global warming: is it us, or is it the sun?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3869753.stm
Excerpts:
||_Sunspots reaching 1,000-year high_
||A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it
||has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years.

||over the last century the number of sunspots rose at
||the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer.

||it has been noted that between about 1645 and 1715,
||few sunspots were seen on the Sun's surface.

||This period is called the Maunder Minimum after
||the English astronomer who studied it.

||It coincided with a spell of prolonged cold weather often
||referred to as the "Little Ice Age".
||Solar scientists strongly suspect there is a link
||between the two events - but the exact mechanism
||remains elusive.

||Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady
||increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that
||has accelerated in the past century,
||just at the time when the Earth has been
||getting warmer.

|| This trend is being amplified by gases from fossil fuel burning,
|| they [the researchers] argue.

||Over the past 20 years [...]
||the number of sunspots has remained roughly
||constant, yet the average temperature
||of the Earth has continued to increase.

Comment: the important question seems to be, which cause is
the more powerful: sun activity or greenhouse gases.

If it's the former, then it might be a mistake to reduce
greenhouse gas generation: for, once the sun cycle turns
(at may be happening already),
the gases will counteract the cooling and maybe prevent a new
Little Ice Age.

(jjustwwondering) :

Comment: the important question seems to be, which cause is
the more powerful: sun activity or greenhouse gases.

If it's the former, then it might be a mistake to reduce
greenhouse gas generation: for, once the sun cycle turns
(at may be happening already),
the gases will counteract the cooling and maybe prevent a new
Little Ice Age.

Sorry, you still left out a key detail. If it is greenhouse gas, is it from
human's industry or is it also from a natural source..

Have you looked at any anti-industry greenhouse claims lately? I notice that
a break-down of how much of each greenhouse gas from humans verses nature
always seems to be missing.

If human's production of green house gasses are less than the natural
production swings then we have very little say in the global warming trends.

Earl Colby Pottinger

--
I make public email sent to me! Hydrogen Peroxide Rockets, OpenBeos,
SerialTransfer 3.0, RAMDISK, BoatBuilding, DIY TabletPC. What happened to
the time? http://webhome.idirect.com/~earlcp

Earl Colby Pottinger wrote:

If human's production of green house gasses are less than the natural
production swings then we have very little say in the global warming trends.

And if the earth is flat, we can launch the shuttle by pushing it off the edge.

The human effect on atmospheric CO2 is well understood. The issues now
are the effect of this increased CO2 on climate.

Paul

Paul F. Dietz wrote:

The human effect on atmospheric CO2 is well understood. The issues now
are the effect of this increased CO2 on climate.

Particularly relative to the effect of the solar cycle.

In article .net,
Rand Simberg wrote:
The human effect on atmospheric CO2 is well understood. The issues now
are the effect of this increased CO2 on climate.

Particularly relative to the effect of the solar cycle.

There is some room to argue about the relative sizes of the effects now.
But there's little room for doubt that if our CO2 emissions keep rising
along current trend curves, they *will* rapidly become the dominant
effect. Debate about the source of *today's* warming is an unimportant
side issue. Whether or not you believe that modest amounts of artificial
global warming are already present, there is no reasonable doubt that
adding tens of terawatts of fossil-fuel power will produce very large
amounts of it.

Moreover, preventing this -- or even restraining it enough to offer some
hope that climate effects will be modest -- is really hard; trying to
regulate it away, e.g. Kyoto, is like ordering the tide not to come in.
Already, 80% of annual CO2-emissions growth is in developing nations in
Asia, not in the industrialized Western world.

This is a technological problem, not a regulatory one: if we're going to
even contain this, then by mid-century, we need to be commissioning
perhaps a terawatt a year of CO2-neutral primary power sources. None of
the current ideas for how to do that is within current technology, if only
because of scaling issues.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

Henry Spencer wrote:

In article .net,
Rand Simberg wrote:

The human effect on atmospheric CO2 is well understood. The issues now
are the effect of this increased CO2 on climate.

Particularly relative to the effect of the solar cycle.


There is some room to argue about the relative sizes of the effects now.
But there's little room for doubt that if our CO2 emissions keep rising
along current trend curves, they *will* rapidly become the dominant
effect. Debate about the source of *today's* warming is an unimportant
side issue. Whether or not you believe that modest amounts of artificial
global warming are already present, there is no reasonable doubt that
adding tens of terawatts of fossil-fuel power will produce very large
amounts of it.

That begs the question as to whether the effect is good, or bad, and
whether or not the costs of preventing it exceed the cost of dealing
with the effects. And if the sun decides to cool down, we may in fact
be able to stave off the next glacial advance by increasing our rate of
burning of coal and production of cattle...

This is a technological problem, not a regulatory one: if we're going to
even contain this, then by mid-century, we need to be commissioning
perhaps a terawatt a year of CO2-neutral primary power sources. None of
the current ideas for how to do that is within current technology, if only
because of scaling issues.

I think that it could probably be accommodated with fission. That's
more a political problem than a technological one.

Of course, everyone knows that "Global Warming" is horse puckey, since
the world is lot cooler now than, say, 1000 years ago, and even less
so compared with 2000 years ago.

The scientists who claim global warming are not lying, they are simply
very carefully stating that the world is warming since 1700, which is
true. What they don't say is that 1700 was the nadir of the Little Ice
Age. So, if you are worried that the world is warmer than a mini-Ice
Age, feel free to worry. I will get worried when large scale farming
starts up again in Greenland.

Rand Simberg wrote in message hlink.net...
Paul F. Dietz wrote:

The human effect on atmospheric CO2 is well understood. The issues now
are the effect of this increased CO2 on climate.

Particularly relative to the effect of the solar cycle.

In article .net,
Rand Simberg wrote:
...Whether or not you believe that modest amounts of artificial
global warming are already present, there is no reasonable doubt that
adding tens of terawatts of fossil-fuel power will produce very large
amounts of it.

That begs the question as to whether the effect is good, or bad...

Any sort of serious climate change is likely to be hard on agriculture,
among other things, in the short term, even if it turns out to be an
improvement in the long term.

Historically, warm periods have been times of gentle weather and plentiful
harvests... but those came about by different routes, and right now we
have no more than guesses on whether an artificially-induced one would be
similar. It's one hell of a gamble. A certain amount of it is likely
inevitable at this point, but there's much to be said for limiting the
size of the pot.

This is a technological problem, not a regulatory one: if we're going to
even contain this, then by mid-century, we need to be commissioning
perhaps a terawatt a year of CO2-neutral primary power sources. None of
the current ideas for how to do that is within current technology, if only
because of scaling issues.

I think that it could probably be accommodated with fission. That's
more a political problem than a technological one.

Unfortunately, likely recoverable reserves of U-235 are only around
300TW-yr tops, and you just can't base tens of TW of power on that. Doing
the job with fission requires either large-scale uranium extraction from
low-grade sources like seawater, or large-scale breeding from U-238 or
(better) thorium, and neither is off-the-shelf technology, not on the
terawatt scale. The breeding solution is probably feasible -- perhaps
with fusion-fission hybrid breeders, which are probably easier than either
pure-fission breeders or direct fusion power -- but needs a lot of work.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

"Henry Spencer" wrote in message ...
Whether or not you believe that modest amounts of artificial
global warming are already present, there is no reasonable doubt that
adding tens of terawatts of fossil-fuel power will produce very large
amounts of it.

Moreover, preventing this -- or even restraining it enough to offer some
hope that climate effects will be modest -- is really hard; trying to
regulate it away, e.g. Kyoto, is like ordering the tide not to come in.
Already, 80% of annual CO2-emissions growth is in developing nations in
Asia, not in the industrialized Western world.

Amen. Though the bulk of the emissions, if not the growth, is still in
the West and the former Soviet bloc.

This is a technological problem, not a regulatory one:

But here I have to disagree. It is at least partially a regulatory
problem. I am not talking about "clean up emissions and improve
power generation efficiency" regulations here. That idea is absurd.
But a part of the solution has to come from reducing the growth in
demand, and regulation (including carbon taxes) can play a role here.

The only technological fix that has a hope of making a dent in the
problem in the time frame required is nuclear breeders. And it is
wrong to suggest that the problem here is merely technical - it is
also regulatory, in both positive and negative senses.
[i]
f we're going to
even contain this, then by mid-century, we need to be commissioning
perhaps a terawatt a year of CO2-neutral primary power sources. None of
the current ideas for how to do that is within current technology, if only
because of scaling issues.

In article ,
Explorer8939 wrote:
Of course, everyone knows that "Global Warming" is horse puckey, since
the world is lot cooler now than, say, 1000 years ago, and even less
so compared with 2000 years ago.

Uh, no, 'fraid not. The snows of Kilimanjaro, which have been around for
thousands of years, will be gone in a few decades at the present rate --
they are shrinking fast. And this is happening everywhere, not just
there. One of the best data sources we have on prehistoric climate and
related subjects is ice cores from old glaciers, and there are scientists
frantically collecting cores from places like Kilimanjaro before they
vanish, which they are doing rapidly. *Something* is very different from
the way it has been any time in the last several thousand years.

(And if it starts affecting the really big ice sheets, we've got serious
problems, like rising sea level. That *didn't* happen during previous
natural warmings -- some of the beaches the Vikings landed on, during the
last big warm spell, still exist, indicating that the sea level now is
much the same as it was then.)
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |