Recent Ocean Heat Content Trend Shows Lack of Heating

J. M. Lyman and colleagues earlier this year claimed the ocean heat content data of 1993 to 2008 showed a global warming trend of 0.63 +- 0.28 W/sq.m.  They allowed that the rise from 1993 to 2000 was followed by a flattening ocean temperature that started about 2001-2002.  Given a peak in land surface temperatures around 1998 and a subsequent flattening for a few years after that as solar irradiance and sunspot activity moved out of a warm cycle into what is looking more and more like a cooling cycle, it is to be expected that the ocean heat content would rise for a few years following the end of the solar irradiance increases.  As Roger Pielke Sr.has pointed out, the oceans hold 90% of the variable heat content of the Earth in the upper ocean water.  Thus, trends in the upper ocean temperatures and its heat content must be related to the solar radiance, though with a bit of lag and some averaging due to the huge heat capacity of the ocean.

With respect to longer term trends in the Earth's climate, the upper ocean temperatures are a much better measure than the flighty atmospheric temperatures on land, which are influenced much more by the time of day and the nearby human population.  We know the ground-based weather stations to have been badly biased upward by urban heat island effects (here, here, here, and here) and a long period of undocumented data manipulation (here and here and here).

R. S. Knox and D. H. Douglass of the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Rochester have an in press publication in the International Journal of Geosciences, which uses data from the global array of Argo floats to calculate the ocean heat content (OHC) of the upper oceans.  The Argo floats were deployed in the early 2000s and are less prone to the biases and errors of the expendable bathythermographs used to obtain earlier ocean data.  The data is show in the graph below:

The green line shows the average annual ocean surface temperature provided by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.  That has been trending downward since 2003, with most of the drop since 2005.  The Argo data from the surface to a depth of 700 meters is plotted in blue.  The red data points are the 12-month moving average of the blue line data.  The dashed red line is the linear fit to the 12-month moving average data.  The energy flux to compare to the Lyman result of 0.63 +- 0.28 W/sq. meter increase is -0.161 +- 0.040 W/sq. meter.

The result does not indicate the expected large rate of increase in OHC due to a warming planet if the increasing concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere were the primary driving force in our climate and it acted as the climate models have generally claimed it does.  Given the short span of time and the strong annual variations of the OHC, this result does not clearly rule out a warming effect of CO2 upon the Earth's temperature.  But, it does suggest that the cooling expected by many solar scientists due to decreased sunspot activity, may have started.  It argues that it is foolish to believe that the warming trend of the 1980s and 1990s was the early part of a catastrophe, which was caused by increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2.  It argues that we need to continue to carefully observe solar effects and the ocean heat content so that we can come to a real understanding of our climate and what causes longer term changes in it.

It also follows that forcing the world's peoples to do without energy or to pay skyrocketing costs for renewable energy or carbon sequestration on the basis of an ensuing catastrophe caused by man-made CO2 emissions is without justification.  It is terribly wrongheaded to use force to make people give up many of the comforts of their lives because some scientists and politicians have been claiming an unproved hypothesis is established fact.  Far from it, the strong global warming claim based on atmospheric CO2 has a trendline which indicates that it is not likely to make the transition from hypothesis to proven theory!

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.

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.

Climate Modelers Have Ignored the Effects of the Sun's Cycle on Climate

It has been common for climate modelers to argue that the solar constant varies by only 0.1% during the solar cycle, so the sun cannot have much affect upon climate variations.  First, the variation in the solar irradiance is 0.22% during the relatively short time that the satellite measurements have been made.  It may have been larger in earlier times and may be larger in the future.  The 0.1% figure used by the UN IPCC report is perhaps due to mistaking the amplitude of the cycle for the amount of the variation.  This is a very amateurish error.

There are further errors in considering the solar cycle.  One is that the variance in the UV portion of the solar irradiance spectrum is larger.  It is 0.5 to 0.8%.  The UV radiation interacts with the ozone in the stratosphere and the concentration of ozone varies with such effects as the solar cycle, volcanic emissions, ozone depleting substances, and climate change.  Thus, the effect of the varying UV radiation on warming the Earth is further complicated by its interactions with the varying ozone levels.

Other important aspects of the solar cycle are the solar wind, which itself carries energy to the Earth and is part of the reason the ozone concentrations depend upon the solar cycle.  Still another aspect of the solar cycle is that it causes the Sun's electromagnetic field to vary, especially during the more active parts of cycles, and to dump energy into the Earth through its interaction with the Earth's electromagnetic field.  

Finally, the variations in the solar electromagnetic field with the solar cycle cause that field's shielding of the Earth from cosmic rays to vary.  When the cosmic ray intensity increases, cloud cover increases and there is a net cooling effect upon the Earth as more sunlight is reflected back into space, except over Antarctica.

But, ignorance of these effects and the belief that all that matters is a supposed minuscule 0.1% variation of the visible light spectrum from the Sun has long puzzled our intrepid climate modelers, since there has been some countervailing observational evidence that the solar cycles somehow matter.  Finally, a few climate modelers are attempting to introduce solar cycle issues into their computer models, even if only very partially.  They have been astounded to find that there are significant effects!  They still present these as smaller variations than those caused by man's emissions of CO2, but important if one is to understand climate change over periods of a couple of decades.

The recent work of Gerald Meehl and colleagues at the National Center for Atmospheric Research has begun to try to understand aspects of the solar cycle interaction with La Nina and El Nino and other effects upon the Pacific Ocean and trade winds.  You can read about this work at Science Daily.

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.

The Sun Controls the Earth's Climate

The source of more or less energy for the Earth is the Sun. The output of UV radiation is particularly variable for the Sun with variations of 0.5 to 0.8%. This UV radiation affects the ozone concentrations in the atmosphere, the energy deposited in the upper atmosphere, and the winds in the upper atmosphere. It affects the amount of sulfur moved from the oceans into the atmosphere, which then affects lower atmosphere cloud cover, which then reflects light back into space. Overall, the energy from the Sun measured by satellites since 1979 has varied by 0.22%. The high to the low energy output were separated by only 7 years. This difference causes a surface temperature difference of at least 0.45 degree C, according to Ian Plimer. He also says the urban warming effect was 0.1 degree C for a total warming of 0.55 degree C. This is about equal to the late 20th Century temperature increase. This was an irradiance variation of about 0.53 Watts/meter squared.

Since most of this period has been one of relatively high solar activity and output, there is reason to believe that longer term measurements will show much larger variations in solar output. If the Sun's irradiance were to be only about 1 to 1.5 Watts/meter squared less than now, we would experience conditions equivalent to the very cold Maunder Minimum of the Little Ice Age. The 23rd Sun cycle was very short, being 10.0 years long rather than the average of 11.1 years, and resulted in a large decrease in solar irradiance. The quiet sunspot Cycle 24 has started and by September 2008 there were 200 consecutive days without sunspots. The very cold Dalton Minimum of the early 1800s was the last time something like this happened. Some astronomers believe that temperatures will start falling due to solar inactivity between 2012 to 2015 and reach a minimum in solar energy in 2040. This will result in the Earth being very cold around the period of 2055 - 2060.

If the temperature of the Earth is primarily due to the Sun's activities, then the other planets should be similarly affected. They are. In 1998, the Hubble telescope discovered that Triton, the moon of Neptune, had warmed since 1989 when a space probe visited it. Measurements on Pluto showed its temperature to have risen 2 degrees C. The Hubble telescope also measured a 1 degree C increase in the temperature of Jupiter in 2006. Mars has been found to have had a temperature increase of 0.65 degrees C between the 1970s and the 1990s, which is very close the 0.7 degree C increase in temperature on Earth in the last century.

Ian Plimer makes a very good case that the Earth's temperature responds primarily to changes in the activity of our Sun. The IPCC computer models greatly underestimate the effects of the Sun and greatly overestimate the effects of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. I again strongly recommend Ian Plimer's book Heaven and Earth.

Clouds, Aerosols, and Cosmic Rays

I am reading the fascinating book Heaven and Earth global warming the missing science by Ian Plimer. Here are a few fascinating statements, minus the many footnotes:

Clouds reflect 60% of the Sun's radiation. A change of just 1% in cloudiness of planet Earth could account for all of the 20th Century warming. However, IPCC computers don't do clouds. Fine particles in the atmosphere are the nuclei for condensation of water vapour into the water droplets that form low-level clouds.

It is the low-level clouds that have the greatest cooling effect.

Sulphuric acid aerosols formed from dimethyl sulphide released from micro-organisms in the oceans affect low-level cloud formation over a very large area because the oceans cover 70% of the Earth's surface. Dimethyl sulphide reacts with water and sunlight to produce sulphuric acid droplets. This reaction is accelerated by lightning in a process called ion seeding. Sea spray provides very small grains of sodium chloride from storm waves, especially in winter at latitudes 40 - 60 [degrees]. Sporadic volcanic eruptions, hot gas vents and hot springs release large amounts of sulphurous gases into the atmosphere. Various sulphur gases in the atmosphere combine with water and form sulphuric acid droplets. These droplets are also the nuclei for low-level cloud formation.

Apparently, man is not the primary source of sulfuric acid in the atmosphere! Who would have thought, given all the environmentalist noise on this subject over the years? There are good reasons for man to clean up the sulfur emissions from smokestacks and we have done a good job of that in the developed countries, by and large. But it is good to know that much of the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere has natural origins.

Not long ago, James Hanson complained on several occasions that the "one thing" that they did not really know about global warming was the effect of aerosols. This one thing is a huge thing. It seems likely to me that as the oceans warm, the micro-organisms that create dimethyl sulfide [being American, I conserve my letters and favor brevity in spelling] will fluorish and produce more of it. So, if we were to suppose that man's CO2 emissions caused warming then the warmed oceans would produce more micro-organisms and these would produce more dimethyl sulfide, resulting in more sulfuric acid droplets, and then more cloud cover. In other words, the earth's response to increased CO2 would be a negative feedback in which CO2 warming would be offset by more cloud cover. Recent studies have at least shown a negative feedback, though I do not know that it is due to the effect I am hypothesizing. The UN IPCC computer models not only do not do clouds, but they almost always assume a positive feedback to warming caused by CO2 emissions, which exaggerate the degree of warming.

The other elephant in the room that the IPCC computer models ignore is the effects of solar radiation variations and activity, which also change the flux of cosmic rays reaching the Earth's atmosphere. These cosmic rays cause ions to form which nucleate clouds. Ian Plimer notes:

The correlation between the Earth's magnetic field and rainfall in the tropics can only be explained if cosmic rays have an influence on the formation of clouds.

The observed variation of 3 - 4% of global cloud cover during Solar Cycle 22 was strongly correlated with the cosmic ray flux. This, in turn, is related to solar activity and the Earth's magnetic field. The weaker the solar activity, the more cosmic rays strike the Earth and the more abundant is cloud cover in the lower atmosphere. The effect is greater at high latitudes because of the shielding effect on the Earth's magnetic field on high-energy charged particles. We must also be mindful of the fact that the Earth's magnetic field constantly changes.

Again, I am commenting. The Earth's magnetic field lines deflect cosmic rays better where they more nearly parallel the Earth's surface. Where they descend to intersect the Earth's surface, cosmic rays can more readily follow magnetic flux lines to enter the atmosphere. This is why higher latitudes both North and South, are more irradiated by the cosmic rays. The changes in the Earth's magnetic field will also change the boundary of those latitudes most affected by the cosmic rays.

I strongly suspect that little is known about the effect of the Earth's changing magnetic field interacting with the Sun's changing magnetic field to create major flows of energy in the Earth's core. There must be great variations in the temperatures of molten materials and the heat flow from them to the Earth's crust. Those same heat vents in the ocean floors that yield sulfur also provide some heating of the oceans. When a strong Earth magnetic field interacts with a strong Sun magnetic field, one would expect that a greater stirring of the Earth's molten core will result. This in turn should mean hotter materials coming into contact with the Earth's crust and added heat being dumped into it. Because the crust is thinnest in the oceans, the heating effect will more immediate and greatest there. Such effects may also have impact on plate tectonics and contribute to the frictional energy generated as plates grind against one another. Frankly, I would not be surprised if such unknown effects are as important as the effect of likely further additions of CO2 to the atmosphere.

In light of the known temperature history of the world, the hypothesis that man-made emissions of CO2 were causing a catastrophic rise of temperatures should have had a very high burden of proof imposed on it. When it came to be understood that the past increases in CO2 atmospheric concentrations followed the temperature rise of the oceans, that hypothesis should have been seen to be in great trouble. When it was further observed that the temperature profile with altitude in the atmosphere was terribly wrong in the IPCC computer models, the hypothesis should have been kaput. But worst of all, the critical nature of cloud cover is apparent to any Earthling. How on Earth could the UN IPCC make such a big deal of their CO2 concentration computer models and future climate scenarios, when they could not begin to understand cloud cover?

The answer is that they had an agenda more important than science. Their agenda was always to do whatever it took to gain world power as the primary world government.

Greatly Decreased Solar Radiation

An article in The Independent on 27 April 2009 called "The missing sunspots: Is this the big chill?" notes that the current decrease in solar activity and the reduced radiation due to it is more important than many scientists had thought. Marc Hairston of the University of Texas says of the solar inactivity "This is the lowest we've ever seen. We thought we'd be out of it by now, but we're not."

There is also the so-called solar wind – streams of particles the Sun pours out – that is at its weakest since records began. In addition, the Sun’s magnetic axis is tilted to an unusual degree. “This is the quietest Sun we’ve seen in almost a century,” says NASA solar scientist David Hathaway. But this is not just a scientific curiosity. It could affect everyone on Earth and force what for many is the unthinkable: a reappraisal of the science behind recent global warming.

The article also provides an interesting history of man's observances of sunspot activity:

Sunspots are dark, cooler patches on the Sun’s surface that come and go in a roughly 11-year cycle, first noticed in 1843. They have gone away before. They were absent in the 17th century – a period called the “Maunder Minimum” after the scientist who spotted it. Crucially, it has been observed that the periods when the Sun’s activity is high and low are related to warm and cool climatic periods. The weak Sun in the 17th century coincided with the so-called Little Ice Age. The Sun took a dip between 1790 and 1830 and the earth also cooled a little. It was weak during the cold Iron Age, and active during the warm Bronze Age. Recent research suggests that in the past 12,000 years there have been 27 grand minima and 19 grand maxima.

Throughout the 20th century the Sun was unusually active, peaking in the 1950s and the late 1980s. Dean Pensell of NASA, says that, “since the Space Age began in the 1950s, solar activity has been generally high. Five of the ten most intense solar cycles on record have occurred in the last 50 years.” The Sun became increasingly active at the same time that the Earth warmed. But according to the scientific consensus, the Sun has had only a minor recent effect on climate change.

It would seem reasonable to believe that the warming trend overall of the period following the end of the Little Ice Age might be due to the unusually active Sun of that period. But, no the great computer models of the climate have claimed that that was only so prior to 1950, but that after that time greenhouse gas effects were dominant. Strange that the most intense solar activity observed was post 1950, lasting to the end of the century. Nonetheless, the very inaccurate climate computer models have claimed that the solar effect is responsible for only 10 to 50% of the warming, with most of them claiming the lower end of that range.

The article notes that the Sun's radiation output varies by about 0.1 percent during the 11-year solar cycle, which is small, but the total energy involved is huge. This is about 1.3 W/sq.m. at the ground, which recent investigations have shown causes some strong regional climate changes.

What strikes me as very noteworthy is that there could be no more obvious a natural factor to the Earth's climate than the varying input of the sun. Despite that and the huge claims made with respect to the greenhouse gas effects of CO2 in the atmosphere, climatologists are clearly not on top of an understanding of the climate effects of the Sun. The computer modelers have clearly overestimated the effects of CO2, which is still increasing, despite a lack of warming since 1998. The overestimation of the greenhouse effect due to CO2 is also clearly revealed in the much lower temperatures of the atmosphere as a function of altitude compared to the predictions of the computer models. It seems clear to me that the radiative output changes of the Sun are actually playing the more important role. At least this is where I would invest my time in improving the computer models for moderately long-term climate changes, if that were my business.

On Warming in Colder, Drier Climates

One of the reasons some people believe increased carbon dioxide caused the warming from the late 1970s through 1998, is because most of the warming occurred in cooler and drier areas of the world. These areas included parts of Canada, Northern Europe, and Siberia, as well as some of the northern parts of China and the United States. Increased amounts of gases which absorb infrared radiation might do this. One such gas is CO2, but anything causing an increase in water vapor in these drier areas would be as likely an explanation.

There may be another explanation. As noted in an earlier post or comment, about 11% of the incoming radiation from the sun is in the form of ultraviolet radiation, about 44% is visible light, and about 45% is infrared radiation. It has been noted that increased solar activity accounts for some of the increase in temperature from the 1970s until 1998. We know that Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, and Neptune's moon Triton have all similarly warmed. Some scientists claim that this does not account for all of the warming on earth in this period, though a similar increase did in the early warming period of 1910 through the 1930s.

During a period of increased radiation from the sun, the warming due to the increased visible light portion of the sun's spectrum is treated by the models, but the effects on the incoming infrared radiation from the sun are cavalierly ignored. In the colder climate areas in the northern latitudes, the atmosphere is drier and there is less water vapor in the atmosphere to absorb incoming solar infrared radiation at higher altitudes. More of this infrared radiation will then reach the ground and lower altitudes and warm them. This would cause a given increase in solar radiation to have a greater warming effect in the drier and colder areas of the earth. Hence, warming occurs more in these areas than others, entirely independent of the wee little concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.

In other words, there is no reason to believe that the observed added warmth in the late 1970s to 1998 period found in these cold, dry areas is evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide was the primary reason for temperature increases. This may well make sense also in light of the fact that if CO2 were responsible for that warming, then the highest temperatures should be found in the atmosphere at altitudes of about 10 Km. Atmospheric altitude temperature measurements have been unable to find a maximum in the temperature profile at that altitude or anywhere near it. This has long been a serious reason to believe that the models predicting the warming based on increased CO2 are simply wrong.

Another serious problem with the idea that CO2 has caused the warming is that before 1760 the CO2 concentrations were extremely low at less than 280 parts per million. The rise in CO2 from that time has been appreciable since 1850 and rapid since 1950. Yet the temperature increases in northern, dry latitudes did not start until at least the mid-1970s. This is important since additions to CO2 are supposed to have more effect when the concentration is low and less and less added effect as the concentration increases. The carbon dioxide warming hypothesis does not work well and is not required as an explanation. Natural solar activity appears to be the primary reason for the warming of the 1970s to 1998, with a complex coupling with ocean currents.

It is critical to take the incoming solar infrared radiation into account as well as the visible light when calculating the temperature in various regions due to solar radiation.