Skeptics - Why is the Earth warming while the radiation we receive from the Sun is getting cooler?

Question

Proof:

"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/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf

News article at:

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

More proof:

"Testing the proposed causal link between cosmic rays and cloud cover", Sloan and Wolfendale, Environ. Res. Lett. 3 (April-June 2008) 024001, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/3/2/024001

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/3/2/024001/erl8_2_024001.html

News article at:

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/opinion/33642

Note that only a few planets are warming, for different reasons. On Mars it's giant dust storms.

Answer 1

Gelatin only want to show tables, but when you look at the data in a graph, it shows a different picture. His input is as shaky as a...well, as a bowl full of jello!

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

Obviously, gelatin is a one trick pony. He assumes a system can only have one input (La Nina), instead of multiple conditions that affect an outcome.

EDIT - now gelatin wants to do away with graphs! The heck with the Windows operating system, we'll go back to DOS. People are visual creatures and that's why we created graphs, to effectively illustrate quantitative relationships. In this case it's temperature over time.

EDIT - Jello, if that's the best argument you have, I'm in good shape. The reason that we plot data is so that we can more easily observe trends or behavior of the data. They are used to understand the behavior of systems, to visualize large sets of data and to help understand many important systems that might not be as easy to understand just by looking at a bunch of numbers. Graphs are a way of making scores of data points manageable and, often, more understandable. Simple as that.

I'm sorry you don't understand that.

Answer 2

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/natur...

The BBC is reporting that they sad the temperature hasn't increased since 1998.

So how about before we go live in caves take a real look at it.

Answer 3

Greenhouse gas warming, caused by emissions from the following sources:

Executive Summary

http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sa...

ES.4 What are the primary carbon sources and sinks

in North America, and how and why are they changing?

The extraction of fossil-fuels and other primary energy sources and their conversion to energy commodities and services, including electricity generation, is the single largest contributor to the North American fossil-fuel source, accounting for approximately 42% of North American fossil emissions in 2003 (Chapter 6 this report).

More than half of electricity produced in North America

(67% in the United States) is consumed in buildings, making

that single use one of the largest factors in North American emissions (Chapter 9 this report).

The transportation sector of North America accounted

for 31% of total North American emissions in 2003, most

(87%) of it from the United States (Chapter 7 this report).

Emissions from North American industry (not including

fossil-fuel mining and processing or electricity

generation) are a relatively small (12%) and declining

component of North America’s emissions (Chapter 8 this

report).

The remaining portion (approximately 15%) of North

American fossil-fuel emissions includes those from other

sectors. This includes natural gas and other non-electrical

fossil energy used in residential and commercial buildings

and fuels used in agriculture.

Answer 4

Bob,

Dust storms on Mars cool the planet by up to 10 degrees, they don't cause warming.  

Also, according to you and Dana, the sun hasn't varied in it's output during the last 30 years.  So how can you make that claim?  

Only a few planets are warming because only a few of them have atmospheres that can be influenced by the sun.  You need an atmosphere to have a greenhouse effect.  The gas giants are barely influenced by the sun because they create their own heat internally.  Plus we can't see through their atmospheres to measure the exact temperature.

Ken, it seems like you only have an internet education.  We all know how accurate the information on the internet is.

Answer 5

Why do you believe that the sun is cooling? I thought that in "Zillions" of years it would get very warm and explode.

Answer 6

Gee, i heard just the other day that it was cosmic rays, not the sun, that are causing global warming. And apparently we're running through a bunch of them lately. You AGW people really shold get your stories straight.

Answer 7

why are greenhouse gases not warming the planet???

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/natur...

Answer 8

I see you found the new Sloan & Wolfendale study too.  That was quite interesting and should put to rest (at least among honest people with a high school or higher level of scientific understanding) yet another failed hypothesis on what's causing the warming.

The earth is not warming because more energy is coming in (as shown by your links), but because less energy is escaping back out into space.  It's a very simply long understood principle of physics, yet the pseudo-skeptics around here are adamantly opposed to accepting what makes sense.  Instead, they'll continue on their quest of "anything but humans" to explain away the warming.

I wonder what jello's next fall-back position will be when the numbers on his table start rising again (as La Nina weakens)?

Edit:

Mark Anthony - if you're an "expert" on time studies and trends, maybe you'd post some links to your journal articles?  And then explain if the global average temperature trend is rising or not.

Answer 9

But the Earth isn't warming Bob.

The graphs from NASA clearly show that the temperatures peaked in 1998 and have been on the decline for the last 10 years.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

Now we're being told that La Nina, not co2 is responsible for the change in the climate.

This is the proof that climate change is natural, not man made, as man cannot just cause change to one ocean in just one hemisphere.

[Edit] Richard - Graphs can be manipulated to get the viewer to come to the conclusion the author desires.  One axis can be longer or shorter to make the temperatures appear they are warming faster or not at all.

Raw data never lies.

Tell me you don't believe in pictures over raw data.

[Edit] Richard - Please, next you'll be telling us that you would rather see the data presented in cartoon form because that eaiser for you to understand.

Answer 10

Being a expert on time studies and using data myself to study trends, I can tell you this.  You would be amazed on how data can be manipulated to produce the result you want. The neat thing, you can prove it.   That's why we have, and need skeptics

Answer 11

Mars has been experiencing global dust storms since we have been able to observe the planet.  Nobody predicted dust devils on Mars, they are a product of heat, and not a cause.  Venus is warmer than current accounting methods would predict.  Let's be honest, these planetary systems, like ours are too complicated for anyone to pretend they understand them completely.

Meanwhile back here on earth, in the past 6 months Aqua HSB data has indicated no increase in global humidity, and Argo ocean temperature data indicates 0'c increase in global ocean temperatures.  Grace observations indicate Arctic climate is dictated by ocean currents (salinity) and not atmospheric forcing.  These are observations not expected in the AGW hypothesis.

In 2005, Dr J Willis and lead researcher Dr J Hansen claimed they had it all figured out, "the numbers fit".  Then 2 years later after painstaking research, we get contradictory information.  It's no wonder researchers at Texas A&M released a study, published in the journal Risk Analysis, that indicates the more educated and informed on climate change a person is, the less likely they care about scientists conclusions.

Scientists, by claiming they know more than they actually do are eroding the confidence we had previously placed in them.  It's a troubling trend that needs to be addressed, unless of course scientist's target market for their information are those people who only read the comics.

Answer 12

jello make up your mind did the earth start cooling in 1998 and continued this downward trend for the past 5 years?

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

that data is using is to detailed you can not use monthly data to check long term trends without doing something to reduce random errors..

so you should use this data

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

and notice the 5 year trend is increasing.

Answer 13

The 'skeptics' can't seem to decide if the planet has stopped warming or if the Sun is causing the warming.

Here's a conundrum - if the Sun was causing the warming over the past 30 years (or 20, if you want to stop at 1998), why did the warming suddenly stop?  Solar irradiance remained constant on average from 1978-1998 and 1998-2007.  There's no reason for the warming to suddenly have stopped if it was due to the Sun.  You can't have it both ways.

Of course, both arguments are wrong.  The 'global warming has stopped' argument relies on confusing weather (1998 El Nino, current La Nina) with climate, and ignoring the long-term trend, which continues upward.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

The solar warming argument relies on ignoring the data, because not only has solar irradiance not increased over the past 30 years, but no scientific study has ever attributed more than one-third of the warming over that period to the Sun, and most attribute just 0-10% to the solar effects

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

Some 'skeptics' have started moving away from these flawed arguments to the galactic cosmic ray (indirect solar effect) theory, but this theory also has some serious fundamental flaws.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

With regards to solar warming, Ray Pierrehumbert at RealClimate put it best:

"That's a coffin with so many nails in it already that the hard part is finding a place to hammer in a new one."

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...

Answer 14

Is the Earth still warming?

If you go by balloon and satellite measurement of the lower troposphere (the lowest part of the atmosphere), it follows solar activity much better than the surface temperature measuring stations.

http://www.ocs.orst.edu/ats210/pp5.GIF

http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headline...