Global Warming Hysteria (cooled)

Peter, I would strongly recommend you read the actual scientific paper that BBC article is refering to. It's a 2005 paper by Sami Solanki that compares solar activity & temperatures over the past 1150 years and found temperatures closely correlate to solar activity. When sunspot activity was low during the Maunder Minimum in the 1600's or the Dalton Minimum in the 1800's, the earth went through 'little ice ages'. The sun has been unusually hot in the last century - solar output rose dramatically in the early 20th century accompanied by a sharp rise in global temperatures.

However, Solanki also found the correlation between solar activity and global temperatures ended around 1975. At that point, temperatures started rising while solar activity stayed level. This led him to conclude "during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source."

Solanki has published several studies confirming that the sun has had only minimal effect on the last 3 decades of global warming as the correlation ended in 1975. And this is confirmed by Mike Lockwood's study in the Royal Society publication that came out earlier this week.

1) Global warming ended in 1998. There was a slight cooling between 1998 and 2005
There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998
By Bob Carter
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/04/2006
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml

2) 2006 was cooler by 0.09 C than 2005
The Week That Was (June 16, 2007)–Brought to you by SEPP (www.sepp.org)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt

3) The sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years
Read the sunspots
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=597d0677-2a05-47b4-b34f-b84068db11f4&p=4

4) Solar irradiance has begun to fall, leading to a deep freeze around 2055-60.
The Deniers Look to Mars
Look to Mars for the truth on global warming
The Deniers -- Part IX
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=edae9952-3c3e-47ba-913f-7359a5c7f723&k=0

You do realise the study that finds the sun has burned brighter now than any time over the past 8000 years also concluded "during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source."

And that Mar is warming due to dust storms reducing its albedo.

I've been reading through all the scientific literature and I haven't found a single study that links a brightening sun to the last 30 years of global warming - there have been many that show there is no link (eg - Lockwood 2007, Foukal 2006, Scafetta 2006, Solanki 2005, Lean 1999, Waple 1999, Frolich 1998, etc). If you know of any peer reviewed studies that demonstrate such a link, please let me know.

Here are a few posts at worldclimatereport.com that reference articles about the influence of the sun on surface warming over the last 20 years.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/03/21/solar-warming/#more-143

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2005/05/10/global-warming-something-new-under-the-sun/#more-110

The first post above says that the solar influence over the last 20 years is severely underestimated by theoretical models.

In the 2nd post above, three recent Science papers say that the solar influence over the past 20 years is 10 times greater that that due to greenhouse gases. In fairness, worldclimatereport thinks that the three Science papers overestimate the solar effect since past fluctuations would have severely disrupted the food supply.

The original post about the BBC article says that "for the last 20 years, the Sun's output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen". Since many scientists (including Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer) say that there has been no warming since 1998, that accounts for 9 years. Lindzen also notes that the warming rate since 1975 is similar to the warming rate before 1940 (which scientists think is due to solar forcing).

The dust storm explanation on mars is not necessarily true and the authors admit that "Exactly what triggers the planet's so-called "global dust storms" remains a mystery." Other planets are also warming.

co2science.org has an editorial about solar dimming and brightening
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V8/N41/EDIT.jsp

Here is another paper about solar forcing which uses a statistical analysis on stratospheric temperature anomaly and solar irradiance data sets. They conclude that "The result
emphasizes a dominating role of the solar irradiance variability in variations of the
tropospheric temperature and gives no support to the theory of anthropogenic climate
change."

On nonstationarity and antipersistency in
global temperature series
O. Ka¨rner
Tartu Observatory, To˜ravere, Estonia
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 107, NO. D20, 4415, doi:10.1029/2001JD002024, 2002

"The revealed antipersistence in the lower tropospheric
temperature increments does not support the science
of global warming developed by IPCC [1996]. Negative
long-range correlation of the increments during last 22 years
means that negative feedback has been dominating in the
Earth climate system during that period. The result is
opposite to suggestion of Mitchell [1989] about domination
of a positive cumulative feedback after a forced temperature
change. Dominating negative feedback also shows that the
period for CO2 induced climate change has not started
during the last 22 years. Increasing concentration of greenhouse
gases in the Earth atmosphere appeared to produce
too weak forcing in order to dominate in the Earth climate
system. Estimate of the adjusted radiative forcing due to
changes in the concentrations of the so-called greenhouse
gases since preindustrial times is 2.45 Wm2 [IPCC, 1996].
If the increase was during 15 years, its annual increment
(0.16 Wm2) would be comparable to standard deviation of
the daily increment of solar forcing at the top of the
atmosphere (0.18 Wm2). The observed global warming
in surface air temperature series [Jones et al., 1999] is more
likely produced due to overall nonstationary variability of
the Earth climate system under anti-persistent solar forcing."