Playing Devil's advocate on climate

[Skyhunter]

I have provided papers that show the 20th century planetary warming could be due to a reduction in planetary cloud cover. See above if anyone is interested.

Your sources are not scientific, therefore may not be discussed here.

There is currently an abrupt interruption of the solar magnetic cycle which has reduced the strength of the heliosphere and has caused GCR to increase by 18%. There has not been an increase in planetary clouds because there has been a three times increase in solar wind bursts during this current solar cycle minimum. I have provided papers to support these statements.

I have been following the current solar minimum, solar winds have been relatively calm for the past year.

[edit] Although they have been much higher than during the cycle 23 minimum. [/edit]

Based on the planetary cloud mechanism, planetary cloud should now start to increase, due to a reduction in the solar wind bursts and due to the increased GCR.

Planetary cloud cover should have begun increasing 18 months ago according to the GCR hypothesis.

So rather than argue whether the solar modulation of planetary cloud mechanism exists or does not exist, we can just watch planetary temperature and see if it does drop. I am interested because I do not understand the delays in the mechanisms and I am unsure of the magnitude of the change.

I am uncertain that the mechanism even exists. And even if it does, since temperatures are still rising it has little effect on global temperatures.

I will keep an eye out for any interesting planetary temperature observations. Have you been watching the current Arctic and Antarctic sea ice cover anomaly?

I visit the NSIDC site 3-5 times a week.

 

[Saul]

Your sources are not scientific, therefore may not be discussed here. I visit the NSIDC site 3-5 times a week.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009JA014342.shtml
Skyhunter,

You must have missed this paper. Let's agree to disagree about the prediction of what is about to happen. Let's wait until there is new planetary temperature data to discuss. I will keep an eye out for new papers.

This should be an interesting scientific period if I understand the mechanisms.


If the Sun is so quiet, why is the Earth ringing? A comparison of two solar minimum intervals

Observations from the recent Whole Heliosphere Interval (WHI) solar minimum campaign are compared to last cycle's Whole Sun Month (WSM) to demonstrate that sunspot numbers, while providing a good measure of solar activity, do not provide sufficient information to gauge solar and heliospheric magnetic complexity and its effect at the Earth.

The present solar minimum is exceptionally quiet, with sunspot numbers at their lowest in 75 years and solar wind magnetic field strength lower than ever observed. Despite, or perhaps because of, a global weakness in the heliospheric magnetic field, large near-equatorial coronal holes lingered even as the sunspots disappeared. Consequently, for the months surrounding the WHI campaign, strong, long, and recurring high-speed streams in the solar wind intercepted the Earth in contrast to the weaker and more sporadic streams that occurred around the time of last cycle's WSM campaign.

In response, geospace and upper atmospheric parameters continued to ring with the periodicities of the solar wind in a manner that was absent last cycle minimum, and the flux of relativistic electrons in the Earth's outer radiation belt was elevated to levels more than three times higher in WHI than in WSM. Such behavior could not have been predicted using sunspot numbers alone, indicating the importance of considering variation within and between solar minima in analyzing and predicting space weather responses at the Earth during solar quiet intervals, as well as in interpreting the Sun's past behavior as preserved in geological and historical records.

 

[Skyhunter]

You are speculating that

1. GCR drives cloud formation, as yet a still unproven hypothesis.
2. The solar wind modulates this as speculative process.

Since the global temperature trend is still positive, and we are entering a positive ENSO phase, then it is likely that global temperatures will continue to rise.

 

[Darryl]

My take on this is, it's not a valid scientific experiment, there is no control subject and it it was "an experiment" that should be allowed to run it's course then what happens if the global warming does swing out of control.

talking about control, I see this as a feedback control loop issue, if you have 'tuned' a feedback control loop you generally have 2 knobs, gain and damping.

Too little damping and the process will go out of control, it will not just swing to one extreme it will begin to oscilate until it hardlines on one extreme.

Too little damping or too much gain will achieve the same result.

To me, cutting down CO2 absorbing trees is reducing the "damping" parameter, and releasing fossilised CO2 in increasing the gain in the system.

It's not an experiment, we don't have anywhere els to go if we are wrong, So possibly erring on the side of causion might be wise.

"Lets wait and see" is not good enough.

 

[D H]

My take on this is, it's not a valid scientific experiment, there is no control subject and it it was "an experiment" that should be allowed to run it's course then what happens if the global warming does swing out of control.

What experiment are you talking about?

It appears you have a misperception of how the scientific method is employed in fields such as anthropology, astronomy/cosmology, and climatology/meteorology. We don't know how to build a time machine, and even if we did, going back in time and experimenting on Mitochondrial Eve would not be deemed as kosher. Anthropologists can only observe, and their observations are limited to ancient bones and shards of flint. Astronomers similarly cannot create in the lab galaxies that are billions of light years apart. They can observe them by telescope. Just because anthropologists and astronomers can't perform controlled experiments with all the trappings does not mean that anthropology and astronomy are not science.

The same goes for meteorology and climatology. Scientists can create scaled-down models of some phenomena, but scaling things down to lab size is always fraught with problems. (The scaling problem is why the aerodynamics industry likes to use full-scale wind tunnel as the ultimate test of what happens to a vehicle.) The best way to determine the weather and climate is to observe it. It is still science.

 

[Skyhunter]

This topic is interesting because there are competing scientific viewpoints in published papers and because there is currently an abrupt interruption to the solar magnetic cycle.

Saul,

I started a new thread.

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=346406

It is a new map of the heliosphere by the IBEX spacecraft . Since the heliosphere is a manifestation of the solar magnetic anomaly you might find the press conference interesting