If NASA scientists are right, the Thames will be freezing over again.

Only true if you choose your 15 years rather carefully. One of the larger cyclic fluctuations in global average temperature is driven by the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation

and that has been pushing temperatures down for the last decade or so.

They don't to anybody who knows what they are looking at, but British science journalists aren't science graduates and haven't got much of an understanding of the stuff they are writing about.

It didn't - the trend has just been hidden by one of the regular cyclic variations

Bought and paid for by Exxon-Mobil and its friends.

As if the Daily Mail were a reliable source of commentary on scientific matters.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Maybe the apparent AGW was itself just a cyclic variation.

But the sunspot thing looks serious.

The sunspot minima correspond to low temperatures.

The "modern maximum" started about 1900.

--

John Larkin, President       Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   

Precision electronic instrumentation
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ng

Why are you sorry? Was I supposed to imagine that you would know about the Atlantic multidecal oscillation, or should I have referred you to one of the thirteen more authoritative sources that Wikipedia lists, but you probably wouldn't understand.

I won't claim that Wikipedia is a thoroughly reliable source, but this particular article looks okay. The Daily Mail is a whole lot less reliable when it comes to science.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

One of the early episodes of Nova in the 1970's was all about sunspots. Aparently they also correspond to hemlines and Beatlemania.

--

Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.

Since the sun warms the earth, and sunspots indicate something serious going on with the sun, there's a chance the sunspot-temperature thing is actually causal.

--

John Larkin, President       Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   

Precision electronic instrumentation
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Sunspots have been visible ever since people first started looking at the sky. Naked eye sunspots are recorded by Chinese astronomers.

A more quantitative index vy Wolf of Zurich goes back nearly 150 years. The Hale cycles are fairly well predictable and despite what you may read in the rightard press the sun is really quite active at the moment.

Now is a relatively good time to go aurora watching or buy an H-alpha solar prominence telescope. There is plenty to see on the sun.

Regards, Martin Brown

Last week The Drudge Report had a nice solar pic and a warning about a big solar storm, so you must be referring to something to the rightard of that.

**********************************

John Larkin, President Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation

ng

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in

Do a little reading about the greenhouse effect sometime. There's some uncertainty about how much of an increase in global temperature you get for a given amount of extra CO2 in the atmosphere - the IPCC puts upper and lower limits at about 1.6 times their best estimate and 60% of the their best estimate - but the basic physics is crystal clear.

If you don't know a thing about it and have a weakness for plausibly packaged denialist propaganda.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Sunspots are entirely superficial - confined to the outermost layers of the sun, which is much too cool for nuclear fusion - and their effect on climate is very small.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

s.

The rightard press doesn't seem to feel any need for consistency - the sun can be quiet when the denialist propaganda story needs it to be quiet, but still active enough to explain the latest solar storm.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

ROFL!

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

And how do you know that?

"Although the details of sunspot generation are still a matter of research, it appears that sunspots are the visible counterparts of magnetic flux tubes in the Sun's convective zone that get "wound up" by differential rotation. If the stress on the tubes reaches a certain limit, they curl up like a rubber band and puncture the Sun's surface. Convection is inhibited at the puncture points; the energy flux from the Sun's interior decreases; and with it surface temperature."

Idiot.

**********************************

John Larkin, President Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation

s.

General knowledge - just because you don't know it doesn't mean that most educated adults are similarly ignorant.

And how deep do you think that convective zone is?

light-solar-cycle

says that it is roughly the outer 30% of the sun. Roughly 99% of the power generated by nuclear fusion is produced with the inner 24% of sun's radius.

The sun-spots don't influence that rate of fusion, just the short term rate of convective transfer of the power generated to the outer radiating layers - a rather slow transfer, since it apparently takes

10 millions year to get the photons from core to surface.

I don't happen to be an idiot, and only an ignorant twit like you would be silly enough to make such a fatuous claim based on such totally inadequate evidence - evidence that you obviously don't actually understand.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

s.

O.5C is small, and the variation of +/-0.1% in solar radiance is also small and basically cyclic. There's one entertaining sentence on that web-site "Their results also suggest that the sensitivity of climate to the effects of solar irradiance is about 27% higher than its sensitivity to forcing by greenhouse gases" which is as fine an example of meaningless nonsense as you could hope to find.

The effect of a 0.2% chance in solar radiance is about 27% higher than some totally unspecified change in greenhouse gas concentration?

English may not be your mother-tongue, but you should be able to spot weasel-wording by now.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I did, in the climategate emails :-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

s.

General knowledge - the sort of stuff that you'd know if you could think about what you read.

Pity about that. The idiot is the guy who thinks that the sun's convection zone goes down to core where the temperature is high enough to drive nuclear fusion. In fact it is confined to the outer 30% of the sun,

light-solar-cycle

You didn't find the right Wikipedia page

could have told you that 99% of the powered generated by fusion in the sun is generated within the first 24% of the sun's radius, and that his power is radiated out to about 70% of the radius, when convective transfer sets in.

So sun-spots don't have anything to do with the power generated by the sun - they merely produce a very slight modulation in the rate at which it gets to us.

You really didn't need to remind us - once again - what an ignorant and over-confident twit you can be.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The temperature gradient in the interior of the Sun is very steep near the photosphere, because it's only gas pressure that holds up the weight of the outer layers. The solar photosphere is very thin--less than 1000 km--so apparently minor perturbations of the convective transport in and below the photosphere can be very important. See e.g.

Cheers

Phil "former astronomer" Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

Sorry, that was density--here's temperature:

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

Convection associated with sunspots certainly does affect transport to the surface, as evidenced by the association of sunspots with the amount of heat that arrives on Earth. It doesn't matter that fusion happens deep; you said yourself that it takes 10 million years to get to the surface. The sunspot dynamics is a lot faster than that.

You are convinced that the only thing that matters is man-made CO2, and you won't even consider anything else. No wonder you don't design electronics.

--

John Larkin, President       Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators