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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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[Below is the original script. Some changes may have been made during the recording of this audio podcast.]
Ultimately, global warming can be blamed on the sun. It's the sun's light that bathes the Earth and then gets sent back towards space as heat. But some of that heat gets blocked by those pesky carbon dioxide molecules building up in the atmosphere—inexorably warming our planet.
So the sun's output has a lot to do with what we can expect climate-wise. After all, a decrease in solar output known as the Maunder Minimum helped freeze Europe for a few centuries.
For the last few years, the sun has been in a relatively quiet phase: there have been few sunspots, which are the markers of a powerful sun. Last year the number of sunspots dropped to a level not seen since the beginning of the 20th century.
So much for climate change contrarians attempts to blame the sun for global warming.
But now new sunspots are moving into view, and a new solar cycle seems to have dawned this past December, which NOAA and other experts expect to be one of the weaker cycles since the 1750s.
This small weakening of the sun, however, has been outpaced by the rapid increase in CO2 levels from all our fossil fuel burning and tree-cutting. A weaker sun might slow human-induced climate change slightly but when the sun eventually recovers force, global warming would heat up with even more of a vengeance.
—David Biello
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8 Comments
Add CommentWhy has warming occurred before? Human activities during last century certainly have also their share. Let us hope we are in time to reverse it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOur brain generates an electro-chemical matrix where perhaps our mind dwells, the sun is a huge electro-chemical matrix does it think? On what time-frame? Think the Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe active sunspot cycle is overdue. Is a thinking sun giving us a chance?
Will we do the right thing - lower our population, restore forest cover, allow biodiversity to return to past levels? That is what is necessary for us as a species to survive past being a small 100k year blip .
And the lie moves on,First the sun warms the renasince and then cooled the maunder minimum. But modern industrilization caused the resent warming that is cooling now even though CO2 is the cause of warming. Maybe earth CO2 is causing the sun to change it's output!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps a little science facts will help:
A cooling hydrosphere will scrub a lot more CO2 out of the atmosphere and result in lowering of the CO2 detected during this period.
Plant life on this planet is an almost steady state carbon cycle and can not cause the changes observed.
Only a planet with huge, dirty (with salts) oceans can have a oxygen enriched atmosphere. CO2 is very easy to scrub with sea water as the CO2 goes into solution with water easily and then combines with light metal ions to make carbonates that percipitate out. Solar radiation in the upper atmosphere breaks down H2O into hydrogen that leaks into space and oxygen that sinks toward the surface.
Global cooling causes lowering of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Global warming causes raising of CO2 in the atmosphere.
CO2 has almost nothing to do with the temperature in the atmosphere, it is an effect not the cause. CO2 is a very poor green house gas and comprises only 1/30 of 1 percent of the atmosphere, and carbon is the most important element for life on this planet. The amount of carbon in circulation is the limiting nutritant in all life on this planet
IT IS THE SUN.
The total output of the sun causes the goldilocks zone to move in or out and the planet to cool or warm depending on the amount of energy it encounters, and the amount of CO2 to lower or raise with the temperature changes.
The creation and maintance of a healthy atmosphere is very important in truspace.
...the rest of the story. Climate is changing and always will. The climate celebrities, however, are linking climate and the economy. Yes, there has been warming to end the Pleistocene. Climate is a multiple input, multiple loop, multiple output, complex system. The facts and the hypotheses, however, do not support CO2 as a serious 'pollutant'. In fact, it is plant fertilizer and seriously important to all life on the planet. It is the red herring used to unwind our economy. That issue makes the science relevant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSulphate from volcanoes can have a catastrophic effect, but water vapour is far more important. Water vapour (0.4% overall by volume in air, but 1 4 % near the surface) is the most effective green house blanket followed by methane (0.0001745%). The third ranking gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves rapidly in cold water and bubbles rapidly out of warm water. The equilibrium in seawater is very high; making seawater a great 'sink'; CO2 is 34 times more soluble in water than air is soluble in water.
CO2 has been rising and Earth and her oceans have been warming. However, the correlation trails. Correlation, moreover, is not causation. The causation is under experimental review, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome.
Using a box of air in a Copenhagen lab, physicists traced the growth of clusters of molecules of the kind that build cloud condensation nuclei. These are specks of sulphuric acid on which cloud droplets form. High-energy particles driven through the laboratory ceiling by exploded stars far away in the Galaxy - the cosmic rays - liberate electrons in the air, which help the molecular clusters to form much faster than climate scientists have modeled in the atmosphere. That may explain the link between cosmic rays, cloudiness and climate change.
As I understand it, the hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center goes as follows:
Quiet sun allows the geomagnetic shield to drop. Incoming galactic cosmic ray flux creates more low-level clouds, more snow, and more albedo effect as more is heat reflected resulting in a colder climate.
Active sun has an enhanced magnetic field which induces Earths geomagnetic shield response. Earth has fewer low-level clouds, less rain, snow and ice, and less albedo (less heat reflected) producing a warmer climate.
That is how the bulk of climate change works, coupled with (modulated by) sunspot peak frequency there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, the planets cool.
The change on cloud cover is only a small percentage, and the ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that.
Although the post 60s warming period appears to be over, it has allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with more humidity, clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years. Ancient sedimentary rocks and paleontological evidence indicate the planet has had abundant liquid water over the entire span. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat.
Check the web site of the Danish National Space Center. NASA has ignored all work outside the biased US establishment.
The mind boggle is, slap your head, David Biello admits the globe cooled over the past ten years while CO2 increased and, moreover, that it is related to solar behaviour but insists the CO2 hypothesis will ultimately overwhelm the solar actual. Scientific reasong - not. Just special pleading to have cake and eat cake too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDarn contrarians and skeptics. If it weren't for these guys we could still cling to the fact the sun revolves around our flat planet all the while being warmed by a few hundred ppm of CO2.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the sun continues it's obstreperous ways and threatens the continued existence of man's civilization through the runaway Global Warming, we must form a consortium of new-clear powers and nuke the sun in order to teach it a lesson. Someone above said the damn thing thinks. Let's give it a headache and sumtin' to think about.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisableheart2 ; nice comment! put a smile on my face, thank you.
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