Solar irradiance & global warming

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Forums > All Posts > Solar irradiance and global warming

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02-08-2012, 04:44 PM

Duwayne Anderson
Saint Helens, OR
Posts: 1

Folks:

I'm new to this forum, so please be patient if I don't do things exactly right.

Anyway, last weekend we had a nice warm day in Oregon, so I decided to wash several week’s worth of dirt off my car. I like to listen to the radio while I do this, and I had AM 620 (local progressive station) playing. Alan was on, and the topic was global warming.

Someone called the show and started spouting off all sorts of nonsense about the science of global warming (I'm a scientist -- physicist by training). I made a mental note that I needed to get online and see if I could straighten out some of the misinformation.

One bit of misinformation that was suggested by the caller is that solar output has been increasing, of late, and this supposed increase is what's responsible for global warming.

A paper from Columbia University puts this notion to rest. In fact, during the past decade, solar irradiance has actually been *falling.* Here’s a link to the paper:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2012/20120119_Temperature.pdf

Scroll down to figure 9, to see a graph of the solar irradiance variation over the past 25 years (it varies somewhat sinusoidally, with a period equal to the 11-year sunspot cycle). Note the scale on the left-hand side. The variation is *very* small, and solar irradiance was decreasing from about 2000 through about 2008.

Hopefully this sort of data will help.

Best regards, all,

Duwayne Anderson

02-09-2012, 10:12 AM

Schmidt
Colorado Springs, CO
Posts: 1058

Thanks Duwayne. Climate Change is a topic that has intrigued me over the years. I have read James Hansen's book, Storms of My Grandchildren, as well as keeping up with news releases and publications by NASA, NOAA and National Academy of Sciences. It has given me an appreciation of the enormous complexity and problems of computer modeling and understanding the effects of atmospheric/oceanic events like El Ninos and La Ninas, the various Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic Osillations, the various ocean currents, as well as cyclic solar activity plus volcanoes, sources and levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, accuracy of global temperature measurements, etc. not only for the present but thousands of years back as ice cores from Greenland and the Antarctic are studied.

Climatolgy and the related overlapping scientific fields of study focusing on aspects of Climate Change have made enormous strides in combining their scientific understanding of factors driving Climate Change, and even more importantly forecasting climate change trends, and identifying what needs to change to alter those trends...i.e. how our planet needs to move off our reliance on fossil fuels before it's too late. Although I pride myself in being a person of science, I am overwhelmed with admiration for the scientists for the challenges and importance of their task that they face.

I also get angry when global warming deniers will cherry pick a weather event or some aspect of their peer review process and start mocking the scientists, as many of the totally ignorant pundits on Fox News do on a regular basis. It is anti-intellectualism at its worst, a campaign by the polluters like Koch Industries to create doubt in the minds of the populace.

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