Is global warming due to the fact that the earth is 3 million miles closer to the sun in the stellar cycle?

Question

The earth revolves in an elliptical orbit around the sun which changes from time to time as shown by five "ice ages" for the earth during it's existance. Following each ice age the earth warms due to it proximity to the sun. Therefore, the closer to the sun the warmer the earth becomes as a natural cycle.

Answer 1

Actually...that isn't quite accurate...it wasn't due to the proximity to the sun it was due to the lack of sun spot activity.  Read on...

And I don't believe in global warming...because:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body pushing for laws that would limit man-made carbon emissions through a series of ultra-draconian regulations aimed primarily at developed nations, has a dirty little secret: its scientists have fudged their data to make the global warming picture look worse than it actually is.

That's what Douglas J. Keenan, an obvious global warming denier who bothered to check the documentation used by the IPCC's chief climatologist, Dr. P. D. Jones in the IPCC's latest report.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/klau...

RSS Satellite data for Jan08: 2nd coldest January for the planet in 15 years

4/022008

UPDATE - see new graph of global ∆T for the past year below. There has been a global drop in temperature of 0.63 degrees Centigrade in the past 12 months.

Of course we already have had a heads up from all the wire reports around the world talking about the significant winter weather events that have occurred worldwide in the last month, but until now, there hasn’t been a measure of how the planet was doing for the winter of 2007/2008.

Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa just posted the latest MSU (Microwave Sounder  Unit) data.

January posted a -.08°C near global anomaly between -70S and 82.5N latitude (the viewshed of the satellite sounder). That makes it the coldest month since January 2000, and the 2nd coldest January for the planet in 15 years. Both northern and southern hemispheres posted negative anomalies of -.120°C and -.038°C respectively, happening for the first time since January 2000.

Look at the article for the table.

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/200...

Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh

Phil Chapman | April 23, 2008

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.



All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/sto...

Great question to get to answer...!

Answer 2

There is a common thread in denier theories lack of facts

(a) The laughable concept that scientist don't know about the eliptical orbit of the Earth, Please.

wrenched:

(b) canadafreepress & whatupwiththat, not even slightly believable.

(c) Sunspots, what rubbish, if you check some real facts you would have found out the the new sunspot started only this year not mar 07 and although not many should be expected for at least the year there have been quite a few already, as you mention SOHO here is a link.

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATE...

the denier trick of picking quite day still images is getting to be well known the above movie shows 6 quite large ones.

And of course there are recorded sunspot numbers which show even though we are just starting a new cycle there are spots there already.

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/ftpsu...

Sorry to ruin the fun, with facts...

wrenched:

Were do you get this sunspot fiction the "ngdc" link above has the 2008 sunspot numbers and they are much higher than 1 in january and 1 last monday.

The monthly averages for 2008

(Jan - 3.4) (Feb - 2.1) (Mar - 9.3) (Apr - 2.9) (May - 2.9)

This is normal for the start of a new cycle, late march saw spikes over 30 in the spot numbers, The numbers you quote are fiction like much of the denier banter.

Answer 3

No.  Scientists have ruled out solar and orbital cycles as the cause of the current warming.  See the link below for further details.

Answer 4

the sun's magnetic field and the solar wind modulates the amount of high energy cosmic radiation that the earth receives. This in turn affects low altitude cloud cover and how much water vapor there is in the atmosphere and thus regulates the climate.

Here are some facts about Earth's climate history.

<EDIT>

The earth's surface does not exist in a static, unchanging "natural" condition interrupted only by the work of humans, but instead it is a dynamic system of which humans are a part. Knowledge about changes to the Earth's surface and the underlying processes that induce them has enormous impact on how society responds to these changes and, ultimately, the cost of responding to change. USGS Global Change Research activities strive to achieve a whole-system understanding of the interrelationships among earth surface processes, ecological systems, and human activities. Activities of the program focus on documenting, analyzing, and modeling the character of past and present environments and the geological, biological, hydrological, and geochemical processes involved in environmental change so that future environmental changes and impacts can be anticipated.

Answer 5

Nope.  Scientists have PROVEN (over and over) global warming is not due to increased solar radiation.  We measure that often.  One recent paper:

"Recent oppositely directed trends in solar

climate forcings and the global mean surface

air temperature", Lockwood and Frolich (2007), Proc. R. Soc. A

doi:10.1098/rspa.2007.1880

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/pro...

News article at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6290228.st...