Is There A "Sun Spots" Crowd Trying To Disprove Global Warming By Humans?

[orleans]

my daughter has a couple friends in a college science class. her friends, i believe, have a skeptical opinion on global warming as my daughter and i understand it (this could be due to a liberal vs. conservative background).

her friends mentioned to her that their instructor said something about sun spots--or that some people think the warming is due more to sun spot activity than to human activity.

so..my daughter asked me to google this.

i found one article -- the first one that popped up on google -- that says that

"Dr David Viner, the senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, said the research showed that the sun did have an effect on global warming.

"He added, however, that the study also showed that over the past 20 years the number of sunspots had remained roughly constant, while the Earth's temperature had continued to increase.

"This suggested that over the past 20 years, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation had begun to dominate "the natural factors involved in climate change", he said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml

however, most of this article, from what i understand, says that human caused global warming is a bunch of shit.

can anyone give me some information on this sun spot/global warming topic?

[Richard D]

1. the biggest proponent of this junk

Is Dennis Avery, a total practitioner of junk science. The anti-global warming idiots love to quote him.

[Shoelace]

2. "Don't Blame Sun for Global Warming" (good article)

here's one to read and give to your daughter:

From Sept. 13,'06 - Nat'l Geographic

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060913-sunspots.html

Don't Blame Sun for Global Warming, Study Says
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News

September 13, 2006
Sunspots alter the amount of energy Earth gets from the sun, but not enough to impact global climate change, a new study suggests.

The sun's role in global warming has long been a matter of debate and is likely to remain a contentious topic.

Solar astronomer Peter Foukal of Heliophysics, Inc., in Nahant, Massachusetts, points out that scientists have pondered the link between the sun and Earth's climate since the time of Galileo, the famous 17th-century astronomer.

"There has been an intuitive perception that the sun's variable degree of brightness—the coming and going of sunspots for instance—might have an impact on climate," Foukal said.

Foukal is lead author of a review paper on sunspot intensity appearing in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature.

He says that most climate models—including ones used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—already incorporate the effects of the sun's waxing and waning power on Earth's weather (related images: our stormy star).

But, Foukal said, "this paper says that that particular mechanism , which is most intuitive, is probably not having an impact."

Sunspot Impact Simply Too Small

Sunspots are magnetic disturbances that appear as cooler, dark patches on the sun's surface. The number of spots cycles over time, reaching a peak every 11 years.

The spots' impact on the sun's total energy output is easy to see.

"As it turns out, most of the sun's power output is in the visible range—what we see as brightness," said Henk Spruit, study co-author from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany.

"The sun's brightness varies only because of the blemishes that are also visible directly on pictures: the dark patches called sunspots and the minute bright points called faculae. In terms of brightness changes, in large part, what you see is what you get."


Continued on Next Page >>
(Print this article and give to your daughter - should help some, hopefully)

Then there's the other camp that claims that the whole solar system is experiencing "warming"!
Cosmic Rays no less. Go to realclimate.org, look in their archives to address that issue as well as solar irradiance, etc.

[EST]

3. Sunspots account for less than a one percent change

in the sun's output. Moreover, sunspots vary according to an approximately eleven year cycle while global temperature change shows no such variability.

There was a time when the sun went through a relatively long period, in human terms,with a minimum of sunspots and the earth went through a slight cooling period, resulting in numerous crop failures and starvation.

There is no real disagreement among scientists who are trained and familiar with such things. The only disagreement comes from misinformed or misinformers who have an axe to grind. There is always, when one examines the facts and sources, some conflict of interest to be found in the ranks of contrarians--always.

They lie because it is profitable, one way or another, for them to do so.

[Up2Late]

4. That article is what can only be called "bad journalism" and even calling it journalism is...

...being very kind to it. There are lots of just plain Wrong statements in it has a lot of Red flags for Propaganda B.S.

Like this, see my notes below:

...Most scientists agree that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have contributed to the warming of the planet in the past few decades but have questioned whether a brighter Sun is also responsible for rising temperatures. (1)

To determine the Sun's role in global warming, Dr Solanki's research team measured magnetic zones on the Sun's surface known as sunspots, which are believed to intensify the Sun's energy output.

The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sunspots signalled a cold period - which could last up to 50 years (2) - but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer. The scientists also compared data from ice samples collected during an expedition to Greenland in 1991. The most recent samples contained the lowest recorded levels of beryllium 10 for more than 1,000 years. Beryllium 10 is a particle created by cosmic rays that decreases in the Earth's atmosphere as the magnetic energy from the Sun increases. Scientists can currently trace beryllium 10 levels back 1,150 years (3).

Dr Solanki does not know what is causing the Sun to burn brighter now or how long this cycle would last.

He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself....(4)

Note (1) And yet, this writer is reporting it as fact.

Note (2) This is just Wrong. Sunspot activity rise and fall in an 11 year cycle, this is a very well established fact.

Note (3) Says who? Throwing out this "fact" with out any reference to where this "fact" comes from or any collaborating evidence sounds impressive to the non-scientist, but without any link to a published study or research, most scientists would dismiss it without much thought.

Note (4) These last two statements are full of contradictions, and make almost no sense at all.

The Telegraph is not a credible source for good science. I can't say, without researching it, that this article was meant to confuse people, but it sure look that way.

I wouldn't doubt, that if you Googled some of the people named in this piece, you would eventually find they are linked to the Oil Industrie's "Global Warming is a Myth..." propagandists.

This is a bogus argument and typical of the anti-scientific propagandists who base an argument on one of many factors (that most people don't understand) that must be considered in the total equation.

[greenman3610]

5. sun spots go in 11 year cycles

if they were effection GW, we' see 11 year
swings on the temp graph.
which we don't.

[seasat]

6. Here's something I posted on another forum addresing that.

Here are a few recent articles from the respected Journals Science and Nature. I'm not sure if these are behind the subscription firewall but they are available at most libraries if anyone wants to read them.

P. Foukal1, C. Fröhlich2, H. Spruit3 and T. M. L. Wigley4. 2006. Variations in solar luminosity and their effect on the Earth's climate. Nature. Vol 443. pp 161-166. (LINK)

Variations in the Sun's total energy output (luminosity) are caused by changing dark (sunspot) and bright structures on the solar disk during the 11-year sunspot cycle. The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years. In this Review, we show that detailed analysis of these small output variations has greatly advanced our understanding of solar luminosity change, and this new understanding indicates that brightening of the Sun is unlikely to have had a significant influence on global warming since the seventeenth century. Additional climate forcing by changes in the Sun's output of ultraviolet light, and of magnetized plasmas, cannot be ruled out. The suggested mechanisms are, however, too complex to evaluate meaningfully at present.

J. Laštovička,1 R. A. Akmaev,2 G. Beig,3 J. Bremer,4 J. T. Emmert. ATMOSPHERE:
Global Change in the Upper Atmosphere. Science. Vol. 314. no. 5803. pp. 1253 - 1254. (LINK)

The trends described above form a consistent pattern of global change in the upper atmosphere at heights above 50 km (see arrows in the figure). The upper atmosphere is generally cooling and contracting, and related changes in chemical composition are affecting the ionosphere. The dominant driver of these trends is increasing greenhouse forcing, although there may be contributions from anthropogenic changes of the ozone layer and long-term increase of geomagnetic activity throughout the 20th century. Thus, the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases influence the atmosphere at nearly all altitudes between ground and space, affecting not only life on the surface but also the spacebased technological systems on which we increasingly rely.

Now if they still believe that the warming trend is the result of increased solar irradiance, here's the data.

Sunspot number is currently declining. (LINK)

The solar constant is decreasing (LINK).

Temperature is increasing (LINK).

2005 was the warmest year on record globally (LINK) and, based on preliminary data, 2006 was the warmest year for the US (LINK). (El Nino is definitely an influence in 2006 warming.)

Greenhouse gases are increasing. (LINK) and expected to continue increasing (LINK).

Here's a good primer on the history of the science behind the greenhouse gas theory of global climate change (LINK).

Also, I regularly measure downwelling solar irradiance as part of my research. We compare these measurements to a numerical model and a Licor 1800 to check the calibration of our field instruments. The difference between the model and the Licor is basically noise level. We are using a spectral solar constant that was published in the early 80's. Therefore, if solar irradiance has changed it is below the detection limits of my instruments. Even the variations over the 11 year sunspot cycle are below those limits. Now even a tiny change in solar output can affect global climate but even the most generous research in recent solar irradiance output acknowledges that, at best, it can only account for 30% of the warming trend. Other research has shown either a constant or declining solar output over the last several decades.

Real Climate is a blog run by scientists has numerous postings that go into further detail than I did if you want more information (LINK).

[orleans]

7. thank you for all the links--i've been browsing through them for about

an hour now. and am continuing to click back and forth.

[kestrel91316]

8. Answer: YES But they aren't climatologists. They are

whacko koolaid-drinkin' "journalists". One of them was on Coast-to Coast w/ that moron George Noory (a GW denier par excellence) recently.

Squeaky wheels with a LITTLE bit of knowledge, that they manage to completely misinterpret.