulfur dioxide are important greenhouse gases in Venus’ atmosphere, but they are also the chemical precursors of Venus’ bright, globally extensive cloud decks. We have modeled the climatic effects of volcanism in Venus’ past by coupling detailed atmospheric radiative transfer calculations with models of volcanic outgassing, cloud formation, exospheric escape of hydrogen and reactions of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide with surface minerals. We find that volcanic injections of radiatively active gases to the atmosphere initially cool the surface due to the build up of massive sulfuric acid/water clouds and an increase in planetary albedo. In the absence of continuing volcanic outgassing, however, atmospheric sulfur dioxide is rapidly lost to reactions with surface carbonate and clouds dissipate in approximately 50 million years. This implies that the clouds of Venus today are being supplied by recently active volcanism. If carbon dioxide can react with minerals at the surface, the response of Venus’ climate is more complex and may exhibit runaways to more stable cooler or hotter regimes. We will present several scenarios from our climate evolution models that may represent the response of the Venus climate system to an epoch of widespread volcanism and subsequent evolution of volatiles
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.htm...511&sid=5080155
Saturn
Discover Magazine: As the World Warms Feb 2005
"Cassini has also turned up signs of big shifts in Saturn's climate. Observations by the Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s clocked winds at Saturn's equator at more than 1,000 miles per hour. The new measurements show equatorial winds have slowed to a much more Earth-like 230 to 450 miles per hour. [Scientists are] confident that both observations are correct, but have no explanation for why conditions have changed so much in the last 20 or so years."
Jupiter
http://www.jupitertoday.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=14078
Berkeley -- If a University of California, Berkeley, physicist's vision of Jupiter is correct, the giant planet will be in for a major global temperature shift over the next decade as most of its large vortices disappear.
But fans of the Great Red Spot can rest easy. The most famous of Jupiter's vortices - which are often compared to Earth's hurricanes - will stay put, largely because of its location near the planet's equator, says Philip Marcus, a professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Using whirlpools and eddies for comparison, Marcus bases his forecast on principals learned in junior-level fluid dynamics and on the observation that many of Jupiter's vortices are literally vanishing into thin air.
"I predict that due to the loss of these atmospheric whirlpools, the average temperature on Jupiter will change by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, getting warmer near the equator and cooler at the poles," says Marcus. "This global shift in temperature will cause the jet streams to become unstable and thereby spawn new vortices. It's an event that even backyard astronomers will be able to witness."
http://www.nature.com/nlink/v412/n6845/abs/412409a0_fs.html
The stability against freezing of an internal liquid-water ocean in Callisto
JAVIER RUIZ
Departamento de Geodinámica, Facultad de Ciencias Geológicas, and Seminar on Planetary Sciences, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to the author (e-mail: jaruiz@eucmax.sim.ucm.es).
The discovery of the induced magnetic field of Callisto—one of Jupiter's moons—has been interpreted as evidence for a subsurface ocean, even though the presence of such an ocean is difficult to understand in the context of existing theoretical models. Tidal heating should not be significant for Callisto, and, in the absence of such heating, it is difficult to see how this internal ocean could have survived until today without freezing. Previous work indicated that an outer ice layer on the ocean would be unstable against solid-state convection, which once begun would lead to total freezing of liquid water in about 108 years. Here I show that when a methodology for more physically reasonable water ice viscosities (that is, stress-dependent non-newtonian viscosities, rather than the stress-independent newtonian viscosities considered previously) is adopted, the outer ice shell becomes stable against convection. This implies that a subsurface ocean could have survived up to the present, without the need for invoking antifreeze substances or other special conditions.
http://www.me.berkeley.edu/cfd/people/marcus/nature02470.pdf
Prediction of a global climate change on Jupiter. by Philip S. Marcus, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
............................................................................................................................................................................
Jupiter’s atmosphere, as observed in the 1979 Voyager space craft images, is characterized by 12 zonal jet streams and about 80 vortices, the largest of which are the Great Red Spot and three WhiteOvals that had formed1 in the 1930s. The Great Red Spot has been observed2 continuously since 1665 and, given the dynamical similarities between the Great Red Spot and the White Ovals, the disappearance3,4 of twoWhite Ovals in 1997–2000 was unexpected. Their longevity and sudden demise has been explained5 however, by the trapping of anticyclonic vortices in the troughs of Rossby waves, forcing them to merge. Here I propose that the disappearance of theWhite Ovals was not an isolated event, but part of a recurring climate cycle which will cause most of Jupiter’s vortices to disappear within the next decade. In my numerical simulations, the loss of the vortices results in a global temperature change of about 10 K, which destabilizes the atmosphere and thereby leads to the formation of new vortices. After formation, the large vortices are eroded by turbulence over a time of ,60 years—consistent with observations of the White Ovals—until they disappear and the cycle begins again.
Other planets and moons in the solar system are experiencing such changes as well.
As only one such indication, there has been a change in the albedos of many of them...
Increased solar activity
http://www.terracycles.com/Solar_X-ray_Flux.htm
Variability in the amount of energy from the sun has caused climate changes in the past. It is now accepted that the global cooling during Ice Ages is the result of changes in the distribution and amount of sunlight that reaches Earth. During the last Ice Age, the globally averaged temperature of Earth was about 6°C colder than it is today. While this may not sound like much, the effect was to cover large parts of Canada, Alaska, and Siberia with huge sheets of ice up to a mile thick.
Even the climate changes of the 20th century may have a significant solar component. Figure 3 shows comparisons of globally averaged temperature and solar activity. Many scientists find that these correlations are convincing evidence that the sun has contributed to the global warming of the 20th century. Some say that as much as 1/3 of the global warming may be the result of an increase in solar energy. So, while it is becoming clear that human activity is changing the climate today, solar activity may also be contributing to climate change and probably changed the climate in the past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_activity
Around 1900 connections between solar variations and weather on Earth began to be explored. Challenges are shown in the efforts of Charles Greeley Abbot, assigned by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) to detect changes in the radiation of the Sun. His team had to begin by inventing instruments to measure solar radiation. Later, when he was head of the SAO, it established a solar station at Calama, Chile to complement its data from Mount Wilson Observatory. He detected 27 harmonic periods within the 273-month Hale cycles, including 7, 13, and 39 month patterns. He looked for connections to weather by means such as matching opposing solar trends during a month to opposing temperature and precipitation trends in cities.
http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=91
Solar Variability and Climate Change
by Willie Soon
January 10, 2000
The purpose of this article is to give you some details about the research which my colleagues (especially Sallie Baliunas and Eric Posmentier) and I have done in studying the controversial relationship between the Sun’s energy output and Earth’s temperature, in short, the sun-climate connection. Despite what you may have heard before about sun-climate studies, there are in fact demonstrable connections between our Sun’s changing energy outputs and Earth’s climate. This paper will use the best information currently available to explain what we do and do not know about the many aspects of the sun-climate connection.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_...HTML&format
Title: Did Open Solar Magnetic Field Increase During The Last 100 Years? A Reanalysis of Geomagnetic Activity
Authors: Mursula, K.; Martini, D.; Karinen, A.
Affiliation: AA(Department of Physical Sciences, University of Oulu), AB(Department of Physical Sciences, University of Oulu; , GGKI), AC(Department of Physical Sciences, University of Oulu)
Journal: Solar Physics, Volume 224, Issue 1-2, pp. 85-94 (SoPh Homepage)
Publication Date: 10/2004
Origin: SPRINGER
Abstract Copyright: © 2004: Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.
DOI: 10.1007/s11207-005-4981-y
Bibliographic Code: 2004SoPh..224...85M
Abstract
Long-term geomagnetic activity presented by the aa index has been used to show that the heliospheric magnetic field has more than doubled during the last 100 years. However, serious concern has been raised on the long-term consistency of the aa index and on the centennial rise of the solar magnetic field. Here we reanalyze geomagnetic activity during the last 100 years by calculating the recently suggested IHV (Inter-Hour Variability) index as a measure of local geomagnetic activity for seven stations. We find that local geomagnetic activity at all stations follows the same qualitative long-term pattern: an increase from early 1900 to 1960, a dramatic dropout in 1960s and a (mostly weaker) increase thereafter. Moreover, at all stations, the activity at the end of the 20th century has a higher average level than at the beginning of the century. This agrees with the result based on the aa index that global geomagnetic activity, and thereby, the open solar magnetic field has indeed increased during the last 100 years. However, quantitatively, the estimated centennial increase varies greatly from one station to another. We find that the relative increase is higher at the high-latitude stations and lower at the low- and mid-latitude stations. These differences may indicate that the fraction of solar wind disturbances leading to only moderate geomagnetic activity has increased during the studied time interval. We also show that the IHV index needs to be corrected for the long-term change of the daily curve, and calculate the corrected IHV values. Most dramatically, we find the centennial increase in global geomagnetic activity was considerably smaller, only about one half of that depicted by the aa index.
http://www.terracycles.com/Solar_X-ray_Flux.htm
Variability in the amount of energy from the sun has caused climate changes in the past. It is now accepted that the global cooling during Ice Ages is the result of changes in the distribution and amount of sunlight that reaches Earth. During the last Ice Age, the globally averaged temperature of Earth was about 6°C colder than it is today. While this may not sound like much, the effect was to cover large parts of Canada, Alaska, and Siberia with huge sheets of ice up to a mile thick.
Even the climate changes of the 20th century may have a significant solar component. Figure 3 shows comparisons of globally averaged temperature and solar activity. Many scientists find that these correlations are convincing evidence that the sun has contributed to the global warming of the 20th century. Some say that as much as 1/3 of the global warming may be the result of an increase in solar energy. So, while it is becoming clear that human activity is changing the climate today, solar activity may also be contributing to climate change and probably changed the climate in the past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_activity
Around 1900 connections between solar variations and weather on Earth began to be explored. Challenges are shown in the efforts of Charles Greeley Abbot, assigned by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) to detect changes in the radiation of the Sun. His team had to begin by inventing instruments to measure solar radiation. Later, when he was head of the SAO, it established a solar station at Calama, Chile to complement its data from Mount Wilson Observatory. He detected 27 harmonic periods within the 273-month Hale cycles, including 7, 13, and 39 month patterns. He looked for connections to weather by means such as matching opposing solar trends during a month to opposing temperature and precipitation trends in cities.
http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=91
Solar Variability and Climate Change
by Willie Soon
January 10, 2000
The purpose of this article is to give you some details about the research which my colleagues (especially Sallie Baliunas and Eric Posmentier) and I have done in studying the controversial relationship between the Sun’s energy output and Earth’s temperature, in short, the sun-climate connection. Despite what you may have heard before about sun-climate studies, there are in fact demonstrable connections between our Sun’s changing energy outputs and Earth’s climate. This paper will use the best information currently available to explain what we do and do not know about the many aspects of the sun-climate connection.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_...HTML&format
Title: Did Open Solar Magnetic Field Increase During The Last 100 Years? A Reanalysis of Geomagnetic Activity
Authors: Mursula, K.; Martini, D.; Karinen, A.
Affiliation: AA(Department of Physical Sciences, University of Oulu), AB(Department of Physical Sciences, University of Oulu; , GGKI), AC(Department of Physical Sciences, University of Oulu)
Journal: Solar Physics, Volume 224, Issue 1-2, pp. 85-94 (SoPh Homepage)
Publication Date: 10/2004
Origin: SPRINGER
Abstract Copyright: © 2004: Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.
DOI: 10.1007/s11207-005-4981-y
Bibliographic Code: 2004SoPh..224...85M
Abstract
Long-term geomagnetic activity presented by the aa index has been used to show that the heliospheric magnetic field has more than doubled during the last 100 years. However, serious concern has been raised on the long-term consistency of the aa index and on the centennial rise of the solar magnetic field. Here we reanalyze geomagnetic activity during the last 100 years by calculating the recently suggested IHV (Inter-Hour Variability) index as a measure of local geomagnetic activity for seven stations. We find that local geomagnetic activity at all stations follows the same qualitative long-term pattern: an increase from early 1900 to 1960, a dramatic dropout in 1960s and a (mostly weaker) increase thereafter. Moreover, at all stations, the activity at the end of the 20th century has a higher average level than at the beginning of the century. This agrees with the result based on the aa index that global geomagnetic activity, and thereby, the open solar magnetic field has indeed increased during the last 100 years. However, quantitatively, the estimated centennial increase varies greatly from one station to another. We find that the relative increase is higher at the high-latitude stations and lower at the low- and mid-latitude stations. These differences may indicate that the fraction of solar wind disturbances leading to only moderate geomagnetic activity has increased during the studied time interval. We also show that the IHV index needs to be corrected for the long-term change of the daily curve, and calculate the corrected IHV values. Most dramatically, we find the centennial increase in global geomagnetic activity was considerably smaller, only about one half of that depicted by the aa index.
http://www.globalwarming.org/article.php?uid=900
GlobalWarming.org
February 01, 2005
Living in sunny times
American Scientist, Dec 25 2004
A publication in Nature last October by solar physicist Sami K. Solanki of the Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung and four of his colleagues is bound to intensify the arguments. Solanki and coworkers attempted to estimate "sunspot numbers," a general barometer of solar activity, for times long before the beginning of the observational record, which starts four centuries ago. Their main result is expressed in the title of their paper: "Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years."
Evidence for sun-climate link reported by UMaine scientists
University of Maine, Dec 22 2004
A team led by University of Maine scientists has reported finding a potential link between changes in solar activity and the Earth's climate. In a paper due to be published in an upcoming volume of the Annals of Glaciology, Paul Mayewski, director of UMaine's Climate Change Institute, and 11 colleagues from China, Australia and UMaine describe evidence from ice cores pointing to an association between the waxing and waning of zonal wind strength around Antarctica and a chemical signal of changes in the sun's output.
Sun is more active now than over the last 8000 years
Max Planck Society, Oct 28 2004
Because the brightness of the Sun varies slightly with solar activity, the new reconstruction indicates also that the Sun shines somewhat brighter today than in the 8,000 years before. Whether this effect could have provided a significant contribution to the global warming of the Earth during the last century is an open question.
Dim Sun: Global dimming? Global warming?
Grist Magazine, Sept 22 2004
Until Ohmura poked his nose into the radiation record, nobody had noticed that between 1958 and 1988, a whopping 10 percent of solar radiation had disappeared.
Global warming: Tony Blair and other stellar effects
JunkScience.com, Sep 19 2004
Tony Blair has made much of enhanced greenhouse and global warming - the Central England Temperature record suggests his fears are groundless. You can either believe a 340-year temperature record or a politician - suit yourself.
UHIE? UHIE who?
JunkScience.com, Sep 10, 2004
UHIE is the acronym for Urban Heat Island Effect.
How strongly does the sun influence global climate?
Max Planck Society, Aug. 3 2004
As the scientists have reported in the renowned scientific journal, Physical Review Letters, since 1940 the mean sunspot number is higher than it has ever been in the last thousand years and two and a half times higher than the long term average. The temporal variation in the solar activity displays a similarity to that of the mean temperature of the Earth.
Chat transcript: The science (or lack thereof) in 'The Day After Tomorrow' with Dr. James O'Brien
GlobalWarming.org, Jun 03 2004
Of course any variation in the sun will be felt in our climate. I am not an expert on solar variations. Recently however, I read that pollution from increasing pollution was reflecting sunlight and reducing short wave energy (light) from reaching the ground and ocean and turning into longwave energy (heat).
Chat transcript: Iain Murray on 'The Kyoto Protocol and its future'
GlobalWarming.org, May 27, 2004
I have no doubt that the solar wind and other cosmic phenomena affect climate, but I don't think this particular research is precise enough to say that the temperature rises since 1970 were due mostly to cosmic ray flux.
Urban Heat Island Effect Still an Issue; McIntyre and McKitrick Praised; More Fiddling with Paleoclimatology
Cooler Heads Coalition, Dec 17, 2003
"The ice age reached its coldest point during a 70-year period from 1645-1715 known as the Maunder Minimum, which was named after the 19th century solar astronomer, E.W. Maunder, who documented a lack of solar activity during the period.
Hockey Stick Data Wrong?; Hockey Stick Crowd Dismiss Medieval Warm Period
Cooler Heads Coalition, Oct 30, 2003
German scientists from the Max Planck Institute along with Finnish scientists from Oulu University have reconstructed sunspot activity over the past millennium. They conclude that the sun has been in what they term a "frenzy" since 1940, which may be a factor in global warming.
Russian Scientists Question Alarmism
Cooler Heads Coalition, Sep 17, 2003
The Russians commend the work of Friis-Christensen and Lassen on the correlation between sunspot activity and climate and back it up with their own research.
Cosmic Influence on Climate
Cooler Heads Coalition, Jul 09, 2003
In new research published in GSA Today, a publication of the Geological Society of America, researchers Nir Shahiv and Jan Veizer conclude that cosmic rays emanating from dying stars account for 75 percent of the change in the Earth’s climate over the past 500 million years.
Troubling Lack of Science Behind Global Warming Claims
Cooler Heads Coalition, Mar 19, 2003
Essex also explained that the earth’s so-called greenhouse effect does not work like a greenhouse. "Incoming solar radiation adds energy to the Earth’s surface," he said. To restore radiative balance the energy must be transported back to space in roughly the same amounts that it arrived in. The energy is transported via two processes – infrared radiation (heat transfer) and fluid dynamics (turbulence).
Climate Variation is the Norm, not the Exception
Cooler Heads Coalition, Feb 19, 2003
The mechanisms include solar variation, emergence from the Little Ice Age, lunar energy variation, internal oscillations (such as El Niño), Milankovitch forcing (variations in the Earth’s orbit), ocean variation, biospheric variation, cryogenic variation (variations in the amount and distribution of ice), surface versus satellite temperature variation, and aerosol forcing mechanisms.
Solar Magnetism and Global Warming
Cooler Heads Coalition, Jun 10, 1999
Evidence that the Sun plays a major role in climate change continues to mount, casting doubt on the CO2-global warming link. A new study in Nature (June 3, 1999) has found that the Sun’s magnetism has increased dramatically over the last one hundred years.
Hansen Falls Back to Weaker Position
Cooler Heads Coalition, Nov 25, 1998
In 1988 James Hansen put global warming on the political map by exclaiming in a Senate hearing that he was 95 percent sure that manmade global warming was upon us. However, he now believes "The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change." His discussion of solar irradiance is important because he challenges the notion that "climate forcing due to solar variability is negligible because it is much smaller than GHG forcing."
New Light Shed on Sunspots
Cooler Heads Coalition, Jul 12, 1998
Professor Terry Robinson and Dr. Neil Arnold at Leicester University have constructed a computer model that may provide an explanation of how sunspots effect the climate.
Sunshine, Cosmic Rays, and Climate Change
Cooler Heads Coalition, Apr 26, 1998
It’s obvious to most people that the sun plays an important role in the climate of the planet. Recently evidence has been accumulating that the sun may have more to do with temperature variations than manmade greenhouse gases.
Sun, Sun, Sun, Sun, Sunshiny Day
Cooler Heads Coalition, Mar 13, 1998
A new study published by Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology corroborates recent studies that find that variations in the sun’s brightness contributes significantly to climate change.
Sun Sheds Light on Climate Change
Cooler Heads Coalition, Mar 01, 1998
Two papers delivered at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) shed light on sun’s role in climate change.
GlobalWarming.org
February 01, 2005
Living in sunny times
American Scientist, Dec 25 2004
A publication in Nature last October by solar physicist Sami K. Solanki of the Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung and four of his colleagues is bound to intensify the arguments. Solanki and coworkers attempted to estimate "sunspot numbers," a general barometer of solar activity, for times long before the beginning of the observational record, which starts four centuries ago. Their main result is expressed in the title of their paper: "Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years."
Evidence for sun-climate link reported by UMaine scientists
University of Maine, Dec 22 2004
A team led by University of Maine scientists has reported finding a potential link between changes in solar activity and the Earth's climate. In a paper due to be published in an upcoming volume of the Annals of Glaciology, Paul Mayewski, director of UMaine's Climate Change Institute, and 11 colleagues from China, Australia and UMaine describe evidence from ice cores pointing to an association between the waxing and waning of zonal wind strength around Antarctica and a chemical signal of changes in the sun's output.
Sun is more active now than over the last 8000 years
Max Planck Society, Oct 28 2004
Because the brightness of the Sun varies slightly with solar activity, the new reconstruction indicates also that the Sun shines somewhat brighter today than in the 8,000 years before. Whether this effect could have provided a significant contribution to the global warming of the Earth during the last century is an open question.
Dim Sun: Global dimming? Global warming?
Grist Magazine, Sept 22 2004
Until Ohmura poked his nose into the radiation record, nobody had noticed that between 1958 and 1988, a whopping 10 percent of solar radiation had disappeared.
Global warming: Tony Blair and other stellar effects
JunkScience.com, Sep 19 2004
Tony Blair has made much of enhanced greenhouse and global warming - the Central England Temperature record suggests his fears are groundless. You can either believe a 340-year temperature record or a politician - suit yourself.
UHIE? UHIE who?
JunkScience.com, Sep 10, 2004
UHIE is the acronym for Urban Heat Island Effect.
How strongly does the sun influence global climate?
Max Planck Society, Aug. 3 2004
As the scientists have reported in the renowned scientific journal, Physical Review Letters, since 1940 the mean sunspot number is higher than it has ever been in the last thousand years and two and a half times higher than the long term average. The temporal variation in the solar activity displays a similarity to that of the mean temperature of the Earth.
Chat transcript: The science (or lack thereof) in 'The Day After Tomorrow' with Dr. James O'Brien
GlobalWarming.org, Jun 03 2004
Of course any variation in the sun will be felt in our climate. I am not an expert on solar variations. Recently however, I read that pollution from increasing pollution was reflecting sunlight and reducing short wave energy (light) from reaching the ground and ocean and turning into longwave energy (heat).
Chat transcript: Iain Murray on 'The Kyoto Protocol and its future'
GlobalWarming.org, May 27, 2004
I have no doubt that the solar wind and other cosmic phenomena affect climate, but I don't think this particular research is precise enough to say that the temperature rises since 1970 were due mostly to cosmic ray flux.
Urban Heat Island Effect Still an Issue; McIntyre and McKitrick Praised; More Fiddling with Paleoclimatology
Cooler Heads Coalition, Dec 17, 2003
"The ice age reached its coldest point during a 70-year period from 1645-1715 known as the Maunder Minimum, which was named after the 19th century solar astronomer, E.W. Maunder, who documented a lack of solar activity during the period.
Hockey Stick Data Wrong?; Hockey Stick Crowd Dismiss Medieval Warm Period
Cooler Heads Coalition, Oct 30, 2003
German scientists from the Max Planck Institute along with Finnish scientists from Oulu University have reconstructed sunspot activity over the past millennium. They conclude that the sun has been in what they term a "frenzy" since 1940, which may be a factor in global warming.
Russian Scientists Question Alarmism
Cooler Heads Coalition, Sep 17, 2003
The Russians commend the work of Friis-Christensen and Lassen on the correlation between sunspot activity and climate and back it up with their own research.
Cosmic Influence on Climate
Cooler Heads Coalition, Jul 09, 2003
In new research published in GSA Today, a publication of the Geological Society of America, researchers Nir Shahiv and Jan Veizer conclude that cosmic rays emanating from dying stars account for 75 percent of the change in the Earth’s climate over the past 500 million years.
Troubling Lack of Science Behind Global Warming Claims
Cooler Heads Coalition, Mar 19, 2003
Essex also explained that the earth’s so-called greenhouse effect does not work like a greenhouse. "Incoming solar radiation adds energy to the Earth’s surface," he said. To restore radiative balance the energy must be transported back to space in roughly the same amounts that it arrived in. The energy is transported via two processes – infrared radiation (heat transfer) and fluid dynamics (turbulence).
Climate Variation is the Norm, not the Exception
Cooler Heads Coalition, Feb 19, 2003
The mechanisms include solar variation, emergence from the Little Ice Age, lunar energy variation, internal oscillations (such as El Niño), Milankovitch forcing (variations in the Earth’s orbit), ocean variation, biospheric variation, cryogenic variation (variations in the amount and distribution of ice), surface versus satellite temperature variation, and aerosol forcing mechanisms.
Solar Magnetism and Global Warming
Cooler Heads Coalition, Jun 10, 1999
Evidence that the Sun plays a major role in climate change continues to mount, casting doubt on the CO2-global warming link. A new study in Nature (June 3, 1999) has found that the Sun’s magnetism has increased dramatically over the last one hundred years.
Hansen Falls Back to Weaker Position
Cooler Heads Coalition, Nov 25, 1998
In 1988 James Hansen put global warming on the political map by exclaiming in a Senate hearing that he was 95 percent sure that manmade global warming was upon us. However, he now believes "The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change." His discussion of solar irradiance is important because he challenges the notion that "climate forcing due to solar variability is negligible because it is much smaller than GHG forcing."
New Light Shed on Sunspots
Cooler Heads Coalition, Jul 12, 1998
Professor Terry Robinson and Dr. Neil Arnold at Leicester University have constructed a computer model that may provide an explanation of how sunspots effect the climate.
Sunshine, Cosmic Rays, and Climate Change
Cooler Heads Coalition, Apr 26, 1998
It’s obvious to most people that the sun plays an important role in the climate of the planet. Recently evidence has been accumulating that the sun may have more to do with temperature variations than manmade greenhouse gases.
Sun, Sun, Sun, Sun, Sunshiny Day
Cooler Heads Coalition, Mar 13, 1998
A new study published by Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology corroborates recent studies that find that variations in the sun’s brightness contributes significantly to climate change.
Sun Sheds Light on Climate Change
Cooler Heads Coalition, Mar 01, 1998
Two papers delivered at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) shed light on sun’s role in climate change.
http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html
Solar Activity and Climate
Space weather may also in the long term affect the Earth's climate. Solar ultra-violet, visible and heat radiation are the primary factors for the Earth's climate, including global average temperatures, and these energy sources appear to be quite constant. However, many scientists have observed corrrelations between the solar magnetic activity, which is reflected in the sunspot frequency, and climate parameters at the Earth. Sunspots has been recorded through several hundreds of years which makes it possible to compare their variable frequency to climate variations to the extent that reliable climatological records exists. One of the most striking comparisons was published by E. Friis-Christensen og K. Lassen, DMI, in "Science" in 1991. In their work they compared the average temperatureat the northern hemisphere with the average solar activity defined through the interval between successive sunspot maxima. The more active the sun - the shorter the interval: the solar cycle runs more intense. Their results are displayed in the figure below:
http://www.solarstorms.org/Strends.html
Scientists have examined the historical record of long-term climate change and have uncovered a rather dramatic correlation, although the cause for it is still not well understood. During the recent century and decades, space weather has played a role in short-term climate change and has led to several controversial proposals.
This figure shows the reconstructed sunspot numbers for the last 12,000 years based on cosmic ray data recovered from carbon-14 isotopes found in wood samples.
The problem is that these evidences don't fit the Big Bang Theory of our solar system's formation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang Thus, such evidences are either ignored or decried as the result of "bad" science or are the results of heresy and foolishness and even of insanity.
There are a couple of other theories that have successfully predicted such changes. They are the Plasma Universe Theory and The Electric Universe Theory.
Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances.
- Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube
There is not the slightest indication that energy will ever be obtainable from the atom.
- Albert Einstein
This `telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
- Western Union internal memo, 1878
Radio has no future.
- Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), British mathematician and physicist
What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?
- The Quarterly Review, England (March 1825)
There is not in sight any source of energy that would be a fair start toward that which would be necessary to get us beyond the gravitative control of the earth.
- Forest Ray Moulton (1872-1952), astronomer
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, "hmm.... that's funny...."
- Dr. Isaac Asimov, Chemist
Space Ring Could Shade Earth and Stop Global Warming
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Writer
posted: 27 June 2005
02:14 pm ET
A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes.
There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example.
And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops.
But the idea, detailed today in the online version of the journal Acta Astronautica, illustrates that climate change can be battled with new technologies, according to one scientist not involved in the new work.
Mimic a volcano
All scientists agree that Earth gets warmer and colder across the eons. A delicate and ever-changing balance between solar radiation, cloud cover, and heat-trapping greenhouse gases controls long-term swings from ice ages to warmer conditions like today.
Earth's Atmosphere
An illustration of the ring of particles or spacecraft casting a shadow on equatorial Earth. To keep the particles in place, gravitationally significant shepherding spacecraft might be employed. They would herd the particle much like small moons keep Saturns rings in place.
Credit: Star Technology and Research, Inc.
Those who are often called experts admit to glaring gaps in their knowledge of how all this works. A study last month revealed that scientists can't pin down one of the most critical keys: how much sunlight our planet absorbs versus how much is reflected back into space.
Nonetheless, most scientists think our climate has warmed significantly over the past century and will grow warmer over the next hundred years. Various studies claim the planet is destined to warm by anywhere from 1 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit over the next few centuries. Seas will rise dramatically, the scenario goes, inundating coastal cities. But another group of scientists argue that the temperature data supporting a warming planet is not firm and that projections, based on computer modeling, might be wildly off the mark.
Either way, perhaps our fate is more in our hands than we might have imagined.
"Reducing solar insolation by 1.6 percent should overcome a 1.75 K [3 degrees Fahrenheit] temperature rise," contends a group led by Jerome Pearson, president of Star Technology and Research, Inc. "This might be accomplished by a variety of terrestrial or space systems."
The power of scattering sunlight has been illustrated naturally, the scientists note. Volcanic eruptions, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, pumped aerosols into the atmosphere and cooled the global climate by about a degree. Other researchers have suggested such schemes as adding metallic dust to smoke stacks, to flood the atmosphere and reflect more sunlight back into space.
In the newly outlined approach, reflective particles might come from the mining of Earth, the Moon or asteroids. They'd be put into orbit around the equator. Alternately, tiny micro-spacecraft could be deployed with reflective umbrellas.
A ring created by a batch of either "shades the tropics primarily, providing maximum effectiveness in cooling the warmest parts of our planet," the scientists write. An early version of their idea was presented but not widely noticed in 2002.
Eccentric but reassuring
Those researchers who don't buy the argument that global warming is occurring at any significant rate nor that humans are largely to blame may warm up quickly to the new idea.
Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, tracks climate research and the resulting media coverage. He's among the small but vocal group that goes against mainstream thought on the topic of global warming.
"I don't think that the modest warming trend we are currently experiencing poses any significant or long-term threat," Peiser told LiveScience. "Nevertheless, what the paper does show quite impressively is that our hyper-complex civilization is theoretically and technologically capable of dealing with any significant climate change we may potentially face in the future."
Peiser also notes that the Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is estimated to cost the world economy some $150 billion a year. He also sees a broader rationale for supporting the seemingly bizarre manner of managing Earth's temperature budget.
"I believe that this mindset, despite its apparent eccentricity, is actually rather reassuring," Peiser said. "It provides concerned people with ample evidence of the extraordinary human ingenuity that, as so often in the past, has helped to overcome many predicaments that were regarded as impenetrable in previous times."
He also sees an ultimate big-picture reasoning to look favorably on the notion of controlling Earth's climate.
"Whatever the cost and regardless of whether there is any major risk due to global warming," Peiser said, "it would appear to me that such a space-based infrastructure will evolve sooner or later, thus forming additional stepping stones of our emerging migration towards outer space."
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Writer
posted: 27 June 2005
02:14 pm ET
A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes.
There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example.
And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops.
But the idea, detailed today in the online version of the journal Acta Astronautica, illustrates that climate change can be battled with new technologies, according to one scientist not involved in the new work.
Mimic a volcano
All scientists agree that Earth gets warmer and colder across the eons. A delicate and ever-changing balance between solar radiation, cloud cover, and heat-trapping greenhouse gases controls long-term swings from ice ages to warmer conditions like today.
Earth's Atmosphere
An illustration of the ring of particles or spacecraft casting a shadow on equatorial Earth. To keep the particles in place, gravitationally significant shepherding spacecraft might be employed. They would herd the particle much like small moons keep Saturns rings in place.
Credit: Star Technology and Research, Inc.
Those who are often called experts admit to glaring gaps in their knowledge of how all this works. A study last month revealed that scientists can't pin down one of the most critical keys: how much sunlight our planet absorbs versus how much is reflected back into space.
Nonetheless, most scientists think our climate has warmed significantly over the past century and will grow warmer over the next hundred years. Various studies claim the planet is destined to warm by anywhere from 1 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit over the next few centuries. Seas will rise dramatically, the scenario goes, inundating coastal cities. But another group of scientists argue that the temperature data supporting a warming planet is not firm and that projections, based on computer modeling, might be wildly off the mark.
Either way, perhaps our fate is more in our hands than we might have imagined.
"Reducing solar insolation by 1.6 percent should overcome a 1.75 K [3 degrees Fahrenheit] temperature rise," contends a group led by Jerome Pearson, president of Star Technology and Research, Inc. "This might be accomplished by a variety of terrestrial or space systems."
The power of scattering sunlight has been illustrated naturally, the scientists note. Volcanic eruptions, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, pumped aerosols into the atmosphere and cooled the global climate by about a degree. Other researchers have suggested such schemes as adding metallic dust to smoke stacks, to flood the atmosphere and reflect more sunlight back into space.
In the newly outlined approach, reflective particles might come from the mining of Earth, the Moon or asteroids. They'd be put into orbit around the equator. Alternately, tiny micro-spacecraft could be deployed with reflective umbrellas.
A ring created by a batch of either "shades the tropics primarily, providing maximum effectiveness in cooling the warmest parts of our planet," the scientists write. An early version of their idea was presented but not widely noticed in 2002.
Eccentric but reassuring
Those researchers who don't buy the argument that global warming is occurring at any significant rate nor that humans are largely to blame may warm up quickly to the new idea.
Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, tracks climate research and the resulting media coverage. He's among the small but vocal group that goes against mainstream thought on the topic of global warming.
"I don't think that the modest warming trend we are currently experiencing poses any significant or long-term threat," Peiser told LiveScience. "Nevertheless, what the paper does show quite impressively is that our hyper-complex civilization is theoretically and technologically capable of dealing with any significant climate change we may potentially face in the future."
Peiser also notes that the Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is estimated to cost the world economy some $150 billion a year. He also sees a broader rationale for supporting the seemingly bizarre manner of managing Earth's temperature budget.
"I believe that this mindset, despite its apparent eccentricity, is actually rather reassuring," Peiser said. "It provides concerned people with ample evidence of the extraordinary human ingenuity that, as so often in the past, has helped to overcome many predicaments that were regarded as impenetrable in previous times."
He also sees an ultimate big-picture reasoning to look favorably on the notion of controlling Earth's climate.
"Whatever the cost and regardless of whether there is any major risk due to global warming," Peiser said, "it would appear to me that such a space-based infrastructure will evolve sooner or later, thus forming additional stepping stones of our emerging migration towards outer space."
"... a 2004 study published in the journal Science found that of the 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers published on climate change in the previous 10 years, not one disagreed with the view that recent climate change is due to human influences."
From:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0621-01.htm
From:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0621-01.htm
QUOTE(Rick @ Jun 21, 05:42 PM) 
"... a 2004 study published in the journal Science found that of the 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers published on climate change in the previous 10 years, not one disagreed with the view that recent climate change is due to human influences."
bandwagon, carried along with the tide, trendy, in with the crowd, conditioning, argumentum ad numerum, etc?
similarly, see http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0209-01.htm
What, the journal Science doesn't meet your standards? How about Nature? What international peer reviewed journals are you published in? How many papers? I have only one so far.
I had 8 from my PhD. Haven't counted since - going on 100? I don't have any in Nature, but I did review journals for them.
Incidentally:
Ironic is the fact that David Lindley used similar words in his article (“The Embarrassment of Cold Fusion”) in Nature on March 29, 1990. It truly is sad that such a reputable scientific journal could be responsible for such reprehensible trash. Source: http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/...6/exposing.html
and
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=14551
Incidentally:
Ironic is the fact that David Lindley used similar words in his article (“The Embarrassment of Cold Fusion”) in Nature on March 29, 1990. It truly is sad that such a reputable scientific journal could be responsible for such reprehensible trash. Source: http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/...6/exposing.html
and
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=14551
That's considerable. Quite an accomplishment.
It's all in the past, Rick. I got ill and now after recovering somewhat I just applied for a job as a college tutor, but I need the £25K/yr or the house will have to go. Sometimes, priorities for the organic far outweigh those for this ethereal thing we call mind. It's good guys like yourself that have helped to keep me active the past 2-3 years and I appreciate it. I value your aptitude and strength of conviction.
....and how do you feel today? Are you working on anything specific?
Hi Don
2 B honest I feel really depressed. Optimistically, I'll put it down to a familial predisposition towards low serotoin levels. I take diothiopin (Dosulepin) for chronic pain (it's not really understood why it has this benefit) but I'm sure that it also helps keep me from the edge.
Poems. And I'm working on getting into as many genres of music as possible - I just love them all. Did you catch "Earth To Calm" by Scott Matthews (New) and "Troof" by Shawn Phillips (Old)? Oh, and at last I began my book "Microbes R Us".
How are you doing?
2 B honest I feel really depressed. Optimistically, I'll put it down to a familial predisposition towards low serotoin levels. I take diothiopin (Dosulepin) for chronic pain (it's not really understood why it has this benefit) but I'm sure that it also helps keep me from the edge.
Poems. And I'm working on getting into as many genres of music as possible - I just love them all. Did you catch "Earth To Calm" by Scott Matthews (New) and "Troof" by Shawn Phillips (Old)? Oh, and at last I began my book "Microbes R Us".
How are you doing?
Well that's not good at all. So your sickness is in neurological wiring not a physical malady based on any specific physiological breakdown?
Try surrounding yourself with vivid colours. I too, suffered a mental breakdown @ 25 yrs old based on a combination of factors. I was depressed and tried zoloft and prozac, but I didn't like the way they made me feel, so I vowed to overcome this psychological disease via natural means (time + space = happiness), as well as an unquenchable thirst (not opium induced) for knowledge as to why I had arrived at where I was mentally and to where I wanted to go. In this search I seemed to have acquired an heightened and amplified perceptual awareness about the world that surrounds my phenomenal field, perecieving most events as though time has dilated allowing for access to many planes of signification and interpretation. The internet, of course limits this access, so I think that it would be good for you to get back into the swing of things and begin interacting socially and intellectually again en mass and in person....and acquiring new and vibrant electrons of information from those that you engage in energy tranference and ride a new wave, with a new amplitude and length....the wave of your future....what would you like it to be? Create your own reality!
I know I may sound coo coo for coco puffs to most but the truely enlightened, and that's ok with me as I know the life's path challenge ahead of me....
Anyway, I will try downloading those tunes.
Right now I'm wiped mentally and physically....from the heat (global warming ?) and the daily grind of work and studio, work and studio etc...
Things have to heat up before things can cool down!
Attachment ----> The wave of the future: ? (macquette for mural project that is in progress - 2 4ft x 8ft paintings)
Try surrounding yourself with vivid colours. I too, suffered a mental breakdown @ 25 yrs old based on a combination of factors. I was depressed and tried zoloft and prozac, but I didn't like the way they made me feel, so I vowed to overcome this psychological disease via natural means (time + space = happiness), as well as an unquenchable thirst (not opium induced) for knowledge as to why I had arrived at where I was mentally and to where I wanted to go. In this search I seemed to have acquired an heightened and amplified perceptual awareness about the world that surrounds my phenomenal field, perecieving most events as though time has dilated allowing for access to many planes of signification and interpretation. The internet, of course limits this access, so I think that it would be good for you to get back into the swing of things and begin interacting socially and intellectually again en mass and in person....and acquiring new and vibrant electrons of information from those that you engage in energy tranference and ride a new wave, with a new amplitude and length....the wave of your future....what would you like it to be? Create your own reality!
I know I may sound coo coo for coco puffs to most but the truely enlightened, and that's ok with me as I know the life's path challenge ahead of me....
Anyway, I will try downloading those tunes.
Right now I'm wiped mentally and physically....from the heat (global warming ?) and the daily grind of work and studio, work and studio etc...
Things have to heat up before things can cool down!
Attachment ----> The wave of the future: ? (macquette for mural project that is in progress - 2 4ft x 8ft paintings)
....oh yeah, viva l'England!
Bend it like Beckham!
Bend it like Beckham!
QUOTE(Trip like I do @ Jun 21, 11:52 PM)
Attachment ----> The wave of the future: ? (macquette for mural project that is in progress - 2 4ft x 8ft paintings)
Wow, that's some art! I feel better already!
....here is the work in progress.
QUOTE(Trip like I do @ Jun 22, 12:28 AM)
....here is the work in progress.
you've not made much progress! (Hee, Hee). please tell me more about your history in/with art.
Hans Eysenk (German b. 1916)
- emphasized not only biological and genetic factors, but also social and environmental factors in assessing personality (the biosocial approach). His superfactors were biological in nature and were determined largely by genetic influences....the product of evolutonary forces (Dimensions of Personality 1947).
- also note the Greek physician Hippocrates (470 BC - 377 BC), who suggested that personalities could be classified according to a predomination of certain bodily fluids (humors) which reflected the four elements of the cosmos.
- the Greek physician and writer Galen (130 AD - 200 AD) followed suit by stating that a predominance of blood led to a sanguine character, marked by sturdiness, high colour, and cheerfulness. A predominance of mucus led to the slow, solid, and apathetic phlegmatic personality. A predominance of black bile led to the melancholic or 'depressed' personality.
- Eysenk was able to help depressed patients....depression is linked to insufficient positive reinforcement. To counteract their depression, patients are trained to increase the rate of positive reinforcement they receive by interacting with the environment in a positive way (constructive communication, problem solving, self-assertion, etc.) in spite of their depressed moods.
- emphasized not only biological and genetic factors, but also social and environmental factors in assessing personality (the biosocial approach). His superfactors were biological in nature and were determined largely by genetic influences....the product of evolutonary forces (Dimensions of Personality 1947).
- also note the Greek physician Hippocrates (470 BC - 377 BC), who suggested that personalities could be classified according to a predomination of certain bodily fluids (humors) which reflected the four elements of the cosmos.
- the Greek physician and writer Galen (130 AD - 200 AD) followed suit by stating that a predominance of blood led to a sanguine character, marked by sturdiness, high colour, and cheerfulness. A predominance of mucus led to the slow, solid, and apathetic phlegmatic personality. A predominance of black bile led to the melancholic or 'depressed' personality.
- Eysenk was able to help depressed patients....depression is linked to insufficient positive reinforcement. To counteract their depression, patients are trained to increase the rate of positive reinforcement they receive by interacting with the environment in a positive way (constructive communication, problem solving, self-assertion, etc.) in spite of their depressed moods.
QUOTE(Rick @ Jun 21, 10:42 AM)
"... a 2004 study published in the journal Science found that of the 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers published on climate change in the previous 10 years, not one disagreed with the view that recent climate change is due to human influences."
From:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0621-01.htm
Actually, Professor, you referenced Commondreams.org. A website that openly delcares a progressive bias and is often quoted by liberal and left-wing political activists. The article does not footnote it's references to the journal "Science."
;o)
QUOTE(Warren Bonesteel @ Jun 21, 11:04 PM)
Actually, Professor
;o)
Welcome back, maestro Warren!
I would like to see the 2001 hocky stick global temperature chart updated to include more recent data.
QUOTE(Hey Hey @ Jun 21, 07:40 PM)
QUOTE(Trip like I do @ Jun 22, 12:28 AM)
....here is the work in progress.
you've not made much progress! (Hee, Hee). please tell me more about your history in/with art.
1 down....now I just need to make its echo.
QUOTE(Trip like I do @ Jun 22, 12:28 AM)
....here is the work in progress.
Are these frescos?
Looks like acrylic paint on urethane foam, to me. Trip, how do you decide on the colors?
QUOTE(code buttons @ Jun 22, 10:26 AM)
QUOTE(Warren Bonesteel @ Jun 21, 11:04 PM)
Actually, Professor
;o)
Welcome back, maestro Warren!
Thank you, sir.
I've been kinda busy, so I don't have the opportunity to stop by here much at the moment. I know. I know. One or two of ya think that's a good thing. ;O)
As far as Global Warming, here's a few more resources to look at...from both sides of the argument...
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
http://vathena.arc.nasa.gov/curric/land/global/climchng.html
http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/historical_CO2.htm
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
http://earth.rice.edu/MTPE/cryo/cryosphere...ics/ice_age.mov
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...04/gray-on-agw/
http://www.multi-science.co.uk/mcintyre_02.pdf
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=714
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=715
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...nthesis-report/
http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/solar/solar.htm
http://www.gcrio.org/CONSEQUENCES/winter96/sunclimate.html
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...arming-on-mars/
http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2005/02/is...lity-based.html
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/promethe...tion_to_th.html
http://www.envirotruth.org/myth7.cfm
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/199805260...trunc_sys.shtml
http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles...19/Feature1.asp
To that effect, and just by chance, I saw Vicepresident Al Gore's movie 'An Inconvinient Truth'. Alarming scientific statistic are flashed back and forth; so much that makes you wonder how can the present administration be so blatantly and irresponsably ignorant about our pollution problem here in the USA: http://www.climatecrisis.net/
QUOTE(Trip like I do @ Jun 26, 07:38 PM)
QUOTE(Hey Hey @ Jun 21, 07:40 PM)
QUOTE(Trip like I do @ Jun 22, 12:28 AM)
....here is the work in progress.
you've not made much progress! (Hee, Hee). please tell me more about your history in/with art.
1 down....now I just need to make its echo.
Here are the pieces finally installed!!!
QUOTE(Trip like I do @ Sep 03, 04:15 PM)
QUOTE(Trip like I do @ Jun 26, 07:38 PM)
QUOTE(Hey Hey @ Jun 21, 07:40 PM)
QUOTE(Trip like I do @ Jun 22, 12:28 AM)
....here is the work in progress.
you've not made much progress! (Hee, Hee). please tell me more about your history in/with art.
1 down....now I just need to make its echo.
Here are the pieces finally installed!!!
Nice. You really couldn't put something like that up in your living room, but it's perfect in that setting. The continuity of stripes on the "echo" is striking. Echo is a good description--just like the first, except a little bit less (unless I'm mis-seeing).
Thanks....they are in the new Accolade West building at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, one of the, if not the, most culturally diverse universities in the world.
Its the new Fine Arts Building that houses theatre, dance, art history, music, etc.
The title of the piece is "The Wave of The Future: a multi-dimensional amplified echo on one parallel stripe or another."
Its the new Fine Arts Building that houses theatre, dance, art history, music, etc.
The title of the piece is "The Wave of The Future: a multi-dimensional amplified echo on one parallel stripe or another."
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