Dean's World

A Russian coldenist speaks:

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.
...
The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions—a point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.

Sorokhtin makes some other points, such that the CO2 concentration might affect atmospheric volatility but not temperature, and that the oft-mentioned CO2 lag in historical temperature cycles may be explained by greater CO2 emissions from warmer oceans.

I found this gray-body emissivity argument interesting as well. Is it even possible for CO2 to warm the planet?

Overall, I have to be a bit suspicious of the climate change industry. Yes, there are lots of scientists involved, but there are lots of ideologically-driven environmentalists involved too, and billions in funding are at stake. It still bothers me that James Hansen once worked on a project that ascribed global cooling to manmade pollutants; that really makes climate change activism look like a solution in search of a problem.

Guess we'll find out who's right in a few years.

(link)

Dishman (mail):

11 and 200 years are known cycles. I've seen evidence of additional cycles out past a thousand years.

The Sun has a time constant of somewhere over half a million years. If nuclear fusion were to stop today, the reduced solar output would not exceed the noise floor for about 5 centuries.

Somehow, in spite of that, people keep trying to see the Sun as a constant. It's not.

I don't know what the truth is, but I'm pretty sure the IPCC is lying. We're about to find out.

1.3.2008 3:52pm

Sandi (www):

Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University, VA has some interesting calculations. His model uses magnetic fields, and calculates how they are affected by instabilities in solar plasma.

Ehrlich's model shows that whilst most of these oscillations cancel each other out, some reinforce one another and become long-lived temperature variations. The favoured frequencies allow the sun's core temperature to oscillate around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years. Ehrlich says that random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other.

These two timescales are instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with Earth's ice ages: for the past million years, ice ages have occurred roughly every 100,000 years. Before that, they occurred roughly every 41,000 years.

1.3.2008 6:17pm

If Ehrlich is right, then the second question on AGW is "Will it be enough?"

1.3.2008 7:25pm

Arnold Harris (mail):

I always knew I really wanted to live in Costa Rica.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

1.3.2008 8:51pm

willem:

David Whitehouse has some interesting observations to add.

1.4.2008 3:29am

Hank Barnes (mail) (www):

Hey, sometimes it gets hot, sometimes it gets cold. BFD

HankB

1.4.2008 2:08pm

For most of us, the question won't be "How cold will it be?", but rather "How thick will the ice be where I live?"

1.4.2008 3:26pm

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