Core Essays

09 October 2009

What???? The BBC Admits that the Man-Made Global Warming Issue is Debatable?

A story by Paul Hudson of BBC News entitled What happened to global warming? takes note that for the last 11 years there has been no increase in global temperatures.  They note that man-made global warming skeptics said the lack of temperature increases was due to solar cycles.  The believers countered with a study published by the Royal Society that claimed that solar influences could not account for the late 20th century warming.

The UK Met Office Hadley Centre claims it has incorporated solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, along with many other factors, so all factors affecting the climate are accounted for.  They say the warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.  They claim that from 2110 to 2015, at least half the years will be warmer than 1998!  This is a firm prediction and they should be held to it.  After all, they claim to have accounted for all factors in their models, so these model predictions will have to be right.  If they are wrong, well then they must not have accounted for all the factors!  Apparently, they only very recently accounted for all of the factors, since they had been predicting warmer temperatures than we have seen since 1998.

Professor Don Easterbrook of Western Washington University said the oceans are cooling and the cooler period will last nearly 30 years.  The oceans cover 70% of the Earth's surface and they hold most of the heat content of the Earth's surface.  This prediction is clearly at odds with that of the Hadley Centre.

Professor Mojib Latif, an IPCC author of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany, says we may be in a worldwide cooling period that may last 10 to 20 years.  Then, he thinks, the overwhelming force of man-made global warming will take over.

Solar scientist Piers Corbyn of Weatheraction thinks solar charged particles (the solar wind) impart much more energy to the Earth than is currently believed.  He claims the affect on temperatures is quite large.  Later this month, he is making a presentation on this belief at a scientific conference in London.  Weatheraction is a long-range weather prediction company.

I have suggested that some warming of the Earth occurs due to the solar wind in a couple of earlier posts in this blog and that the scale of this effect needs to be evaluated.  This effect is different than the solar electromagnetic field strength effect that governs the flux of cosmic rays entering the Earth's atmosphere.  However, the solar wind and the solar electromagnetic field are both greatest when solar activity is high, as it was in the late 20th century.  It is interesting that while the solar irradiance undergoes relatively small changes in the solar cycles 21, 22, and 23, the solar flare index or solar wind in the 23rd weaker cycle is much lower than in the two earlier cycles.  See the plot of these three solar cycles below.  The lower solar flare index means there is a lower flux of charged particles reaching the Earth and their energy or heating effect will decrease in such a weak solar cycle.  The percentage decrease will be more than the decrease in solar light and solar infra-red radiation.  If the amount of energy transferred by the particles is significant, this would cause a considerable variation of that energy.  Presumably, this is what Piers Corbyn will be claiming and proving in his presentation.  It will be interesting to learn more about this.

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