Global Warming Standstill Confirmed - But How Long Will It Last?

It is good news that the authors of the PNAS paper Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998 - 2008 (Kaufmann et al. 2011) recognise that there has been no global temperature increase since 1998. Even after the standstill appears time and again in peer-reviewed scientific studies, many commentators still deny its reality. We live in the warmest decade since thermometer records began about 150 years ago, but it hasn't gotten any warmer for at least a decade.

The researchers tweak an out-of-date climate computer model and cherry-pick the outcome to get their desired result. They do not use the latest data on the sun's influence on the Earth, rendering their results of academic interest only.

They blame China's increasing coal consumption that they say is adding particles into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight and therefore cool the planet. The effect of aerosols and their interplay with other agents of combustion is a major uncertainty in climate models. Moreover, despite China's coal burning, data indicate that in the past decade the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere has not increased.

The researchers seek to explain the temperature standstill between 1998 and 2008. They say that the global temperature has increased since then.

This is misleading. There was an El Nino in 2010 (natural cyclic warming) but even that did not raise temperatures above 1998. In fact the standstill has continued to 2010 and 2011 appears to be on course to be a cooler year than any of the preceding ten years.

Tweaking computer models like this proves nothing. The real test is in the real world data. The temperature hasn't increased for over a decade. For there to be any faith in the underlying scientific assumptions the world has to start warming soon, at an enhanced rate to compensate for it being held back for a decade.

Despite what the authors of this paper state after their tinkering with an out-of-date climate computer model, there is as yet no convincing explanation for the global temperature standstill of the past decade.

Either man-made and natural climatic effects have conspired to completely offset the warming that should have occurred due to greenhouse gasses in the past decade, or our estimation of the ‘climate sensitivity' to greenhouse gasses is too large.

This is not an extreme or ‘sceptic' position but represents part of the diversity of scientific opinion presented to the IPCC that is seldom reported.

e-mail: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.org
Source: http://www.thegwpf.org/the-climate-record.html

Sun "Sheds Its Skin Like a Snake"
by Dr David Whitehouse

Astronomers have discovered a key fact required to understand the sun's 11-year cycle of activity. Sunspots and flares on the sun's surface follow the cycle, but expelled gas clouds do not. It seems that these ejections trail the sunspot peak - they peaked in 2002, two years after sunspots. The expelled gas takes away the sun's old magnetic skin allowing a new one to emerge to start a new cycle.

The sun's 11-year cycle of activity - as recognised by the coming and going of sunspots - has been known since 1843, when Heinrich Schwabe, a German astronomer, noticed the pattern. Years later the activity was recognised as being of magnetic origin by George Ellery Hale, the American astronomer, who, in 1908, saw that sunspots were intensely magnetic. Since then many theories have been put forward to explain the solar rhythm. The accepted theory is that the sunspot cycle is a consequence of rotation and convection inside the sun. The fact that the sun's outer layers are bubbling, and that the sun rotates faster at the equator than the poles, and faster on the inside than on the surface, results in a solar dynamo that, over 11 years, becomes increasingly wound up. So at some stage during the magnetic cycle the sun has to somehow shed its old, contorted magnetic skin, and allow a newer, less troubled one, to emerge.

Source: strak.com The Soho (Solar Heliospheric Observatory) satellite may have obtained evidence about how the sun does it. Eight years of observing gas eruptions - Coronal Mass Ejections (CME's) - show that they are removing the sun's old magnetic field bit by bit, first from one pole and the equator, and then the other pole. "The sun is like a snake that sheds its skin," says Nat Gopalswamy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, author of a report in the Astrophysical Journal. "In this case, it's a magnetic skin. The process is long, drawn-out and it's pretty violent. More than a thousand coronal mass ejections, each carrying billions of tons of gas from the polar regions, are needed to clear the old magnetism away. But when it's all over the sun's magnetic stripes are running in the opposite direction."

"This analysis of nearly eight years of CME data is a big step forward in making sense of space weather," says Joseph Gurman, NASA Project Scientist for Soho. "By identifying the solar origin of these events with CME's of different speeds and appearances, and at different latitudes, it improves our capability to predict space weather that can affect the earth, at different phases of the solar activity cycle."

Dr David Whitehouse is the science editor for the BBC News Online
Source: news.bbc.co.uk 24 November 2003

The Sun: A Biography
Published December 2004 by John Wiley
Paperback December 2005

The Sun: A Biography covers a remarkable array of subjects from the historical to the scientific, the mythological to the personal. David Whitehouse leads off with a story about Air Force One losing touch with the outside world while crossing the Pacific Ocean in 1984. The culprit? Intense "space weather" associated with a string of sunspots in Active Region 4474. The ways in which the Sun can affect the modern world have become increasingly complex, but its role as a central heavenly body (in more ways than one) forms the foundation of the book.

Jumping back and forth in time, the book balances a topical arrangement with a distinct chronological order. The interlocking narrative first becomes apparent somewhat incongruously in the form of interstitial images that appear between each chapter. Whitehouse leads with subjects such as "the Goldilocks star" and a brief history of the universe, but the images that separate the chapters include a Celtic glyph depicting an eclipse and a relief showing "the four-pointed disk of Shamesh." By the time archaeological records get addressed in the text, we've already seen pictures that have introduced the topic.

A rich history of the Sun's influence on humanity extends back for millennia, and Whitehouse lavishes loving attention on everybody from the Babylonians to the Chinese, from the Irish to the Aztecs. Once we get past the Scientific Revolution, a plethora of observations bolster the central story, which continues to explore human understanding of our parent star.

We learn about Thomas Harriot's 1610 drawing of sunspots, Giovanni Cassini's highly accurate 1672 estimate of the Sun's distance, John Winthrop's 1761 observations of the transit of Venus, the first complete telling of the remarkable and tragic story of Richard Carrington following his 1859 recording of a visible solar flare - the list goes on and on. Whitehouse tracks the divergent events and ideas with the dogged determination of a scientific sleuth resolved to turn up every available clue about the Sun and its history. Characterized by lengthy asides and digressions, Whitehouse's style nonetheless manages to entertain and engage without losing the core narrative. In many ways, The Sun feels like a reference book, yet it reads quite easily and enjoyably.

Although history plays an important role, the science and understanding of the Sun holds center stage, and a staggering amount of current science gets worked into the account: thermonuclear fusion, sure, but also the solar dynamo, space weather, and stellar evolution, to name just a few.

Despite the lengthiness of his book, Whitehouse manages brief and accurate explanations of complex topics. For example, a few simple sentences connect the magnetic loops of material (seen in ultraviolet and X-ray images of the Sun) with sunspots seen in visible light: "In the regions of high magnetic field, the outward flow of energy is impeded and a cooler region ensues where the loops appear, often in pairs. Welcome to a sunspot." It's hard to get more succinct than that.

Whitehouse, a longtime BBC News Online science editor and European Internet Journalist of the Year in 2002, makes his American debut with The Sun (an earlier "biography" of the Moon has not appeared in the United States). If he has the wherewithal to maintain the momentum established in this book, we can expect great things in the future. He has provided us with a spectacularly detailed written portrait of the Sun: rife with historical and scientific details, a story materializes about not just the detailed nature of Earth's parent star, but also about the process by which science proceeds and the methodology of discovery. The Planetarian.

Comments by Dr David Whitehouse on the PNAS paper Kaufmann et al.

embargoed until 4 July, 8pm (GMT)

Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998 - 2008.