No Scientific Consensus About Global Warming

Do you think everyone agrees about global warming? Think again.
Peter


from:http://www.prnewswire.com/news/index_mail.shtml?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/09-12-2007/0004661425&EDATE=

Challenge to Scientific Consensus on Global Warming: Analysis Finds Hundreds of Scientists Have Published Evidence Countering Man-Made Global Warming Fears

Sunspots And Weather, Is There a Link?

Here is an article describing how scientists try to link sunspot activity to weather events. There are many other studies correlating changes in the amount of solar energy received by the Earth with both major climate changes like ice ages, and more frequent episodic cycles of warming and cooling.

In this article, Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Institute For Space Studies, a long-time proponent of man-caused global warming, discounts this study linking sunspots with increased rainfall in East Africa. Surely he can not dispute the longer-term relationship between the sun and the Earth's climate.

Schmidt is also a pricipal author at the climate website http://www.realclimate.org/
I think I'm going to begin referring to people who insist on man's responsibility for global warming and climate change as the "real deniers". What do you think?
Peter

Do sunspots foretell heavy rains — and disease?
Controversial new study links East Africa’s wettest seasons with solar cycle

JAXA/NASA
This composite image shows multiple solar flares on the sun. A new study suggests a link between sunspots and heavy rains in East Africa.

By Bryn Nelson
MSNBC contributor

Periodic peaks in the number of visible sunspots may help predict heavy rains and subsequent disease outbreaks in East Africa, according to a controversial new study. Although previously questioned, the sunspot-rainfall link suggests that many of East Africa’s wettest rainy seasons during the 20th century were closely associated with highpoints in the mysterious solar cycle that yields the sun’s large dark blotches.
The take-home message, researchers concluded in the latest issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, is that careful scrutiny of past climatic conditions may generate better long-term predictions of destructive weather events in the future. That knowledge, in turn, may provide a crucial head start to those working to limit fallout such as erosion, flooding and mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and Rift Valley Fever.
J. Curt Stager, the report’s lead author and a paleoclimatologist at Paul Smith’s College in Paul Smiths, N.Y., said reaction to his research has been decidedly mixed, due in part to the checkered past of sunspot predictions.

“I’m afraid it suffers from the same failings as most of the purported surface climate-solar cycle connections,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. In an e-mail, Schmidt said that even uncorrelated “noise” in records with decadal variability, such as rainfall measurements, can sometimes yield apparent patterns if someone looks hard enough. But it doesn’t make those correlations significant.
“People have been looking for solar cycle effects in climate for 200 years,” Schmidt said. “If they were there, they’d have been found already.”

David Verardo, director of the National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate Program, nevertheless praised the new results in a statement as “an important step in applying paleoclimate analyses to predicting future environmental conditions and their impacts on society.” The foundation provided major funding for the study.
Sunspots, or slightly cooler and dimmer patches, have been closely associated with magnetic storms on the sun’s surface. Each upsurge in sunspots reflects a slightly greater output of solar radiation and the numbers peak in roughly 11-year cycles. The next crest, or solar maximum, is expected to arrive between 2011 and 2012. According to the new study’s main prediction, East Africa should experience a major intensification in its rainy season about a year before that solar maximum.

Solar physicists cannot yet explain the 11-year rhythm of sunspots. Even so, observers have noted their cyclical waxing and waning since the first half of the 19th Century. Far more recently, satellite data have documented slight increases in the sun’s energy every time the sunspot numbers peak.

In Stager’s study, he and his colleagues compiled evidence suggesting that those solar peaks also correlate with significant up-ticks in the levels of East Africa’s Lake Victoria and other regional lakes. The widespread effect, the researchers suggested, was mediated primarily through unusually heavy rainfall that began roughly one year before each solar maximum.
“The weak part,” Stager conceded, “is we don’t know exactly why it works.”

The heightened solar energy, according to one potential explanation, heats land and ocean water alike, pushing up the moist air and producing abnormal precipitation. A more speculative hypothesis suggests that the sun’s slightly increasing energy may help trigger or pace El Niño events that bring additional rainfall to East Africa.

If supported by additional research, the study’s implications could be far-reaching. Rift Valley Fever epidemics, for example, are commonly associated with unusually heavy rainfall and all eight of Kenya’s outbreaks over the past 50 years have coincided with upward shifts in the level of Lake Victoria.

Early in the 20th Century, two successive sunspot peaks matched up almost perfectly with higher surface levels in the lake, leading many researchers to take the apparent connection for granted. At the time, however, scientists and non-scientists alike were seizing upon the peculiar sunspot cycles to explain everything from droughts to “mass human excitability.”
Then something unexpected happened. The roughly 11-year solar cycle stayed in place, but a sort of double-time pulse appeared in Lake Victoria’s fluctuating levels, making some of the lake’s peak levels coincide with minimal sunspot activity and masking the previously clear correlation.

“People took that and said, ‘Well, it was just an illusion,’” Stager said, and most scientists promptly dropped their inquiries into the purported link.
Sunspot-related phenomena have been greeted with skepticism and even hostility ever since, he said — a wariness likely not helped by murky Internet claims that the solar cycles can be linked to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

Space storms occur when the sun throws off an outburst of radiation and energetic particles that can interact with Earth's magnetic field. Such storms can disrupt communications, damage satellites and even pose health risks. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has set up three scales to measure the severity of "space weather."

To make their case, Stager and his colleagues first compared rainfall with lake levels to bolster past research suggesting Lake Victoria’s fluctuating levels are dictated primarily by the rain falling within its watershed, and that the water may take as long as a year or two to flow to the lake.

Using a variety of visual and statistical comparisons, the team also demonstrated a “spot-on” correlation between each sunspot maximum and Victoria’s high-water marks. The researchers found similar connections between the sunspot peaks and water levels for East Africa’s Tanganyika and Naivasha Lakes.

Because they had concluded that the lake levels are largely influenced by prior rainfall in the watershed, the researchers’ final task was to also link those rainfall amounts to the sunspot tallies. Stager pointed out that heavy rains and subsequent rises in lake levels can occur at other times, as happened during the early 1960s. But most of East Africa’s soggiest rainy seasons, he found, consistently pre-dated the regular sunspot peaks by about a year. And although the sunspot-rainfall link appeared to weaken between 1927 and 1968, Stager said his research suggests the connection held firm throughout the 20th Century.

The big question, he said, is what mechanism underlies the phenomenon. One of his chief though speculative suspects is El Niño, already associated with extra rainfall in East Africa. “We’re suggesting that the rhythm of the solar cycle might be triggering the El Niño event,” Stager said, “or setting the pace.”
He cautioned that the sunspot observations have no obvious connection to global warming, however. (Of course he won't make any connection with global warming, that would be politically incorrect. Peter) Nor is the solar cycle capable of providing good predictions of drought in the East Africa region. Only time, and perhaps more research, will tell if the sunspot-rainfall prognostication fares better in the coming years.

The Physical Evidence of Earth's Unstoppable 1,500 Year Climate Cycle, by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery

This is the beginning of an excellent article documenting and clearly explaining the multiple lines of evidence showing that the Earth's climate has been and is constantly changing. It is very difficult to explain how the climate now is any different that it has been in the past, long before mankind was around and emitting carbon dioxide.
Peter
from: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st279/index.html


The Physical Evidence of Earth's Unstoppable 1,500-Year Climate Cycle
NCPA Study No. 279September 30, 2005
Read Article as PDF Get Adobe Reader

by S. Fred Singer & Dennis T. Avery
Executive Summary
Introduction
The Ice Cores
Seabed Sediments
Lake Sediments
Cave Stalagmites
Fossilized Pollen
Boreholes
Tree Rings
Mountain Tree Line Elevations
Glacier Advances and Retreats
Miscellaneous Climate Proxies
Summing Up the Worldwide Physical Evidence
Sidebar: Climate Cycling in North America
Notes
About the Authors
Executive Summary
The Earth currently is experiencing a warming trend, but there is scientific evidence that human activities have little to do with it. Instead, the warming seems to be part of a 1,500-year cycle (plus or minus 500 years) of moderate temperature swings.

It has long been accepted that the Earth has experienced climate cycles, most notably the 90,000-year Ice Age cycles. But in the past 20 years or so, modern science has discovered evidence that within those broad Ice Age cycles, the Earth also experiences 1,500-year warming-cooling cycles. The Earth has been in the Modern Warming portion of the current cycle since about 1850, following a Little Ice Age from about 1300 to 1850. It appears likely that warming will continue for some time into the future, perhaps 200 years or more, regardless of human activity.

Evidence of the global nature of the 1,500-year climate cycles includes very long-term proxies for temperature change — ice cores, seabed and lake sediments, and fossils of pollen grains and tiny sea creatures. There are also shorter-term proxies — cave stalagmites, tree rings from trees both living and buried, boreholes and a wide variety of other temperature proxies.
Scientists got the first unequivocal evidence of a continuing moderate natural climate cycle in the 1980s, when Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland first saw two mile-long ice cores from Greenland representing 250,000 years of Earth’s frozen, layered climate history. From their initial examination, Dansgaard and Oeschger estimated the smaller temperature cycles at 2,550 years. Subsequent research shortened the estimated length of the cycles to 1,500 years (plus or minus 500 years). Other substantiating findings followed:
An ice core from the Antarctic’s Vostok Glacier — at the other end of the world from Greenland — showed the same 1,500-year cycle through its 400,000-year length.

The ice-core findings correlated with known glacier advances and retreats in northern Europe.
Independent data in a seabed sediment core from the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland, reported in 1997, showed nine of the 1,500-year cycles in the last 12,000 years.
Other seabed sediment cores of varying ages near Iceland, in the Norwegian and Baltic seas, off Alaska, in the eastern Mediterranean, in the Arabian Sea, near the Philippines and off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula all also showed evidence of the 1,500-year cycles.

So did lake sediment cores from Switzerland, Alaska, various parts of Africa and Argentina, as did cave stalagmites in Europe, Asia and Africa, and fossilized pollen, boreholes, tree rings and mountain tree lines. None of these pieces of evidence would be convincing in and of themselves. However, to dismiss the evidence of the 1,500-year climate cycle, it is necessary to dismiss not only the known human histories from the past 2,000 years but also an enormous range and variety of physical evidence found by a huge body of serious researchers.
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The Physical Evidence of Earth's Unstoppable 1500 Year Climate Cycle-Introduction

The following explains the rationale and evidence in the historical and scientific literature demonstrating the cyclical or periodic nature of past global climate changes. It is difficult to ignore or deny the fact that forces other than man's activities are at work changing the global climate. The global climate is clearly changing all the time. To attribute all of the present climate change to carbon dioxide emissions is beyond the belief of a sane and rational thinking person.
Peter

NATIONAL CENTER FOR POLICY ANALYSIS
ABOUT NCPA / CONTACT US

The Physical Evidence of Earth's Unstoppable 1,500-Year Climate Cycle
Introduction
Is the Earth currently experiencing a warming trend? Yes.
Are human activities, including the burning of fossil fuel and forest conversion, the primary — or even significant — drivers of this current temperature trend? The scientifically appropriate answer — cautious and conforming to the known facts — is: probably not.
"The Earth's climate cycles through 90,000-year Ice Ages interspersed with shorter warm periods."

Indeed, the current warming cycle is not unusual: Evidence from around the world shows that the Earth has experienced numerous climate cycles throughout its history. These cycles include glacial periods (more commonly known as Ice Ages) and interglacial periods, as well as smaller, though significant, fluctuations. During the past 20 years, scientists have been accumulating strong physical evidence that the Earth consistently goes through a climate cycle marked by alternating warmer and cooler periods over 1,500 years (plus or minus 500 years).

The evidence indicates that:
The Earth experienced a Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850.
A Modern Warming period began about 1850 and continues to the present.
Figure I tracks the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age that preceded today’s Modern Warming.
"Within the longer cycle, the climate warms and cools in 1,500 year-cycles (plus or minus 500 years)."
We have long had physical evidence that the Earth has experienced numerous climate cycles throughout its history. The best-known of these is the Ice Age cycle, with 90,000-year Ice Ages interspersed with far shorter interglacial periods. What is new is the evidence of more moderate, persistent climate cycles within these broader cycles.

The message that the 1,500-year climate cycle is real, broad — and sudden — is being dug up from the Earth itself by modern science. The key evidence comes from very long-term proxies for temperature change, especially ice cores, seabed and lake sediments, and fossils of pollen grains and tiny sea creatures that document even small changes in Earth’s temperature over many thousands of years.

In addition, we have a number of shorter-term proxies (cave stalagmites, tree rings from trees both living and buried, boreholes and a wide variety of other temperature proxies) that testify to the global nature of the 1,500-year climate cycles.
A striking example of the effect of this 1,500-year climate cycle can be seen in the temperature-sensitive history of wine-growing in England.
"Evidence from every continent and ocean confirms the 1,500-year cycle."
The Romans grew wine grapes in England when they occupied it from the first through the fourth centuries. Aerial photography, remote sensing and large-scale excavation have recently revealed seven Roman-era vineyards in south central England. One site contains nearly four miles of bedding trenches that could have supported some 4,000 grapevines.1
A thousand years later, during the Medieval Warming of 950-1300, the Britons themselves grew wine grapes in England. The Domesday Book, compiled in the 11th century, recorded 46 places in southern England growing wine grapes. (Richard Tkachuck of the Geosciences Research Institute notes that German vineyards were found as high as 780 meters in elevation during the Medieval Warming, but are found today up to only 560 meters — indicating a temperature difference of 1° to 1.4° C.2) During the Little Ice Age (1300-1850), England was too cold to grow wine grapes. Instead, London often held ice festivals on the frozen Thames River, which hasn’t frozen in the last 150 years.

Now that the Little Ice Age has given way to the Modern Warming, a few hardy Britons have again begun serious efforts to grow good wine grapes in England — but thus far with spotty success. The Web site http://www.english-wine.com/ admits that British wine-making is still a very chancy proposition. Only two years in 10 will the wine be very good, and during four of the other years it will be terrible, “largely due to weather....”
British vintners should be hopeful, however. The Modern Warming is still young, and likely to eventually give them several centuries of good wine production. The Earth is apparently having its third natural, moderate — and unstoppable — warming in 2,000 years.

Taken by itself, the cycle of wine-grape growing in England might be seen as an aberration. However, this is just one bit of the emerging body of physical evidence of a natural climate cycle — a cycle too moderate and too long to have been reported in the Viking sagas and earlier oral histories from people without thermometers.
"The changing concentration of oxygen-18 in Greenland ice cores corresponds to the 1,500-year cycle."
None of these pieces of evidence would be convincing in and of themselves. However, in order to dismiss the huge impact of the 1500-year climate cycle, we would have to dismiss not only the human histories from those periods, but also the enormous range and variety of physical evidence presented here.

Importantly, if the current warming trend is, as the evidence suggests, part of an entirely natural climate cycle, actions proposed to prevent further warming would be futile and could, by imposing substantial costs upon the global economy, lessen the ability of people to adapt to the impacts — both positive and negative — of climate change.
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