Re: [asa] Effect of Solar variability

Thanks, Rich. I have been waiting for your response. If West/Scafetta's work
depends on the derivative approximations that are criticized in an exchange
on RealClimate a couple year ago then I'd dismiss the whole thing. However,
I think what West is saying in his latest set of papers is that there is a
resonance phenomenon between the sun and the earth. If that's so, then a
little perturbation from the sun can grow larger than the magnitude of the
sun's variability would suggest. I'm not taking any position on this, but I
do intend to read West's papers a bit more thoroughly.

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 7:26 PM, Rich Blinne <rich.blinne@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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
>

-- 
William E (Bill) Hamilton Jr., Ph.D.
Member American Scientific Affiliation
Austin, TX
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