Re: [asa] Effect of Solar variability

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Christine Smith <
christine_mb_smith@yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
> Nevertheless, like I said, I'd like to do some more digging on it. Perhaps
> Rich and others who are more acquainted with the details of the topic will
> have more to add here?
>
>
This fails the common sense test. Solar variability has been measured since
the 1950s. The Sun varies in the neighborhood of 0.1% following the Sun spot
cycle. http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/IRRADIANCE/irrad.htmlThere is a
slight climatic effect from this but again it's cyclical. Global warming is
up and to the right which also matches what happens with CO2. Physics Today
is not a peer-reviewed journal while the PNAS most definitely is. Note the
following paper that looked for a long-term trend for Solar variation.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1810336

Despite the direct response of the model to solar forcing, even large solar
> irradiance change combined with realistic volcanic forcing over past
> centuries could not explain the late 20th century warming without inclusion
> of greenhouse gas forcing. Although solar and volcanic effects appear to
> dominate most of the slow climate variations within the past thousand years,
> the impacts of greenhouse gases have dominated since the second half of the
> last century.

Have you ever wondered why all these solar papers go back to 1900? It's
because if there is a long-term trend it's too slow to explain the recent
warming. Global Warming really took off starting around 1980 while directly
measured solar irradiation oscillated very slightly for three sun spot
cycles.

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Wed Feb 11 20:27:13 2009