Will a Warmer Earth Really be a Drier Earth?

According to a recent Popular Science video and article, a 2⁰C increase in temperature will cause the Earth to be a lot drier Earth, but one which also will have increased “extreme precipitation” events, such as the National Climate Assessment says has occurred “in every region of the contiguous states since the 1950s.”  It claims that “droughts and heat waves have also intensified, as is evident in California, which in recent years has seen less rain, drier soil, and the spread of wildfires.”  The United Nations ascribes to this same viewpoint.

It fails to note that for a few hundred years prior to 200 years ago, California was also drier than it has been in the last couple hundred years.  It does note that the world’s surface is 70% ocean.  It fails to note that a 2⁰C temperature increase would cause more water to evaporate from the oceans, which has to be cycled back to the surface as more rain and snow.  It fails to note that much of the warmer land on the Earth’s surface is covered with rainforest, which is hardly dry.  It fails to note that the driest land areas on the Earth are those in very cold regions near the poles.  Is it not logical that warming the polar regions might make them less dry?  And one must not forget that this is the water planet with 71% of its surface covered with water, both ocean and fresh water.

The video and article state that:

“The last time the Earth was as warm as it is now was over 11,000 years ago. Oceans covers 70% of our planet, and it takes a lot of energy to heat up that much water, not to mention the air and land. So a two-degree increase in the average global temperature means that temperature increases across the board are a lot more than 2°C.”

This statement ignores the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warming, and the Minoan Warm Period, which were as warm, or warmer, than the present moment -- a moment brief as yet compared to those much longer periods and one not yet clearly established as climate rather than just weather.  It was not observed that when California was previously drier than in the last couple hundred years, the Little Ice Age was underway.

And what does that foolish third sentence in the quote above mean?  The average is the across the board temperature.  Yes, if the Earth were to warm, the warming would be greater in some areas than other areas.  There is a tendency for the warming to be greater over land areas and to be greater where the temperature is colder than where it is warmer.  The tropics would not warm up as much as would areas of land at higher latitudes because water evaporation tends to limit the temperature increase.  However, the third sentence in the quote does not say this.  It is nonsense.

There are many natural cycles that cause the climate to change.  As I have shown in numerous articles on this blog, the physics used to claim catastrophic effects due to man-made global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions is very wrong.  There is as yet no empirical or experimental evidence that further increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause significant global warming.  It may well actually cause an insignificant cooling for reasons I have discussed a number of times.

What we do know for sure is that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will greatly aid plant growth, making it easier for us to feed a growing human population.  Unlike many of the anti-human proponents of the idea that man is destroying the Earth, I think a growing human population is a good thing, at least if we can see to it that most of them are free to use their minds and free to be productive.

Apparently, the increased rain events noted in this foolish article and video are to be the precipitation of anhydrous water, which will create terrible droughts.

Is it perhaps the case that part of the reason the Industrial Revolution got underway when it did is because the Little Ice Age was ending?  Warming on Earth is usually a good thing for mankind, not a bad thing.  But note that those hawking alarmist and catastrophic man-made effects on climate love to start the reference clock at the end of the Little Ice Age.  We are still warming as a result of the end of that cooling period primarily due to the large heat capacity of our oceans.

Thanks to Prof. Howard “Cork” Hayden for bringing this article and video to my attention.

Update on 12 June 2018:  Prof. Howard "Cork" Hayden's The Energy Advocate for June 2018 has a brief discussion of a paper by J. Warren Beck, et al., "A 550,000-year record of East Asian monsoon rainfall from ¹⁰Be in loess, " Science 360, May 25, 2018, that shows that higher rainfall results from higher temperatures.

An Unsettling Removal of Atmospheric CO2 by Plankton

Adam C. Martiny and a crew of mostly researchers from the University of California - Irvine have just published a study in Nature Geoscience that indicates that phytoplankton in warm ocean waters use up far more of the so-called greenhouse gas CO2 than had been previously thought.  The overall result is that about twice as much CO2 is taken up by plant life in the oceans as had been previously thought.

Many textbooks and practitioners of ocean biogeochemistry have long thought that phytoplankton, their excretions, and dissolved nutrients in the ocean interior maintained a ratio of carbon to nitrogen to phosphorus of 106:16:1.  This is known as the Redfield ratio, which Alfred Redfield established in 1934.

Martiny, et al., showed experimentally that this ratio varies considerably in the oceans, mostly as a function of latitude.  They observed carbon enrichment in the phytoplankton as high as 195:28:1 in warm, nutrient-deprived low-latitude areas with closed-loop circular currents.  In warm, nutrient-rich upwelling areas, the ratio was 137:18:1.  In cold, nutrient-rich high-latitude areas, the ratio was 78:13:1.

Some models had shown the possibility of such variations of the Redfield ratio and some field and laboratory measurements had shown differences with the Redfield ratio.  But, this large sample study should put that persistent ratio into retirement.  The settled science has another unsettling reality check!

I am of the opinion that while the first little bit of CO2 may contribute to warming, additional CO2 with common water vapor concentrations, does not cause significant Earth surface temperature change.  Insofar as it does, it is likely to act as a coolant to the surface, even as it raises the temperature of air at altitudes above the main water vapor concentration top.  This is because the much ignored absorption of solar insolation by added CO2 is greater than is appreciated and this cools the surface.

The IPCC claim of catastrophic CO2-induced warming depended upon an assumption that increased CO2 had caused all of the warming since the end of the Little Ice Age (or the dawn of the Industrial Age) and a posited positive feedback by increased water vapor due to the warming said to be caused by increased CO2.  The assumption that CO2 had caused all the warming since the Little Ice Age was extremely questionable and therefor a likely exaggeration.  The positive feedback due to increased water vapor due to warming is looking more and more to be a mild negative feedback, making the Earth's climate a lot less unstable.

Increasing the partial pressure of CO2 over the oceans will cause them to absorb more CO2, which is another negative feedback mechanism.  Now we find out that increased CO2 is used up by ocean phytoplankton in greater quantities than previously thought and that the warmer the ocean the more CO2 is used up.  This again is a negative feedback mechanism.

The Earth and its ecosystems do not seem to want to cooperate with the catastrophic predictions of the settled science of the Earth's climate based on man-made global warming.  It appears they have a proclivity toward much more stability.  Although we must note that this means that a more stable climate creates a most unstable status for the settled science!

Is the Sun Betraying the Catastrophic AGW Hypothesis?

The sun undergoes a solar cycle of sunspot activity of about 11 years.  The comparative intensity of cycles varies and the sunspot minimum between cycles may vary in number of sunspots and in the time it takes for sunspots to start reappearing.  Usually, the sunspot minimum lasts about 1 year.  Sunspots are cool spots on the sun's surface, but more sunspots means that the sun has thrown off more energy.  Thus, more sunspots result in more radiation being received by the Earth.  Sunspot activity has been lower than usual for some time now.

Sunspots are generated by magnetic loops that form deep inside the sun and migrate outward through the surface in a burst of energy.  This leaves the cool spot on the surface called a sunspot.  Sunspot activity is affected by two large conveyor belts of gas that cycle through the sun's interior and out through its surface carrying material and magnetic fields.  This cycle has an average period of 40 years.  David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, recently made incorrect predictions that the sun would return to normal activity.  Now he is reporting that the conveyor belt flow across the sun's surface has been speeding up since 2004.  Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson have determined that the internal flows of matter and magnetic fields have slowed down greatly.  The slow internal speeds and the fast exterior speeds are not understood by the solar models used by Hathaway to make his predictions that the sun would soon return to vigorous activity.

Sunspot activity slowed rapidly in late 2007 as the sun went into its solar minimum between active cycles.  2008 was expected to be a year of low sunspot activity, but it was free of sunspots 73% of the time, which was the lowest level of activity observed since the 1913 minimum with 85% sunspot-free time.  Hathaway predicted that 2009 would be a very active sunspot year.  Nothing happened until December 2009, when a large group of sunspots emerged.  The new cycle has finally started, but with much less activity than expected.

William Livingston, of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, and Matt Penn have found that the average strength of the sunspot magnetic fields has decreased greatly since 1995.  That is the same year that significant global warming stopped according to Phil Jones, the disgraced former head of the Climate Research Group at the University of East Anglia and a long-time leader of the catastrophic AGW advocates.  Livingston claims that if the decrease in magnetic field strength in the sunspots continues, in five years those fields will not be strong enough to form sunspots at all!

Michael Lockwood, professor of space environmental physics at the University of Reading in England, has used the concentrations of isotopes of elements in ice cores and tree rings to find periods of similar solar inactivity over the last few thousand years.  He found 24 such events.  In two of these cases, the sunspot activity was nearly nil for decades.  In only one case did the sunspot activity come back to record levels.  In most cases, the sunspot activity remained low.  This implies that the chances are high that the high level of sunspot activity that characterized most of the 1900s is over.  That was also the period over which most of the warming claimed by the AGW alarmists occurred.

Lockwood also says that the unusually cold winter in Europe in 2009 - 2010 was likely due to the solar inactivity.  He bases this on records going back to 1650.  In 2008, Judith Lean of the Naval Research Laboratory published a paper showing that high solar activity has a disproportionate warming effect upon northern Europe.  I would expect both of these findings to be because the climate of northern Europe is highly dependent upon the Gulf Stream, whose temperature is dependent upon solar warming of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.

If the sunspot magnetic fields continue to decrease in strength, sunspots may not be able to form by 2015 and we may be in for something like the Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715, during which sunspots nearly disappeared.  The effect in northern Europe was colder than usual winters and an average annual temperature drop of about 1 to 2C.  The Maunder Minimum caused one of the worst segments of the Little Ice Age.  Life in that time became notably more difficult.

These two articles from the Washington Post to which I have linked were written by Stuart Clark, who has a Ph. D. in astrophysics and wrote the book The Sun Kings.  These articles were first published in The New Scientist, where he frequently writes.  It is refreshing to find articles honestly presented in the Washington Post which question the idea that man's emissions of CO2 are about to boil the planet.

UAH Satellite Temperature Readings in 9-Year Decline

As we have observed, the land surface temperature record is unreliable and biased upward by the elimination of rural stations, the bad siting of most stations, and the application of adjustments to the raw temperature readings which create an artificial rapid temperature increase bias.  The UAH satellite temperature record showed a much weaker late 20th Century temperature increase than did the unreliable land surface temperature record.  For the period from 2001 to 2009, the atmospheric CO2 concentration continued to increase as shown by the black line in the plot above.  The UN IPCC AR4 climate models all predict a continuation of the late 20th Century temperature increase into this period based on this increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.  The satellite temperature record is the red-blue line and the linear trend line is the green line.  The trend line is showing a 0.84C decrease of temperature per century.  Of course, the longer term trend line of temperature since the end of the Little Ice Age has been positive.

Dr. Syun Akasofu presented the temperature trend and the decadal oscillations of the global temperature superimposed upon the longer linear trend line using the global temperature data since 1880 and up to 2000.  The linear trend line for that period is projected back into the very late Little Ice Age and forward.  The graph indicates where the temperature had been measured to be through 2008 and the IPCC AR4 report of 2007 prediction out to the year 2100 is shown.  This graph was presented at the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, New York, March 2009.  The pink area is the UN IPCC range of predictions, which are proving to be too high.  This is not surprising given that they were a projection themselves largely based on a time from the bottom of the last cooling temperature oscillation and the maximum of the warming oscillation of the late 20th Century.  Such climate predictions are incredibly foolish.

The upper graph of temperature is basically that between the end of the yellow box area to the present, showing a slight temperature decline.  This decline is consistent with the indicated temperature oscillations superimposed on the long term linear trend line since the end of the Little Ice Age in the Akasofu graph.  Of course, there is no certainty that the linear long term warming rate from 1880 to 2000 will be maintained into the future, since the natural forces causing this warming trend are not well-understood and they have been known to frequently change direction in the past.  But, it is a more reasonable guess than that of the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, whose science we know to be wrong on steroids.

More Hockey Stick Temperature Data

I found the short version of J. Storrs Hall's history of temperature in the the Greenland ice from Watts Up with That?  I am going to present a shorter version here with my comments, but it is worth looking at the original version, which also goes further back in the history of the Earth.  Meanwhile, let us all be very sure that we have a solid understanding of the relatively recent steady and stable climate provided to us by beneficent natural forces prior to man's industrial age, in which man acquired the capability to kill the Earth and promptly set out to do so.  Yes, we all on board with Obama and so many leaders of governments all over the world gathered in Copenhagen who are only too happy to lay down the law and restrict our energy use for the good of the Earth.  ......Good, you know me well enough to know that the last couple of sentences were tongue in cheek, mimicking the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming nuts!

At the Foresight Institute, J. Storrs Hall had some interesting graphs made from NOAA ice core data (Alley, R.B. 2000. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.)

Let us look at the recent history of this Greenland ice core data and note how stable the temperature was prior to 1840 during the Little Ice Age.

Note the unique rise from 1840 to about 1880.  This is a terribly sudden rise.  Now just as Mann and Briffa look at their bristlecone and tree ring data sets with flat temperature histories in much of this same period and then append the land surface instrumental measurement data to the late 20th Century as enhanced by the urban heat island effect to create a similar hockey stick set of temperature data, we examine this data in the same mindset.  Well, clearly the early industrial age, though limited to Britain mostly at that time, with the U.S. and Germany as minor players, was very effective in altering the world's climate!  Shame on those Brits!  It's really their fault.  They should pay us punitive taxes!  Indeed, the Brits owe everyone in the whole world.

We should note that there has been a further temperature rise in fits and starts after 1900 of about another 0.5 C.  Dare we look further back in history as seen by Greenland ice?  Awwww......sure, why not.  We are intrepid explorers here!

Hmm.....You mean before the Little Ice Age there was a warm period which was much warmer than it was in 1900?  It was even warmer than now!  Who woulda thunk?  And look at that awful temperature rise from 900 AD to 1025 AD of 1.7 C.  What do you suppose those people coming out of the Dark Ages in Europe did to cause that?  Were they really roasting that many Christian heretics in bonfires?  Was it due to all the blacksmiths hammering out armor and making swords?  I guess whatever they were doing must have stopped in about 1025 AD.  Maybe they noted the fact that their activities had caused man-made global warming.  I bet they all got together in Copenhagen and signed a treaty to burn less wood and charcoal!  Apparently, after that, it got colder and everyone was really happy again!  Man warming the Earth being such an awful bad thing and all.

 

Dare we look still further back?  Of course, we are all fearless here!

Oh my!  It was as warm (at least in Greenland) from about 2500 BC to 500 AD as it is now!  What on earth were those Romans and Greeks and Persians and Indians and Chinese doing then to cause those high temperatures?  Oh, and how come there was ice on Greenland at all?  How dare the ice in Greenland not have melted in 1200 BC when it was about 2.2 C warmer than now.  Al Gore, the inventor of the internet, says it should melt when that warm and flood the Earth with sea levels 20 feet higher than now.

J. Storrs Hall keeps going back and shows us what we really should worry about.  Namely, the Earth has had a real fascination with ice ages in earlier times.  He reminds us, as I have in the past, that if you want to worry about climate change, worry about the way natural forces tend to give the Earth many an ice age.  We should be very thankful it is warm.  Of course, if it were as warm as it was from 2500 BC to 500 AD, we might actually have good reason to be happy.  After all , man made some pretty good advances in that time, when according to Obama and Gore, man should have been too miserable to function.  He should have been hiding deep in his cool caves.

So, Obama and Gore, the UN, and all those European leaders, and the reluctant Indians and Chinese are all sitting down and trying to put the blacksmiths out of work.  If they put enough blacksmiths out of work, do you suppose they can bring on the return of the Little Ice Age?  Wouldn't that be just grand?

Medieval Warming to Little Ice Age

If the warming of the late 20th Century had not come to an end, what kind of catastrophe were we headed for? Apparently one similar to the Medieval and Roman Warmings. Well, what does Ian Plimer in his wonderful book Heaven and Earth have to say about that?

The Medieval Warming period from 900 to 1300 was a period of great human advances in Europe, China, and Angkor Wat in southeast Asia. Humans generally prospered and were able to more easily feed and cloth themselves. As a result, they had enough time and resources to be able to undertake the building of cities, great cathedrals, and the start of universities throughout Europe. Europe started importing goods from China and the East Indies via the Orient. The Orient itself prospered with renewed agriculture, trade, and the establishment of institutions of learning. This period was warmer than the late 20th Century period.

The Medieval Warming was not nearly as warm as had been the longer Holocene Climate Optimum from 7000 BC to 3000 BC, but it was about the equivalent of the Roman Warming between 250 BC and 450 AD. Europe was warm, rainfall was plentiful, the climate was stable, and agricultural production became more bountiful and reliable. Farmers were able to farm to higher elevations in the mountains. Food production increased enough to allow the population to increase from 30 to 80 million in Europe. The population of China doubled in 100 years also.

There was a great expansion in trade. People could produce more than was needed for subsistence and were able to trade the excess. The warm period was accompanied by fewer storms and intense winds were less common than during the Dark Ages. Note that this is contrary to the claims of many Global Warming Alarmists today. Coastal trade and long distance ocean trade routes were widely established. Movement overland became easier. Though it rained more, there was also more sunshine to dry out the mud on roads. Mountain passes were open for longer periods.

The Vikings settled in Iceland, Greenland, and in North America. They farmed barley and raised cattle and sheep in Greenland. They had vineyards in Newfoundland. They fished for cod and hunted seals in ice-free waters. The Vikings traded extensively in Russia and Kievan Rus, down to Persia and Constantinople.

The Doomsday Book shows grapes were grown in England where they cannot be now. England was warmer and drier then than it is now. Its population grew from1.4 million to 5.5 million. the population of France tripled to become 18 million. Vineyards in Germany went to altitudes of 780 meters, though they only go to 560 meters now. This implies the average temperature was about 1.0 to 1.4 degrees C higher than now. In Norway, the land was cleared, settled, and farmed about 100 to 200 meters higher in elevation than now, suggesting a temperature average about 1 degree C higher than now. In 1000 AD, the treeline of the polar Urals was higher than it is now.

Mining in the higher Alps occurred both in the Roman and Medieval Warming periods. These mines were covered with ice in the Dark Ages and again in the Little Ice Age. Some of these mines were again exposed with the ice retreat of the late 20th Century warming. The sediments of Lake Neufchatel in Switzerland show it was warmer in the Medieval Warming than now, but that a 1.5 degree C temperature drop occurred quickly with the start of the Little Ice Age. The Baltic Sea supported tropical and sub-tropical plankton then, but cannot do so now.

A study of 600 boreholes on all continents shows that the Medieval Warming period was warmer than today. They also show a drop of 0.2 to 0.7 degrees C due to the Little Ice Age. Turkey, Northern Africa, Pakistan, southern Africa, Japan, the Great Plains of North America, Alaska, northern Quebec, southern Ontario, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Mono Lake in California, the Anasazi Indian area, southern Alberta, Argentina, Peru and the Andes, and the South Pacific all experienced the Medieval Warming with benefits to the people of the regions. Similarly, when the Little Ice Age was experienced in all these areas, the people suffered.

Of course, these temperature changes were not caused by CO2 emissions by man. They were caused by changes in the irradiance of the Sun, changes in its magnetic fields, and in its emissions of solar wind and the resulting interactions with cosmic rays.

So, if the 20th Century warming had continued, mankind might have enjoyed the many benefits enjoyed by human civilizations in the Roman and the Medieval Warmings. Those benefits are the catastrophe the Democrats and the rabid environmentalists are trying to protect us from by bringing on catastrophic energy use restrictions and taxes. Had they simply done their homework and taken some reasonable regard for the great wealth that the Industrial Revolution has brought to mankind in increased security, longer lives, a richer intellectual life, and so much more, they would not be intent upon throwing wrenches and bolts into the gears of our economy. In the name of a phantom global warming catastrophe caused by human use of fossil fuels, they would throw many of us out of jobs, leave us in chilled homes and businesses in the winter, in swelteringly humid buildings in summers in which electronics cannot long function, deprive our businesses of profits, and restrict our travel.

As is so often the case, wrong-headed Democrats are coming close to destroying the miracle of America. Perhaps the coming Great Chill caused by our Sun will keep them from wrecking destruction via the route of energy use restrictions. Of course, the Great Chill will itself make life harder, as such chills always have. And, of course, the Democrats are always, without pause, looking for more ways to inhibit our pursuit of happiness as humans. They are especially fond of finding ways to reduce our production of the goods and services that people want.

The Cooling Earth

The principal influence upon the global climate is always our Sun, though our galaxy can also have a major affect over the eons. Ocean currents respond to it. The oceans hold 99 times more heat than the atmosphere, so they in turn affect our climate. But it all comes back to the sun and the Milky Way galaxy. These are the big sources of energy and produce the big effects on cloud cover, at least aside from major volcanoes.

Astronomers Dr. William Livingston and Dr. Matthew Penn have long been measuring the Sun's magnetic fields. They have found that the magnetic intensity of sunspots has been decreasing for the last 15 years. If this continues, the Sun will have no sunspots in 5 years and its activity will be similar to the Maunder Minimum which is believed to have caused the Little Ice Age.

Other scientists measuring the solar wind, the plasma thrown off by the Sun, have found it to be weaker than at any previous time during the measurements which go back 40 years. This both indicates less solar radiation and less shielding of the Earth from cosmic rays. More cosmic rays create more cloud cover. More cloud cover cools all of the earth, except Antarctica. Antarctica actually warms with more cloud cover because its white snow and ice is more reflective even than clouds, which is not the case in Greenland.

Drs. Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory have been tracking the path of a subsurface jet stream called the torsional oscillation which began near the Sun's pole, as such jet streams do in the Sun every 11 years. These streams travel east to west and slowly approach the equator of the Sun over a 17 year period. When they reach a critical latitude of 22 degrees, they generate sunspots. The torsional oscillation of the last Sun cycle took 2 years to make a 10 degree change of latitude, but the torsional oscillation of the present cycle has taken 3 years to do so. This slow rate of travel has extended the solar minimum, which is a cooler period for the sun.

Many solar scientists now believe the chances that the Earth will be cooling significantly exceed the chances of global warming.

Meanwhile, those dumb Democrats are still proclaiming loudly that there is a scientific consensus that catastrophe awaits us if we do not cut back drastically on fossil fuel energy use, even if it costs us a fortune, kills entire industries, and plunges the nation into economic depression. It is fearfully irresponsible of these people to turn to the use of government force to so harm the lives of other Americans without even doing their homework. But then, these are the same people who vote for House and Senate bills they have not read and the same president who tells us the bills do not contain the provisions that they do contain.

In fact, it is more likely we will need all the fossil fuels we can get to keep us warm. Any very modest warming we can get from generating more CO2 through a greenhouse effect will be welcome, though it will be a very small effect compared to the likely cooling brought on by a cooler Sun. With shorter growing seasons, any increased atmospheric concentrations of CO2 that man can contribute will be very helpful in fertilizing our food plants. So drill and drill some more. Nonetheless, the cooling of the oceans will probably cause a decrease in atmospheric CO2, so again, the effect of man will be puny.

With more than 6 billion people, it appears that the environmentalists will get their fondest wish. There will be mass starvation if we slip into another little ice age. If they are right that people are the problem, then there will soon be fewer of them. As always, the Democrats have misidentified the real problem.

Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

I wish to direct my readers to an excellent review of the climate literature on the subjects of global temperature and climate related to the observed increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide which has occurred since 1870. The rate of increase in CO2 has been faster since about 1950 than it was before that date. This review by Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, and Willie Soon was published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (2007) 12, 79-90 and was entitled Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Because the article was written for physicians, it is well aimed for my audience of intelligent people, who may very well not be up on the latest jargon of climatologists or all the details of the many ocean cycles, etc.

The first figure of the article shows the temperature measured at the surface of the Sargasso Sea, which is a large area of the Atlantic, over a 3,000 year period using isotope ratios of marine organisms left in the sediment. The average temperature of this period is drawn as a reference and it is seen that the height of Greek civilization occurred during a warm period with a maximum temperature about 2 degrees Centigrade warmer than the average temperature, that the Roman period corresponded to a temperature period very near average, that the Fall of Rome and the Dark Ages corresponded to a period in which the temperature dropped by about 1 degree Centigrade, followed by the Medival Climate Optimum during which conditions improved in Europe, followed again by a decrease called the Little Ice Age, followed again by a return to a very nearly average temperature, where we are today. The French and Indian War and the American Revolution were during the coldest parts of the Little Ice Age, with conditions few living Americans would prefer to those of the present near average temperature. This figure is shown below:

They then show that the shortening of glaciers occurred well before increases in the atmospheric CO2 began. It began as a result of the warming ending the Little Ice Age. They show that the arctic temperature correlates very well back to 1880 with solar activity and does not correlate with atmospheric CO2. Then they show that the increase in annual mean surface temperature in the contiguous United States from 1880 to 2006 was 0.5 degree Centigrade per century. This is a temperature difference well within the 3 degree Centigrade variance over the last 3,000 years and one which few people would notice personally. A 0.5 C temperature increase is caused by an increase in solar activity of about 0.21% and the measured increase in solar activity from 1900 to 2000 was 0.19%.

During the recovery from the Little Ice Age, U.S. climate has improved with more rainfall, fewer tornadoes, and no increase in hurricane activity. Sea level has trended upward over the last 150 years at a rate of 7 inches per century. This sea level rise also began with the end of the Little Ice Age, rather than with the major increases in atmospheric CO2.

During the past 50 years, human use of hydrocarbons has increased 6-fold, but the increase in atmospheric CO2 has been only 22%. This increase in atmospheric CO2 has stimulated plant growth, which is good for both humans and other animals. Higher CO2 concentrations allow plants to grow faster and larger and to grow better in drier climates than otherwise. The Industrial Revolution has not only improved human life, but it has benefited plant life and the animals who depend upon plants. Increased warmth has also made life a bit easier for most plants and animals. The historical record of bursts in human civilizations also seems strongly to correlate with the warmer periods of the last 3,000 years.

Very Little Sunspot Activity Recently

There has been very little sunspot activity since the most recent solar cycle 24 began in January. The last sunspot activity was on 20 July. Before that, there was a long stretch with no sunspots also. Measurements of solar irradiance over the last three months have also been very low.

The Little Ice Age had two parts. The second part corresponded to an extensive time of very few observances of sunspots, called the Maunder Minimum.